The River That Flows Both Ways
Discovering four fascinating musical projects spanning sixty years and four continents.
Living in the States for decades, I’ve become inured to the notion of people going back to work on December 26th. I grew up in the UK, where Boxing Day was usually preferable to Christmas Day: a second consecutive official holiday, it was a day to play with presents rather than just gift them or open them, a day to eat left-overs rather than a formal sit-down meal, a day to have fun with friends rather than pressure with families, and one in which the football calendar would present a hand-curated fixture list full of local derbies. And even if some of those traditions have changed with time, age and location, I still like to gift Boxing Day to myself as a day to do what I want, which is often just to relax.
So when I woke (too) early this Friday, December 26th, before 5am, I took some time to relax my mind, then made a cup of tea – I brought three boxes home from Nepal, where it is a major agricultural crop – and decided to spend some time back in bed, reading. I brought my Surface Pro (a lightweight Windows laptop) back upstairs with me, figuring to catch up on some Substack reading, or a longer magazine article, and I brought my headphones too, so as to listen to some music while doing so without waking anyone.1
Wordsmith posts twice a weekend; these Sunday posts tend to run long, the idea being that you enjoy them as I enjoyed my Boxing Day morning: at leisure, preferably on a computer rather than a phone, and with a coffee or tea or whatever you enjoy, and reading in bed if that’s what you prefer. Putting on some ambient music is also recommended. Links follow below.
I was always going to choose something chill to accompany this early morning holiday reading, especially with headphones. So I turned to ZenSounds’ recommendations for The 25 Best Ambient Albums of 2025, because although I gave that list a plug already, it now dawned on me that I had not actually spent time with it.
At the top of this list, otherwise presented in unranked, random order, ZenSounds host Stephan Kunze – who lives in Berlin, a long way from where I live – had selected one album above the rest, one that he credited with “an undeniable magic.” It is Gift Songs by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, “an experienced experimental musician who’s originally from Texas but has been living on the Westcoast for a long time and has now been based in Upstate New York for a while, working by day as a Zen Buddhist priest and hospice chaplain.” By any measure this sounded like an interesting person worth following up on, and I quickly hit play on the Bandcamp link to the album in question.
As the 20-minute opening cut “The Milky Sea” kicked in – if that’s the right word to describe a beatless album – with distant classical piano flourishes, I had reason to read on. “Upstate New York” is a term that many people ascribe to those of us who live in the Hudson Valley, a fertile region either side of the Hudson River that begins barely an hour north of New York City and continues for a couple more hours of drive time north, concluding by the point one reaches the state capital of Albany. From there onwards, in pretty much every direction, the real Upstate New York takes over, for hundreds of miles north and west, and in the mostly rural areas if not the few remaining scattered cities, it’s exceedingly right-wing Republican territory. In other words, the real Upstate New York is not the obvious breeding ground for experimental musicians who double as Zen priests and hospice chaplains.
I now followed the link to an interview that Kunze conducted with Cantu-Ledesma earlier this year for Tricycle magazine. This alone seemed serendipitous, for while it is hardly surprising that someone whose Substack begins with the word Zen should write for a publication that tags itself “the Buddhist Review,” it was only a week or so ago that I purchased my first ever print copy of Tricycle (and wrote about it here). I had been toying with the idea of a subscription ever since. As Kunze’s interview/article now brought me to Tricycle’s website for the first time, the presence of a paywall elevated that subscription consideration.
For the moment, at least, what was published above paywall was enough to confirm my supposition: Cantu-Ledesma, whose reputation precedes him, but had yet to reach me, lives in what was now described as the “rural Hudson Valley.” Those same initial paragraphs also elaborated on the Buddhist credentials, citing him as “an ordained Soto Zen priest, currently teaching with the Brooklyn Zen Center.”
Brooklyn is not in the Hudson Valley, of course, but there are many expats here from that NYC Borough of Kings, my own family included, and much physical and cultural movement back and forth. The Zen Mountain Monastery that I attended in my former home hamlet of Mount Tremper and have often referenced in my posts also has a centre in Brooklyn, for example, and it turns out to be right round the corner from that of the Brooklyn Zen Center, in the Cobble Hill/Boerum Hill neighborhoods that abut the one where I lived for my first decade as a parent, in Park Slope.
And possibly explaining Cantu-Ledesma’s current residence, Brooklyn Zen Center turns out to have its own Hudson Valley temple, in a place called Millerton. Given that I have been sensing a calling to return to more formal Zen practice, I looked it up: it appears to be an hour’s drive east of me.
Still taking in “The Milky Sea,” its percussive rumbles and treated piano notes hiding behind a peaceful synth drone, I bit the bullet and took out that subscription to Tricycle. As I had hoped, in the Q&A I was now able to read in full, Cantu-Ledesma revealed much about his practices, the spiritual, musical and vocational aspects of which all intertwine. But he was notably short on the sort of theoretical explanations of motivation and movement that many people – especially musicians – are typically keen to elaborate upon. Asked why he decided to become a Zen priest, for example, he responded in perfectly Zenlike fashion, that “It doesn’t feel like a decision I made—life made this decision for me.” Backtracking to the key move he made years ago, from his previous home in San Francisco to Brooklyn, he explains that his teacher was setting up the Brooklyn Zen Center while he going through a divorce.
