Jefre Cantu-Ledesma

Audio Diary of a Mad Scientist

“I didn’t even know what the fuck I was doing until maybe two weeks before the record was ready. I was like, OK, I’m done, that’s it, no more recording; I just gotta throw it together now. It’s in there somewhere.”

When it comes time to recap the year in breakup albums, Björk’s Vulnicura will almost certainly top the list. But save some room for Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s A Year With 13 Moons. While entirely instrumental, the New York musician’s album is also about picking through the rubble of a failed relationship—albeit in a more abstract way. Described by the artist as an attempt to engage with memory in an “unsentimental” way, 13 Moons is a kind of audio diary that is almost sculptural in its proportions.
A longtime resident of San Francisco, Cantu-Ledesma moved to Germany in 2011 with his wife, a German citizen who was having visa problems in the United States. By early 2013, he was back in the Bay Area, alone. “It was a really difficult time in my life,” he says. “When I moved to Germany I was married—I was ready to live there, you know, and stay there, and I definitely didn’t suspect that things would go the way they did.” As luck would have it, however, his return to the Bay Area coincided with the acceptance of his application, alongside the filmmaker Paul Clipson, for an artistic residency at Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County.

TO READ MORE ABOUT HIM AND HEAR MORE OF HIS MUSIC:
http://blog.bandcamp.com/2015/02/10/audio-diary-of-a-mad-scientist/