#jefre

Points of Connection • Exhibit by artist Jefrë

It also kind of looks like it says "lex," "lox," "love," or... "lerp."

How many cities have giant icons of their names, spelled out in huge, towering letters? The one that pops instantly to mind is the Hollywood Sign, above the neighborhood of Hollywood in Los Angeles, which is close enough, and, well, that’s it really. Now, Jacksonville, up in the northeastern corner of Florida, is getting a giant name tag too. Located in downtown Jacksonville’s Riverfront Plaza,…

Filipino American public artist Jefrë Figueras Manuel, who goes by “Jefrë,” is holding his first solo museum exhibition, JEFRË: Points of Connection, at Orlando Museum of Art in Florida until January 3, 2021.

Jefre Cantu-Ledesen

A Year With 13 Moons

@ 2014 EU Pressing

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Despite the shoegazing sonics, the title of Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's A Year With 13 Moons looks skyward: this is a star-crossed album, in multiple ways. It was recorded after the dissolution of the prolific experimental musician's marriage, a breakup that sent him back to the Bay Area after several years in Germany. And it was meant for release on a different label—a plan that fell through, for reasons unclear and perhaps unimportant, given that Mexican Summer gave the record a good home, and, potentially, a larger audience than Cantu-Ledesma is used to with his own Root Strata imprint. So it's striking how much cool remove characterizes Cantu-Ledesma's own description of the record. He writes of his interest in "conveying memory in music without being sentimental," and of "translating the fog of images, people, and places that I've experienced in the last two years into a body of work that could still be ambiguous and leave space for the listener to enter."

The resulting album is plenty ambiguous—its outlines diffuse, its composition unstable. It was recorded on a spartan setup during a three-month residency at Marin County's Headlands Center for the Arts: just guitar, effects pedals, laptop, and multiple tape machines, all run through a PA system in a huge, barnlike studio on the former military base. It's not so much recorded to tape as smeared across it. Heavily distorted, its fidelity often mangled beyond the point of recognition, it suggests solids crumbling like chalk—or, conversely, mist on the verge of taking a physical form. It is a sound of transitory states, of in-betweenness, of becoming undone.