‘She said, “Why don’t you come to Brooklyn? We could use some help.”
And so he went.
“I had no intention to ever move to New York; I’ve never imagined myself living there.” But she just asked me, and my life opened up in this way.”
Then asked specifically, “How does your Zen practice inform your music practice?” he responded thus:
“In my experience, Zen practice allows you to get out of your own way and just let this innate creative energy flow without a lot of confusion. Over time, I’ve been able to trust this generative energy that comes through us. It can get tampered down by thinking and conceptualizing. All those things are fine and part of the process. But everything has its place, and I’ve just learned to trust more.”
These are sage words, and they can be synthesized down to a simple time-honored saying. Go with the flow.
Certainly, going with the flow had allowed me to progress from almost randomly selecting a piece of music to listen to in headphones at 5am, to finding out about an interesting musician/artist, to finding out about a second Zen centre in my area, to subscribing to Tricycle, to reading more about this still mysterious musician/artist who now revealed that the Millerton-based temple he teaches at is “about an hour east” of where he lives… which would place Cantu-Ledesma pretty much where I live. A short web search later confirmed as much. ZenSounds Album of the Year was recorded by someone who lives in my hometown of Kingston. It was also recorded in Kingston.
When I came down from our former family house high on Mount Tremper, in 2019, and moved into an apartment in Kingston, a small city that abuts the Hudson, one with a strong history as the original New York State capital, and one with its significant ups and downs, I had hopes of falling in with what was already well known as its bustling group of creative individuals. I attended gigs, I joined a writer’s group, I attended art openings, I spoke to people in shops, I took coffee or a drink with everyone I knew based in town and some whom I didn’t. If my apartment had been big enough I would have hosted gatherings, salons, music or movie nights. But it wasn’t, and nobody else was inviting me to theirs, and I only found out considerably later about various “house concerts” that had been taking place in town. Put simply, the connections never really happened.
All of this has occasionally felt like a disappointment of sorts, but allowing myself to feel that way runs contrary not only to my intended outlook on life, but to the hidden facts of it. For while I did put myself about a little in Kingston, I had also put myself into an important role with Rock Academy by the point that I moved, and Rock Academy was based back up in Woodstock and its gigs held all over the place. Besides, being officially single again, I put myself back in the dating pool as well, and though I never met anyone of romantic note at all those art openings and gigs, thanks to OK Cupid I was already seeing someone regularly by early 2020. Neither myself nor the Kingston scene, whatever it may have been, were right for each other at that moment. Besides, something else happened right at that point: Covid.
Covid was the spark for a mass influx of new faces into Kingston (with subsequent concerns of gentrification) as young couples and families in particular fled New York City for a more attractive life in the Hudson Valley. Cantu-Ledesma, his second wife and their baby daughter were among them. Going with the flow after Covid would lead me to making music with my partner as Hudson Palace, to forming The Dear Boys with my old band-mate Tony Page, to further commitment and musical adventures with Rock Academy, and to otherwise staying home to practice all these songs I was either writing, covering or directing (all while also maintaining my non-fiction writing and my podcasting). Going with the flow post Covid would not only lead Cantu-Ledesma into the Hudson Valley, and a new job as a hospice chaplain but, and it is hardly surprising given his quarter-century history of engagement in American experimental/electronic/ambient music, immersion into Kingston’s scene of like-minded (if un-ordained) musicians, those whom I had never quite connected with. Gift Songs features several of them: Omer Shemesh on piano, Joseph Weiss on bass, Clarice Jensen on cello, and Booker Stardrum on percussion, only the last of whom I am familiar with from his occasional fascinating performances at Kingston dive club Tubby’s. The record was born out of quietly improvisational sessions between and among them, an album made with a jazz approach but one that sounds nothing like jazz.
Gift Songs concludes with perhaps its loveliest track of all, “River That Flows Both Ways,” described by what I assume is the record company on the Bandcamp page as “an immersive, long-tone work for Hammond B3 and pump organs.” That title “River That Flows Both Ways” may sound like something out of an ancient Zen koan, but it is actually the translation of the Native American name for the Hudson River which, being a tidal estuary, pushes ocean tides upstream (north) for about six hours (or until it reaches Albany), after which the river’s natural flow pushes it back downstream, or south for six hours. It had never occurred to me until writing this paragraph, but one could easily take this physical fact of nature as a metaphor for the physical flow of people and culure back and forth between New York City and the Hudson Valley.
