Library Tapes - Sentiments of a Lost Time

David Wenngren and Per Jardsell are two Swedish musicians who in 2005 launched Library Tapes, a project spanning ambient, noise and modern classical. A sound that translated Sweden's cold landscapes into music through a minimal use of piano, guitar and electronics, marked — especially on the early albums — by an obsession with darkness bordering on the apocalyptic.

The project's early years are defined by the simplicity of its sonic elements — very often just a few piano or guitar notes repeating hypnotically minute after minute, before finally being devastated and wiped out by merciless waves of noise. These early albums — especially the first two, which can be considered their peak, with covers rigorously rendered in blurred black and white — seem to represent a musical version of the bleakest, most mournful visions of their countryman Ingmar Bergman.
As long as David Wenngren and Per Jardsell worked together, these remained the project's defining traits, but with Jardsell's departure — which came before the release of Höstluft — the project's direction shifted towards brighter sounds, closer to a more traditional modern classical (with correspondingly different, colour-based artwork), losing much of its initial emotional power. To draw a comparison, one could say that Library Tapes' records move from Labradford or Silver Mt Zion towards Max Richter or Sylvain Chauveau. 

The first two albums: the dark, most creative phase

The cover of Alone In The Bright Lights Of A Shattered Life (2005) already introduces us to these atmospheres, with its blurred photo of what might be an abandoned power plant, and behind it, a dawn breaking over a decaying, inhuman, man-made world. The sense of the fleeting nature of things comes through clearly in “Broken Piano”, a brief sonata for detuned piano, a direct descendant of John Cage's prepared piano, with background recordings instilling an oppressive sense of reality growing thin.
The typical structure of the Swedish project's early tracks, though, is best represented by “In A Safe Place… Somewhere Near Your Heart”, a dark piano melody, first played with the left hand on the low notes and then echoed in higher octaves by the right hand, over which the guitar enters before slowly being dissolved by a devastating wash of noise electronics.
Despite the simplicity of the ideas at play, the result is nonetheless thoroughly successful, with an emotional impact that ambient music rarely manages to achieve. “The Leaves Have Left Us” offers a similar solution, with solo acoustic guitar over electronic winds and an atmosphere very close to the bleakness of Labradford. The two compositions “Cold Leaves For The Violent Ground” and “The Scratches On The Window In The Doors Of Each Cell” share the same structure within a limited runtime, while the nearly ten-minute title track represents the apex of the duo's ideas. Intense rhythms and low piano and guitar notes merge together until a fresh wave of white noise collapses every note. Library Tapes' music reached expressive heights that would prove hard to match in much of their later work.

With Feelings For Something Lost (2006), a gradual evolution begins towards sounds so bare they seem almost unfinished. The cover depicts a black-and-white tree standing in a desolate landscape, a metaphor for a dying nature, almost annihilated by the presence of man. David Wenngren and Per Jardsell pare down the sound of their debut, deconstructing every form of melody: where melodic ideas were once sharp and clear, here they seem fragmented, destined to vanish into nothing, leaving room for the listener's imagination. The twelve tracks (all with very long titles and very short running times) open with “But Now Things Were Different, With Birds Unable To Speak”. Birdsong is slowly replaced by industrial sounds: what at first sounds like the noise of a saw alternates with metallic clangs that gradually take the place of the sound of nature.
These fragments of unfinished melodies laid over field recordings, almost like sketches of tracks never completed (“Feelings For Something Lost In Two Parts”, “Fading Lights And Distant Memories”), at times with genuinely interesting timbres (“Leaves Abstract In A Village Plunged Into Mourning”), lend the whole album a sense of fragility that captures well the fleetingness of music in general, and of ambient music in particular. Amid this overall sense of incompleteness, the splendid melody of “Lines Running Low Through 7th (…The Shame Of It All…)” emerges unexpectedly, almost out of nowhere, its perfectly sequenced piano notes enough to make any film score composer envious.

