Jefre Cantu-Ledesma – Love is a Stream

The final track on Love is a Stream, ‘Mirrors Death,’ is so achingly beautiful it worms its way into the mind and juggles everything that’s inside. Its fluid, flowing drones support a continually squelched guitar melody, a melody that yearns to escape its distorted and gated effects, but cannot. It is a turbulent, liquid melody atop a placid foundation, fractured and pure. When Love is a Stream ended, I was left with an enormous sense of affirmation, a blissful vision of what I’ve always believed: that love is dimensional and arcane, is sonorous and noisy, explosive and softening.

It takes roughly 40 minutes, though, to get to ‘Mirrors Death,’ and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma brings the listener to this place through a magnificent passage. Multiplicities are at work here: tortured tones tending towards white noise played with melodic intent, enchanted choral voices invoking speech but indecipherable. Whatever anyone else wants to call it (shoegaze, ambient, drone, noise) or compare it to (My Bloody Valentine, Catherine Wheel), Love is a Stream is a singular experience and has to be judged as such. The twelve pieces form a life-cycle of sorts, examining love in various incarnations, as in the invigorating blasts of throbbing noise that begins ‘Loving Love’ that transform into a melodic haze at its end. Or the distant gauze of memory that opens ‘Where I End & You Begin’ that then erupts in a volcano of sound. I’m careful to call it sound, because there is so much depth to each track that if one cares, is attentive, one can hear the hidden consonances within Cantu-Ledesma’s fractured walls of apparently abstract noise. Noise is made of notes.

‘Where You End & I Begin’ (the permutation of the previous track title) starts to lead the listener towards the defining architecture of ‘Mirrors Death’: a conventional chord progression ripped apart by distortion and stuttering builds its foundation, and the faint, echoed voice cannot fully articulate whatever it has to say. As in the breaking of the melody in ‘Mirrors Death’, Cantu-Ledesma shows his willingness to conceive of something quite organically beautiful and peel open its skin so that we may feel what it really is inside.

Saccharine displays of love, captured by a blurry lens and tied up with a bow, ultimately are nothing more than a vacuous substitute for what is real between people. It takes courage to make something this beautiful, to expose something raw. I incline to find a bit of the ancients in Cantu-Ledesma: a Greek acceptance of dichotomy and chaos that is capable also of accepting pleasure. I read a bit of Heraclitus in the title Love is a Stream. It was he who wrote that “the river where you set your foot just now is gone — those waters giving way to this, now this.” Change is the only constant. Love is a process, not a fixed point in space. As soon as one ingests this magnificent album, it begins its cellular transformation. You’ll listen to it again. Perhaps immediately. And it will reveal new, fresh, sublime things about how sound can express (not merely “represent”) love. It is all a bit inexplicable. But so is love.