So do you guys feel like you’re being chased around different boroughs as people catch up to whatever the new scene is?

Drew (Piraino, Jefre's touring bassist; ex-Sonna and owner of Psychic Troubles Tapes): I think it’s just the reality of living there. Like people bitch about gentrification, all this stuff. That’s just the way New York is. I’ve talked to people that got pushed out of Manhattan in the 80’s, it’s just the way the city works. So you can’t really fight it and you can’t really bitch about it, you just have to accept it and then once you get tired of it you just have to leave.

Jefre: And it’s true that the longer you stay in New York you can find a rhythm, you meet more people, there’s lots of exceptions to what we’re saying. We’re grossly generalizing the situation, but the more time you spend there, if you’re willing to hash it out for two, three, four years, you actually can end up with a nice situation if you stick through it and stay in one place.

Drew: But it’s become harder and harder for people who are creative to live there because you need a studio, or you need to be able to tour, or you need to whatever but space is very difficult, money is really difficult. Creative stuff becomes a lot harder living there, whereas before that was where you went when you were creative.

I hadn’t considered the Manhattan situation, but yeah I guess there are entire swathes of New York that were today’s Williamsburg 20 or 30 years ago.

Jefre: Oh yeah. Have you read Just Kids, the Patti Smith book? You should read it, it’s a beautiful portrait of New York at the late 60’s/early 70’s. She was living in a loft in SoHo for $200 a month.

Drew: Actually now the Upper East Side is cheaper than Brooklyn. It’s actually switching where Manhattan is gonna be cheaper than Brooklyn.

Jefre: It’s because kids don’t want to live in Manhattan. They wanna live in Brooklyn, they wanna live in Queens now, too.

Drew: So as these old New Yorkers die in like the West Village and Upper East Side, no one is filling those spots. So I think what you’re going to see happen is that it’s gonna bounce back and forth. For some people that’s great, because you can actually afford to live in nice neighborhoods and stuff. I think there’s a big issue in North Brooklyn though, there’s this issue of white kids moving from places that have never been big cities, and they come to North Brooklyn, which had traditionally been Polish or whatever and had always been white. And so they’re very comfortable; they move into these white neighborhoods, they never have to deal with living in a city, they never have to deal with diversity, but they pay a ridiculous amount of money and they live around a bunch of, like, college white kids. And you get people dealing with never having lived in a big city by staying in this 20 by 20 block zone of other white people and Europeans. So this part of Brooklyn, like Greenpoint, Bushwick, Williamsburg, that was traditionally where artists lived in lofts is basically a college campus. That’s the reality of the city, it’s just a place for people to move to when they get out of school.

Jefre: We’re just getting too old.

How do you manage such a vast array of projects? It seems like it’d be hard to keep everything straight between collaborations, solo projects, groups…

I left California a few years ago and moved to Germany, and then back to the States, to New York. My pace of collaborating and doing music has slowed down quite a bit, so I don’t do as much as I used to. Now it’s just meeting people, long-time friends that I maybe have an interest in doing something with, and the time arises or you get together in the right space and do something. I don’t put too much thought into it, really – sometimes I get asked to do collaborations with people, like today I’m playing with Greg Fox. He just asked me to do that out of the blue. He opened for a show Drew and I did for a record release and stayed in touch. Sometimes things just emerge like that, people just write you and ask. But then sometimes, like with Liz [Harris, aka Grouper] we’ve been friends for years and always talked about it and then the right situation arises like oh, I’m going to be in your town, let’s play a show together, let’s finally get started working on that collaboration.

Do things like that get planned out for ages before you put it to tape or is it still of the actual moment of collaboration?

Some things, obviously when you work with a record label – like I’m working with Mexican Summer and Liz and I are gonna go to Marfa next year for a festival before SXSW. So that takes a little bit of planning, and we actually have to talk about getting there a few days before so we can write some music together. Other times no. Do you know Felicia Atkinson? She’s European, Shelter Press is a label that she runs with her husband. She and I just finished a collaboration that’ll probably come out early next year and that was done all over email for like a year and a half. So it can kind of take different forms, like with Drew – he’ll probably play more on my next record, we’re neighbors, it’s just having someone around. I would love to collaborate with Lawrence [English] but he lives in Australia. We’ve talked for years over email and maybe someday that’ll happen, but it’s going to take the right context.