Per Jardsell's departure, a new phase

At this point, just as the duo had become one of the most accomplished and interesting ambient outfits of the new decade, Per Jardsell leaves for study reasons. The move obviously has consequences, but David Wenngren manages to keep the project alive and give it new prospects, even if something will be lost forever.
Höstluft (2007), the first record without Jardsell, shifts the cover to yellow, with a streetlamp, the only man-made object, immersed in a landscape that could be described as yellow-grey, with a cold sun flooding the surrounding nature. The music changes further still: the tracks no longer have the crescendos of the debut's electronic finales. Melody now comes to the fore forcefully, with disturbing electronic noise in the background, almost representing the decay of the magnetic tape. But two elements stand out above all: Höstluft is conceived as a solo piano record, with the electronic contribution kept truly minimal, and the tracks always start and end the same way, with no evolution as the minutes pass. At times perfect melodies emerge, as in "Skiss Av Träd" or "Repor", while at other times they are simply sketched out without being brought to completion, and at still other times they are nothing more than simple melodic watercolors of just a few notes, yet with great impact.

Sketches (2007), as the title already suggests, achieves something that seemed impossible: stripping everything down even further to the bone. The tracks are sonic ideas pared to the bone as never before. In a few pieces, such as "Fields" or "First Day Of Spring", strings make their entrance, showing how the new Library Tapes were moving closer to the ethereal atmospheres of Max Richter, also thanks to the collaboration with English cellist Danny Norbury. The intimacy of certain sonic ideas such as those of "View From A Train", the rarefied notes of "The Park", the electronic textures over piano of "Snowleaf" still retain a certain interest.
Sketches closes out Library Tapes' finest period, one that, despite the countless subsequent works, they would never again reach in terms of the powerful poetics of their first albums.

Meanwhile, Wenngren's partner, Erica Gunnarsson, releases a piano work under the name Xeltrei. Litotes (2007) is an experiment in the duality of music and silence, where the piano notes are so rarefied as to verge on the intangible.

The definitive shift to modern classical

A Summer Beneath The Trees (2008) marks the definitive shift to modern classical and the complete abandonment of the previous grey-dark atmospheres, ushering in a new, brighter season, but one poorer in ideas. Even the color cover signals a change. From the blurred black-and-white of the early works to a blue sky and a yellow field, suggesting a landscape vaguely reminiscent of an Impressionist painting.
Piano and strings dominate throughout, and the music becomes all too predictable. There's clearly no shortage of evocative moments, but all the unsettling feelings woven into the first albums are transformed into background music, all too similar to itself.

Fragment (2008) is the second work released in the same year, essentially a clone of its predecessor, updated to reflect the new phase Wenngren had embarked upon. The eight tracks that make up this kind of ambient concept album become music-box sounds performed on piano, with some guitar embroidery and layers of strings. At times the alchemy works well, reaching mystical atmospheres worthy of Popol Vuh ("Fragment II"). In "Fragment III", the classic piano compositions with the repeated two-note figure that made Max Richter's fortune make a return, once again pointing to the direction being taken. There's also room for a collaboration with French composer Sylvain Chauveau ("Fragment VI"), who was himself making a name for himself in those very years with albums of pianistic minimalism.

Three one-off projects: Forestflies, Le Lendemain and Murralin Lane, plus an album under his own name

Also in 2008, Wenngren brings to life the one-off project Forestflies, with which he releases Structure/Chaos. The six tracks, simply titled with the names of the instruments used in them, represent as many experiments in electronic filtering of bare instrumental pieces, ranging from the shadowy romanticism of "Cello 2", to the Basinski-esque abstraction of the drones of "Guitar And Cello", to the constant ambient flow of "Processed Vocals And Strings" and the moving "Piano And Violin", the only track in which Wenngren offers glimpses of his graceful pianistic minimalism.