Not a lot of Gift Songs’ listeners would know that about the Hudson River. And Cantu-Ledesma does not volunteer the info. As befits an ordained priest in a practice that seeks to minimize the ego, and as someone whose own musical practice he defines as necessary creative outlet but not his income-producing vocation, he has almost no online presence; the only social media I could find is an Instagram account that serves simply to re-post those images and stories in which he has been tagged by others. Bang in the middle of the eleven such posts to date, however, you’ll actually get to see him as a “normal” person, talking into a camera from the dockside down at the Roundout, Kingston’s marina that serves as a small inlet from that epic Hudson River that otherwise abuts the city. He is doing so in service of Pitchfork Media’s “Perfect 10” project.
Cantu-Ledesma’s Perfect 10 is Peace and Love by Dadawah, which he describes as “a 1970s Jamaican reggae record” (1974, to be precise), and while others might (also) classify it under Dub, it is far more experimental than that. Peace and Love, all four long tracks of it, features nyabinghi drums rather than reverbed snare, quietly funky guitar licks rather than the familiar off-beat reggae “chink,” and largely spoken entreaties by Ras Michael to Haile Selassie and Rastafari rather than your typical Jamaican vocal melodies or rhythmic dub toasting. The closest comparison to Peace and Love would probably be the Congos’ Heart of the Congos, though the former predated the latter by three years, and while the Congos’ album is celebrated, at least these days, as a classic of its kind, its forerunner, which struggled for recognition on the more mainstream label of Trojan, has largely fallen through the cracks of history. Cantu-Ledesma does Peace and Love a positive service by selecting it for further exposure. (He also does a good job of describing his own Gift Songs as he attempts to describe Peace and Love.)
The same is true of another of Kunze’s articles for Tricycle, such as I could now sought seek out with the benefit of my new subscription. Last year, he wrote a piece to commemorate the 60th anniversary reissue of Music for Zen Meditation and Other Joys, credited primarily to the American clarinetist Tony Scott. Released on Verve in 1964, it had been recorded in Japan that same year, at a time when that country’s thousand-year-old form of Buddhism – Zen Buddhism - was just seeping into an intellectual mainstream in the west. The nine instrumental tracks captured the results of an improvised set between Scott, and two Japanese virtuosos: Shinichi Yuize on the zither-like koto and Hozan Yamamoto on the bamboo flute known as the shakuhachi. Its title running contrary to the typical requirement for conducting zen meditation in silence, Music for Zen Meditation is certainly restrained: it has as much to do with jazz as Peace and Love does with reggae, which is to say not very much at all, yet each has plenty in common with Cantu-Ledesma and his Gift Songs.
Allowing the connections we have forged between these three albums, which span sixty years and hail from very different physical locations but form solid spiritual and musical connections, I could leave it there. Except I did not leave it there. Checking in on my e-mail (because, y’know, something important might be landing at what was now about 7am on post-Christmas morning), I serendipitously found a fresh one right up top of the Inbox from the prolific Ukrainian-based electronic/experimental musician 58918012’s Bandcamp account, announcing a new album.
This of itself was hardly news: the album in question, Warped Space, is Yura’s 11th full length release of 2025 alone. I have not heard them all, but going by my previous purchase of his entire back catalogue of 50 earlier albums (I wrote about some here and here), it’s fair to say that Warped Space was not necessarily going to fit the early morning’s aural ambience; as well as collaborations with vocalists and other musicians, some of 58918012’s instrumental music is highly abrasive.
It therefore seemed almost uncannily appropriate that the opening of Yura’s Bandcamp pitch, included on the e-mail, should state the following: “This album seems like it came from nowhere. It was born out of my tries to “meditate” by writing music.” Specifically, Yura recorded one track a day for a full week (“without any backthought”), saved them in a digital folder and left them alone for long enough to forget what they sounded like in the first place. “And when I finally opened it and re-listened to everything together,” he elaborates on the album’s Bandcamp page, “I figured out that they sound incredibly tight together. They really fit each other like they were written like this on purpose.” Staying true to the flow of that musical meditational week, the seven tracks have been released, as Warped Space, exactly as they were recorded.
Having listened through in full, I might challenge the notion that they really fit each other – “The Room” reverts to Yura’s abrasive nature – but the album is otherwise suitably peaceful, meditational, and, even if it is distinct from the three referenced above for its lack of collaborators, clearly improvisational. “Sleepless Night” is my personal fave, but listen and choose your own.
Going with the flow is not the antidote to evil; it doesn’t stop the Russian bombardment of Yura’s Ukrainian homeland, for example. But when accompanied by subtle, even subconscious affirmation, it brings each of us to the place we were meant to be, at the moment in time we find ourselves there. For Tony Scott, that was Japan in 1964; for Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, it was Kingston as of 2020. And for myself, it was the spare bed up the road from him at 5am with laptop and headphones, and a couple of hours of a Boxing Day drifting pleasantly down a musical Zen river that, just like the vast Hudson down the road from me, just like life itself, flows both ways.
My partner had come down with that nasty cold bug over Christmas and so I was in the spare room to avoid being infected, but I still didn’t want to risk waking anyone.
Thank you Tony, what a great read! I am so happy and grateful that you were inspired by my articles here and in Tricycle. Sending positive vibes and greetings over from Berlin to the Hudson Valley, with Dadawah's Peace And Love playing in the background.