Do you think it’s important anymore to be in a sort of artistic Mecca in order to get collaborations going?

Jefre: Yeah. I wouldn’t be playing with Greg Fox right now if I didn’t live in New York. I probably wouldn’t be on Mexican Summer right now, or doing more music with them. New York just has so many musicians, people may not know you but they see you perform somehow – that’s what I was saying earlier, if you stay in New York and put in a couple of years people start to meet you and know that you exist. If you lived in, you know, [Raleigh], it’s a nice town and all but it’s just a matter of numbers.

Drew: What’s interesting about that is that when there are like six shows a night people just stop caring. I go to very few shows now whereas if you live in a smaller town it’s much more exciting when people come through or people put together more interesting bills. In New York people are just trying to make money, so it’s like every club has to do two shows a night to be able to pay rent.

For Root Strata [the record label Cantu-Ledesma founded], how do you go about finding artists? Is recruiting the right word?

Jefre: No, nothing like that. Usually it’s a matter of friends asking friends to do something and eventually they do. There’s only a couple of people that have ever been cold-contacted, Harold Budd being one of them. Other than that it’s only friends and acquaintances. You know that band from Chicago, Zelienople? We did a record with them, they sent us a demo. I think that’s the only demo I’ve ever gotten where it actually fit what I’m interested in. I don’t put too much – I don’t want to say effort – I don’t put too much thought into it. It’s very intuitive.

Drew: Knowing Jefre, I feel like things happen with him in a very organic way, which is a really amazing thing to be around. Especially living in New York, you’re in this place where people are all trying so hard. Everybody’s busting their ass to try and be something, or to do something, and it’s so refreshing to be around a friend that just does what he does. And it’s like if people care, they care, and if they don’t, they don’t. That’s like a very non-2015 way to look at the world. It’s nice to be around people that just let things happen and don’t try and force themselves into this thing. Is that fair to say?

Jefre: If that’s how you feel.

Do you have any commercial aspirations for the label? What’s the motivation for operating it?

The label started because the band I was in before, Tarentel, we were going on tour in Japan and I decided to make a CD-r of some music to take. It was my music and so I just started the label that way, seriously hatched in a month and made everything. It’s kind of continued that way – it’s definitely slowed down, which I like. We’re doing just a couple records a year now, and I think that’s a lot more reasonable. I hope that my friends that we work with don’t really have a lot of expectations because we don’t do press, we hardly make any money on the records. Now with digital distribution there’s a little more money made because people actually buy .mp3s and stuff, but still in terms of profit we just scrape by. And that’s fine, I like having a label that just putzes along and does its own thing. I can’t imagine it growing to being a business that would pay my bills or anything, definitely not interested in trying to make that happen. If anything it’ll slow down even more, particularly now that I’m going back into school. I can see it being like one record a year and that would be cool. I love records. That’s really all it comes down to.

Do you think you’re drawing in consumers who follow a specific artist you may be working with or the label itself?

Back in the day when we did mail-order ourselves, it was definitely that way – the same names would be buying from us. There was the same 150 people that would buy a record no matter what. It’s harder to tell now that I’m a little bit more removed from that. Distribution is done through a big company in Germany now and so I really don’t actually have a sense of who buys the records. I imagine with that Harold Budd record we might’ve had a lot of people who didn’t know what Root Strata was. I would also imagine that some people had the Grouper record and that’s it. Does that answer your question? I’m sorry if this all sounds a little bit ambiguous, I would just have to say that these aren’t things that I ever consciously think about too much.

That’s one of the interesting things about interviewing, the impossibility of a wrong answer. It’s like the Pope; whatever you say, as the interviewee, becomes the correct answer.

Sort of like that observation thing in science where when you’re looking at something you change the nature of it. That horrified me when I was a kid because it just meant that there’s no absolutes. I was too young to take that on. You’re looking at something and it changes just because you’re looking at it, that’s really fucked up.