In 2009 Wenngren puts the Library Tapes project on hold, but he doesn't sit idle. He founds his new label Auetic and begins two collaborations with the projects Le Lendemain and Murralin Lane. In the first, he collaborates with the aforementioned cellist Danny Norbury and creates Fires (2009), a very melancholic LP of piano and cello seeking a modern chamber minimalism. In the second, under the name Murralin Lane, he explores more original paths, thanks to the participation of Swedish singer Ylva Wiklund.
Our House Is On The Wall (2010) is the first David Wenngren record to feature a voice, but this shouldn't come as a surprise, since here Wiklund's singing is just one instrument among the alien sounds, created with processed echoes, that capture sounds recorded at dawn around Wenngren's own country house, the place where the album was recorded in its entirety. The piano disappears completely, allowing for the exploration of completely different sonorities, abstract and evanescent, with sounds reminiscent of the ticks of a Geiger counter, in a kind of lo-fi, post-atomic slow-core.

Wenngren finally releases his first, and to date only, work under his own name, titled Sleepless Nights, composed entirely at various moments between the dead of night and the first gleams of dawn, during a period of insomnia suffered by the Swedish artist. A work whose austerity translates into short compositions describing a dark, strongly evocative ambience, summed up in electronic beds over which gusts of cello or scattered piano notes insist, no longer steeped in crystalline serenity and almost never juxtaposed to create proper melodies. Wenngren's insomnia then reaches hallucinated peaks, arching into slowed-down modulations of claustrophobic drones, which in "For D.N" ripple into persistent distortions, while "06.08, When Everything Is Quiet" perfectly captures the exhaustion of the nighttime vigil, with muffled, almost motionless piano notes.

The return of Library Tapes

The new work released under the Library Tapes name, Like Green Grass Against A Blue Sky (2010), isn't too far removed from the paths Wenngren had charted in previous years. Among the various piano sketches, increasingly close to musicians like Nils Frahm or Peter Broderick, the seven minutes of "O2" stand out, stretched out as never before in the Swedish musician's discography, yet at the same time particularly unsettling and obsessive, with the magnificent sound of Danny Norbury's cello in the spotlight. For the rest, it's once again the piano that takes center stage, in "Enslig", with a sound reduced almost to silence, and in "Klosterg.", a bizarre episode in its sudden accelerations. Field recordings and noise elements have by now practically vanished. Library Tapes' music increasingly tends toward a formula that repeats itself without much in the way of novelty.

In 2011 the Swedish artist's collaborations are enriched by a project made together with Canadian sound artist Christopher Bissonnette, The Meridians Of Latitude And The Parallels Of Longitude, a record containing four long compositions (around ten minutes each) of atmospheric drone music that don't stand out for originality.

Sun Peeking Through (2012), featuring Danny Norbury and Julia Kent, is a work of pure modern classical with all the genre's trademarks, one that struggles to surprise, even though the title track still proves interesting, and at times ("Found") one can catch sounds close to those of the soundtracks of the duo Nick Cave/Warren Ellis.

The albums on 1631 Recordings, David Wenngren's new creation

In 2015 David Wenngren founded a new record label, 1631 Recordings, an extremely prolific imprint that became a point of reference for modern classical music.
Escapism (2016), the first album released on the label, is in many ways a synthesis of everything expressed in the previous records, but has the merit of containing piano melodies capable of sticking in the memory ("Running By The Roads, Running By The Fields"), partly thanks – once again – to Julia Kent, who brings a sound halfway between a stark ambient that completely forgoes any temptation toward minimalist repetition, and a deliberately simple and essential chamber music, built on constant dialogues between piano and cello.
The album sets off with the delicate vibraphone chimes of "Introduction I", followed by cello that immediately sets the melancholy mood of "Escapism". Right after, the piano bursts in; the pianistic flight of "Running By The Roads, Running By The Fields" seems to revive the sound of the master Max Richter and his "Vladimir's Blues". The piano and vibraphone notes of "Feathers" open up cracks of light that keep expanding, eventually giving rise to the magnificent, airy "Silhouettes", a genuine waking dream and the album's most liberating moment. The finale is left to the dreamlike "Achieving Closure", where the piano disappears to make way for brief percussion and string chimes.

In the same year, released on cassette only, came the now-impossible-to-find Sketches, Outtakes & Rarities Vol. 1 & 2, a collection of discarded tracks or simple sketches never developed further.

