why we love this

Felisha Ledesma unfurls sumptuous tones, personal voice recordings, scatters, and a heavy, onyx-like sparsity in this beautiful touchstone of sound holding patience, and patience shaping presence.

about the record

A gorgeous swell of intimate soundscaping from Felisha Ledesma, dispatching two extended, richly absorbing pieces woven from everyday detritus: synths, strings, voicemail, found sounds. Using AMQR—a software synthesizer built by Ledesma together with Ess Mattisson—both pieces here shimmer with elusive timbres that occupy a realm that feels lost between worlds—neither electronic nor acoustic, but more a sort of observational sound that radiates togetherness and warmth.

Operating at insightful levels of synesthesia, Ledesma poetically turns ostensibly humdrum sources into clouds of smoke—emails, voicenotes, walking along the water, a poem attached to an email, walking alone in New York during lockdown, going for a swim at sunset in the desert—all turn into a smudge of memory. When ‘Beamsplitters’ opens with a tangible human presence—a voicemail from a friend—it startles with its earthly pull, eventually getting lost in a tangled spool of found sound, leaving just a trace of iridescent, intimate reverie.