Reviews - ALbums
The Library Tapes
A Summer Beneath the Trees
released: october 2008
label: make mine music
what we think: it's the new Tim Hecker and for fans of minimalism, a must-hear
by Natasha Stokes.
There's the “found sound” style of music that makes you grit your teeth even as you pretend to appreciate its hugely avant-garde hipness. And then there's Swedish instrumental outfit The Library Tapes, who make haunting, wintry compositions out of classical instruments and field recordings.
Ex-duo The Tapes is actually now down to just David Wenngren, and this fourth album is a marked shift from 2007's Höstluft. Where Höstluft featured downright ascetic found-soundscapes, Summer sees plenty of string arrangement love, giving the album a richer though still clean-cut atmosphere that's graceful, mournful and at times even heart-rending. It's like what elevator music wants to be when it grows up.
“Above the Flood” is a whirling duo of violin and piano, alternately uptempo and down, while “The Modest Triumph” is a strings-heavy piece that manges to be haunting and strangely hopeful at the same time. Then there are the tracks of pure sound - “The Sound of Emptiness” (parts one and two) is one and a half minutes of sweeping, funereal tones, while “The Fragile Tide” is the crackling of outside, punctuated with stately piano notes.
It's abstract, yet accessible stuff – each track meanders around a sonic playground of haunting violin, clean, clear piano, and that lovely texture you get with the judicious use of found sound. Don't expect anything even approaching a hook, chorus or, in fact, anything that might signal whether you're in the beginning, middle or end of a track. That's part of the album's beauty – one song fades into the next, tugging your emotions along in the gentlest possible way.
Melancholy is a major theme, highlighted by a clutch of triumphant moments given life by staccato piano or majestic strings. The album closes pretty much as it opened, and there's probably some kind of metaphor to be made about things/life//music coming full circle, but fuck it, here's a sweet and exquisitely arranged piece of modern classical that you should listen to and namedrop immediately.