2016 ended on a high note for Wenngren, with his first film score, for a movie by Swiss director Jan Gassmann, Europe, She Loves. Gassmann's film, following the lives of four European couples living in very different countries (Ireland, Estonia, Greece and Spain), underscores the fragility of these love stories, while trying to highlight what they all have in common. Against such a fragile narrative backdrop, the music of Library Tapes, once again aided by Julia Kent, proves perfect for depicting the four cities and the four couples at the heart of the film.

After years of repeated stylistic devices, the short EP Komorebi (2017) – a nineteen-minute composition split into five parts – marks a welcome change. Setting aside the usual dialogues between piano and Julia Kent's cello, on "Komorebi pt.1" and "Komorebi pt.2" the music edges closer to the ambient of Brian Eno, with repetitive synths and organ sounds creating particularly dreamlike, almost lysergic atmospheres.

The Solo Piano Albums

This shift proves very short-lived: it is cut off almost immediately by Patterns (Repeat) (2018), this time featuring, alongside the usual Julia Kent, Japanese violinist Hoshiko Yamane. The return to a predictable form of modern classical is, frankly, unexciting, and aside from the piano pieces ("Patterns", "Achieving Closure" and "Repeat"), there seems to be little worth salvaging. In 2020 the album got a new lease of life with the release of Patterns (Revisited), a stretched-out ambient version of the pieces played by violinist Hoshiko Yamane, for strings and synth alone, overall preferable to the original.

By now David Wenngren's project seems to have little left to say, and the EP Summer Songs (2020) attempts a new solo path for piano alone, with no collaborators at all. Seven small sketches for solo piano, ethereal musical watercolors lasting barely thirteen minutes, dedicated to summer. The minimal piano scores remain spare and extremely simple throughout, never fleshed out with other instruments (save for a few rare recordings), as if searching for distant memories of long-forgotten summers, impossible to recall except through stillness and quiet.
Summer Songs thus falls into that category of EPs made up of off-the-cuff sketches that so many musicians have released over the course of their careers. There are nods, of course, to the modern sonata form, but they stretch all the way back to the godfather of minimal piano, John Cage. Works created in total solitude, born of the inspiration of the moment, ranging from mornings bursting with joy ("Summer Morning") to relaxed repeated patterns ("With Windows Open") to the sight of deep blue skies ("July Skies").

No layering, no overdubbing, everything stripped down to the bare minimum, right up to "Above The Quiet City", a track that anticipates the following LP The Quiet City (2020). While the previous record was played entirely solo, the new one is something of a modern classical multinational. Contributors include cellist Julia Kent, pianist Olivia Belli, Michael Muller of Balmorhea, violinist Hoshiko Yamane and composer Akira Kosemura. This multitude of collaborations doesn't bring much that's new, except in the finale of repetitive minimalism, where Olivia Belli and Julia Kent engage in a frantic dialogue between piano and cello.

Dusk (2021) rediscovers the prepared piano ("At Night", "Safe Heaven") without ever reaching the heights of "Broken Piano" from the debut, chases romantic melodies ("Hanami", "Lullaby") and attempts pianistic flights in the style of Max Richter ("Fleeting Waltz"). All in all, a decent solo piano record, as is its clone-like follow-up LP (which even shares the same cover) Sunset (2022). Worth noting especially is its odd opener, so close to a classical sonata form ("Red Clouds") that it makes you realize just how far the project has traveled since its beginnings.

The same sonic blueprint carries over to A New Context (2023), marked by greater use of field recordings and, overall, a more bucolic sound, as the cover art suggests, showing a photo of the countryside. Nature becomes the central theme: a rainy morning ("Another Morning Rain"), a bike ride through the fields ("The Bicycle Waltz"), the changing seasons ("November Skies", "A Summer Waltz").
The creative drought is confirmed by Leaves (2023), which sees the return of Julia Kent and the usual cello-and-piano duets ("Roots"), this time closer to the atmospheric sound of Patterns (Revisited), as shown by tracks like "Mercy" and "Through Glass".

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