You’ve worked a lot with [filmmaker] Paul Clipson and obviously make work that’s very intertwined. Is that a collaborative process, or are you guys in separate rooms, separate cities?

Yeah, Paul and I decided early on that we weren’t really going to really discuss what the other person was doing. So when we go on tour, if we go somewhere to play a show together like Texas next year with Liz there won’t be any discussion about what he’s playing or we’re playing; he’ll just show up with his films and Liz and I will write some music. We decided that we wanted them to both kind of have their own value, and they exist in a vacuum and then you bring them together. We realized early on that that was really the magic of it – the viewer then brings this whole narrative to it. It’s automatic, I can’t tell you how many times we’ve been on tour and people come up and say oh, how long did you work on the music for that film? I didn’t even see it. There will be serendipitous moments where things change and the film moves and then the sound changes and we just project. That seems way more interesting than us planning something out – ok I’m gonna start with a bunch of lights, so make the music this way or whatever. And Paul is pretty consistent with that with people he works with. If he goes to Poland to show his films, he’ll get local musicians to come and play. He has to kind of sit them down and say ok, I’m not gonna tell you what I’m gonna play. You just have to play. And definitely don’t look at the film and play to the film. For Paul that’s like you’re ruining it, basically.

Jim Jarmusch has a band, and I saw them playing over Man Ray films. You would think it would be a great, awesome perspective but it was kind of weird in the not-great way. A lot of it sounded just like the Dead Man soundtrack.

Did you hear the [Neil Young record] that Daniel Lanois did, Le Noise? A lot of people missed it, it was about five years ago. The guitar tone on that record is unbelievable. He’s running through tons of effects, Daniel Lanois-style, and of course he sings about politics and stuff like he does now, which isn’t very interesting.

A Year With 13 Moons has a lot of thematic heaviness – was just the sum of sessions following the last album or done in a more compressed timeframe?

Yeah, A Year With 13 Moons was all done in a three-month period that Paul and I had a residency at an arts center in Northern California, right across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. It’s an old army barracks, which does an art residency program now. I had just moved back from Germany and I moved up there. So during that three-month time I recorded all of the music for that record. I recorded every day for like six hours for three months. It was just obscene. When I went to visit family in Washington I just edited all the music down and cut it up into the album. It’s all live, basically.

How do you go about pulling a relatively short album from such a huge amount of material?

It’s funny, Drew and I were talking about this yesterday. One thing that’s helpful is to think about the context – a record can only have so much music on one side, so that’s a frame. I thought ok, so I can only do 20 minutes a side. I wanted there to be lots of songs, so that meant things would have to be short. So then it’s finding short pieces that sound interesting. What I ended up looking for the beginning – I just listened and listened and listened to stuff until I found the piece that I knew was the beginning. After that I just made the whole record instantly, I could just throw it all together. Then I had the beginning for Side B, and the same thing happened. It’s just like cooking – what am I going to make tonight? Something with greens, ok, a salad, ok, veggies, whatever.

So it’s almost like DJing, you get to the end of a track and that’s the jumping off point.

Exactly! The end of the track says something about the next track. And you just have to kinda listen and say oh, the end of that track was super harsh so I’ve got to start with something super beautiful on the next track. Something super-contrasty, or maybe I’ll just do silence for two minutes or something really minimal. It’s almost like making a film – I didn’t know where it was going to go but I knew where it was going to begin and that was enough.

I tend to think of drone-y, blissed-out stuff as what it sounds like a cross-section of – you know, what was blown up to create this huge expanse. In your case, I think it’s a lot of dream-pop stuff, which I hadn’t really heard in drone form before. How’d you end up pivoting into that for the new record?

I grew up listening to The Cure and stuff like that, and then I think at some point I got interested again in Cocteau Twins somehow. I had never really gotten into them before so I got in deep and that sort of opened up a whole world. I started listening to The Durutti Column a whole bunch, stuff that I’d sort of avoided before because of the time period they were made in and the sounds that were used, and then I realized that there was a whole rich palette there for me to use. The interesting thing is that the whole mood that a lot of that music is in and the world that it creates is kind of melancholic, a little bit dark. That’s been consistent in my music since the Tarentel days. The drum machine was a little bit of a leap, but I was kinda bored with just making drone records and missing being in a band. I was living in Germany and didn’t have people to jam with really, so it was a way to get back to playing songs again and happened to take on a different vibe from anything I’ve done before.

