Summary:The second full-length release for the San Francisco-based artist was mostly recorded on reel-to-reel tape during his three-month residency at San Francisco's Headlands Center for the Arts.
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Record Label:Mexican Summer
Genre(s): Electronic, Avant-Garde, Pop/Rock, Indie Rock, Indie Electronic, Experimental Rock, Experimental Ambient, Experimental Electronic
13 Moons holds a broader appeal than some of his more abstract or challenging LPs. That said, there’s nothing particularly straightforward about the album.
It would be hard to call the album unsentimental. At times it feels as though Cantu-Ledesma is fighting his way through the fog, swinging wildly, exhausted but determined.
What can be said about an album that says so much without saying a single word?
A Year With 13 Moons is an album that most people will notWhat can be said about an album that says so much without saying a single word?
A Year With 13 Moons is an album that most people will not find enjoyable, it's a simple fact that the aesthetic of the album is merely too much for more mild listeners, saying anything but that would be lying to yourself in a vain attempt to get an ignorant populous to see a beautiful work of art for its pure magnificence. A Year With 13 Moons is an extremely abstract piece of audio art that most people would merely mosey past in a museum, Ledesma is doing to music what Pollock did to painting with his abstract compositions.
The first track of the album trumps all other tracks by pure length alone, being twice as long as the second longest track and being eight times longer than most tracks on the album. But it doesn't feel that way. The Last Time I Saw Your Face tells a story like all other tracks on this album. It's a staring contest through a dirty window, the rain washes away some of the dirt periodically throughout the track as wind carries new particles in the form of audio noise. You think you can see through the window, but maybe that's just you being delusional after having stared out into a blurry wonderland for so long. There is no real rhyme, there is no reason. The thought of looking out of the window came to you with the same randomness of nature itself. As quickly as it's here it's gone.
Ledesma then makes one of the wisest decisions in the entire album, cut the next track's running time in half to ease the listener down to the normal short running times of the rest of the tracks on the album. By doing this there is not quick jump cut between songs, the flow of the album feels as natural as the randomness of it. A randomness that is really an artificial randomness, it feels random but it's just expertly designed to feel that way.
Love After Love feels like a robot in the rain. Disappear is soothing and apprehensive at the same time, it reminds me of waiting music at a Dave And Busters or Sports Plus, it's one of the most ambient songs on the album and one that could go on forever. Mirror of Past & Future serves as an introduction to Interiors, it takes abstract sounds and constructs a beat from them that is further expanded upon and combined with the ambiance of Disappear in Interiors. Pale Flower breaks free of the standards set fourth by the preceding tracks in the album. It really does feel like a sun-stained flower is breaking up through tough dry soil. There is a slow zoom-out that occurs during Pale Flower that ends the series of Love After Love-Disappear-Mirror of Past & Future-Interiors-Pale Flower.
The next section of the album has some of the most clearly constructed beats of the entire album. The Twins/Shadows sort of begins in an alternate universe of Pale Flower and ends in a cosmic billiards hall orbiting the moon. Agate Beach takes yet another perspective on the events of Pale Flower, combining the beats of Agate Beach with a very My Bloody Valentine influenced collection of soaring screeches. This small two song set merges with the previous series of songs to create small vignettes into separate scenes of struggle in electronically fantastic alternate universes of the same event.
The Spree is a nice little interlude, preparing the listener for a voyage into the fluctuating echoes of a not so vacuumed region of deep-space. A year long voyage that starts with an ascent into the heavens in Early Autumn and a crashing back to Earth in At the End of Late Spring. You float around for a while in A Portrait of Nico's Grave... and come across a 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque monolith in Remembering, as you reach out to touch it shocks are sent into your system that rattle your being like a jolt of lightning, emanating as thunder in the clouds of a deep space nebula. A large ship approaches you in Görlitzer Park, you board it and enjoy an alien slow motion rave in Along the Isar. Of course you return to Earth in a blaze of burning spacecraft in At the End of Late Spring, only to be greeted by a murky fog covered landscape completely dissimilar to the Earth you once knew in Remains. As you walk around you see creatures and landscapes that you can not recognize at all, you realize that you have not been away for a year, but for thousands of years as you are abruptly destroyed by the harsh foreign landscape you once called home.…Expand
I'm not very acquainted with experimental music. A Year with 13 Moons sounds like a heap of distortion as a backdrop for a bunch ofI'm not very acquainted with experimental music. A Year with 13 Moons sounds like a heap of distortion as a backdrop for a bunch of overheating computers...but I like it a lot, for some reason.…Expand
