No Joy’s More Faithful Out Today

As we reach the end of our conversation over Skype, he dips out of sight of the camera and returns with a pair of vases. My grainy camera viewpoint doesn’t do them justice, but even so there’s nothing grand or showy about these pretty little pots, one a soft blue-grey and the other a deep blue marked with turquoise.

“When I moved to New York,” he explains from his home there, “I wanted to experience something where I was forced to be innocent purely because I didn’t know what I was doing.” He’s certainly been making music a good deal longer than ceramics, having been in bands such as Tarantel and The Alps since the mid-’90s and releasing several albums, tapes, DVD-Rs, and CD-Rs as a solo musician, as well as running the experimental Root Strata label, and collaborating with artists such as Liz Harris. But Cantu-Ledesma applies a similar creative approach to both pottery and music. Innocence, he explains, is central to his method of “just playing and seeing where it goes. I record that whole process and at some point I’ll get to the end and find where the songs are.”

Having whittled down hours of recordings, Cantu-Ledesma will sequence and title them into an LP. Some four years have passed between Love Is A Stream, his most recent album on Type, and A Year With 13 Moons, for Mexican Summer. But a steady stream of low-key releases such as the 2014 the first is a collection of refined sketches of sorts, A Year With 13 Moons possesses a very real sense of……