Did you find a lot of what you would consider your style of music in Germany or was it more techno and club stuff? Having never been, that’s the association I make.

Oh, no, Germany is so broad. In Berlin it’s incredible. There’s a really, really strong experimental scene growing out of jazz. There’s a really good sort of mutant electronic scene there, people that aren’t quite doing techno but they’re doing stuff with electronics. Berlin’s great, I would say go there if you ever get a chance. And if you’re into dance music, it’s just unbelievable the sound systems that they have.

It seems like you’ve got this massive vault of stuff that could be released any time – do you write things with a release date in mind, or what’s the relationship between when things are recorded and when they come out?

Sometimes it’s really specific, like hey, I want to do this tape with you, and I want it to come out in the fall. Can you get me some music in the summer? Sometimes I record things and then they’re done and I don’t know if I want to put them out right then. In Germany I did a release on my Bandcamp page called Devotion, and I’ve got a whole half hour of additional material from that session that could be the other side of a vinyl release. I just never released it because it didn’t fit at the time. I just feel it out – I make a lot of music, have a full hard drive. I remember in high school the art teacher said the artist edits, and I remember not understanding what that really meant but now I do. Everybody doesn’t need to hear what I make all the time, it’s just not that interesting.

With all of the different projects that you do, what’s the importance of naming things for you? Artist names or even albums or songs.

I’m pretty considerate of how I name my stuff. I spend a lot of time thinking about that because I think it sets a mood and an understanding of where the work might be coming from. Particularly when you make instrumental music and there’s not lyrics and stuff it can be helpful to show it’s not a random thought or whatever but actually has a specific emotional context. I’m always writing down titles and stuff, like if I hear something that invokes a feeling or a mood. Like 13 Moons, I had that for a year before the record. Also with Love Is a Stream, same thing. I had that title something like two years before I made that record. Same with band names, it just has to sound right. We were making fun of some of the band names we heard, but it’s so subjective. I can’t tell anyone what to name their band. I don’t really want to tell the listener what to think, because then you run the risk of – well you’re frozen in a way, it’s like it becomes so this is what this is that no one has an entry point. So it’s a balance, where you give them the mood that you were in and maybe where you were at the time, but they can also have their own entry point. Being instrumental music, that’s pretty easy since I’m not there singing about going through a divorce or something. I’m not interested in telling people what they need to think or feel with my music. You’re so detached from it once it goes out into the world. I know what my friends think about it, but other than that, nothing.

As soon as you put it out into the wild, any intentionality is vaporized.

Yeah, and I think that’s fine, because the thing about art is that it’s not about the artist’s intention. It’s just about our experience of it. Like The Velvet Underground’s self-titled record, where they’re sitting on the couch. That record evokes such a specific mood for me, because there was such a specific point in my life when I found that record and obsessed over it. I can remember what my room looked like, and I remember what year it was, and so many details come to my mind when I hear that music. I carry that internally and no one knows about it, it’s got nothing to do with what Lou Reed and John Cale intended when they made it. It’s my experience that no one else can argue about. So it’s inappropriate for me then to tell other people what they should experience when they listen to my music. Part of it is recognizing that I don’t even know where the music comes from. It’s not like I’m sitting down and scoring things, like I’m making food for you. It has more ambiguity to it. You just sit down and you start playing and things just started to happen. Put some titles on it, package it, make some choices, but that’s it.

Drew: That’s what makes it fun to play music with Jefre; I don’t have this desire to play music with people that often. You play music with some people and they want you to do this specific thing and if you don’t do exactly what they have in mind they’re disappointed. What’s so much fun is that he’s very accepting and things just kind of happen rather than him going here’s a part, I wrote this thing, do it for 18 measures and then we’re gonna go into this other thing.

Jefre: Just you wait, buddy.