The next freely available release i want to explore is Devotion, by US musician Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. It’s a 20-minute fantastical work that lives up to its title by suggesting varying forms of ecstatic focus.
The first part, ‘The Light Years’, juxtaposes an intense wall of squalling electronics with a band of slowly drifting, rotating chords. Two utterly contrasting elements, which Cantu-Ledesma forces to contend with each other, but remarkably, as time passes they seem more and more inseparable. Indeed, it’s as if the noise is an effect caused by the implied ferocity of the chords, like staring in rapture at the sun and overloading the eyes’ cones and rods, obliterating them entirely in the closing seconds. It’s an exquisite balance of extremes that i find moving and uplifting every time i listen. ‘Difficult Loves’, which follows, is similar albeit more restrained. A layer of soft chords is again surrounded by an energetic noisescape, with light pulsations travelling across the surface. Again it begs the question of how the two elements are related, but again they improbably meld into a form of steady state, with each revealing more inner details as it progresses, becoming a lovely, unified sonic entity.
‘Roam The Milky Way’ breaks apart the extremes to create a warm ambient bath tilting around a fifth, glanced against by periodic bursts of scratchy noise. There’s again a sense of ecstatic focus, which only becomes more intense as, imperceptibly at first, Cantu-Ledesma slowly increases the amount of peripheral noise. It creates a subtle but palpable accumulating effect, heightening the perception of the apparent stasis and making it yet more immersive and impossible to turn away from. In its closing minute the ambience drifts into the middle distance, leaving the noise bursts exposed like a series of malfunctioning nerve endings. Devotion ends with ‘Hand Written Letter’, which initially seems to continue from where ‘Roam The Milky Way’ ended, with short vestiges of loud electronic cacophony being replaced with another chord mobile slowly coming into range. That’s essentially all it does, continuing as an increasingly gentle epilogue which acts as a necessary come down after the overwhelming euphoria of the previous three tracks.
There’s a lot to love about Devotion, but what appeals to me most is how all of its four tracks are like variations on the same fundamental concept, each demonstrating a subtly different form of fixation and rapture. This is music of extremes, ostensibly polarised, but showing how what are sonically poles apart can in fact act as fundamentally sympathetic elements in a cohesive musical beauty.
Devotion is available for free download from Cantu-Ledesma’s ‘Shining Skull’ Bandcamp site.
