Library Tapes

David Wenngren and Per Jardsell are two Swedish musicians who in 2005 founded Library Tapes, a project that ranges from ambient to noise and modern classical. A sound that translated the cold Swedish 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 first years are defined by the simplicity of its sonic elements—very often just a few piano or guitar notes repeating hypnotically minute after minute, only to be devastated and erased by inescapable waves of noise. These early albums—especially the first two, which can be considered their peak, with covers strictly in blurry black and white—seem to offer a musical version of the darkest, most somber visions of their compatriot Ingmar Bergman. As long as David Wenngren and Per Jardsell worked together, these were the project’s main traits, but after Jardsell’s departure—before the release of Höstluft—the project would shift toward brighter sounds, closer to a more traditional modern classical (and consequently to color covers with a very different look), losing much of its initial emotional power. By way of comparison, one could say that Library Tapes’ records move from Labradford or Silver Mt. Zion toward 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 these atmospheres: a blurred image of a perhaps abandoned power plant and, in the background, a dawn over a decadent, inhuman, human-shaped world. The idea of the transience of things is clearly captured in “Broken Piano,” a brief sonata for an out-of-tune piano, a direct descendant of John Cage’s prepared piano, with background recordings that instill an oppressive sense of a reality growing thin and rarefied.

The typical structure of the project’s early pieces, however, is best represented by “In A Safe Place... Somewhere Near Your Heart”: a dark piano melody first played with the left hand on low notes and then echoed on higher octaves with the right hand, into which the guitar enters, before everything is slowly dissolved by a devastating flow of noise electronics.

Despite the simplicity of the ideas, the result is strikingly successful, with an emotional impact that ambient music rarely even approaches. “The Leaves Have Left Us” offers a similar solution, with only acoustic guitar over electronic winds and an atmosphere close to Labradford’s gloom. The compositions “Cold Leaves For The Violent Ground” and “The Scratches On The Window In The Doors Of Each Cell” share the same structure in a short format, while the nearly ten-minute title track is the apotheosis of the duo’s ideas: intense rhythms and low piano and guitar notes merging until a new wave of white noise collapses every sound. Library Tapes reached expressive heights here that they would struggle to find again in many later works.

With Feelings For Something Lost (2006) a gradual evolution begins toward sounds so bare they can seem almost unfinished. The cover shows a black-and-white tree inhabiting a desolate landscape, a metaphor for a dying nature, nearly annihilated by humanity’s presence. Wenngren and Jardsell simplify the debut’s sound, deconstructing every melodic form: where melodies were once clear, here they feel fragmented and destined to vanish into nothingness, leaving space for the listener’s imagination. The twelve tracks (all with very long titles and very short durations) open with “But Now Things Were Different, With Birds Unable To Speak.” Birdsong is slowly replaced by industrial sounds: what at first seems like a saw alternates with metallic clangs that gradually supplant nature’s voice.

These fragments of incomplete melodies over environmental recordings—almost sketches of pieces never completed (“Feelings For Something Lost In Two Parts,” “Fading Lights And Distant Memories”), sometimes with decidedly interesting timbres (“Leaves Abstract In A Village Plunged Into Mourning”)—give the album an overall sense of fragility that well conveys the fleeting nature of music in general and ambient in particular. Out of this general incompleteness, an unexpected moment emerges almost from nowhere: the beautiful melody of “Lines Running Low Through 7th (...The Shame Of It All...)”, whose perfectly sequenced piano notes would have made any film-music composer jealous.

Per Jardsell’s departure: a new phase

At this point, just as the duo had become one of the most accomplished and interesting ambient acts 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 to give it new perspectives, even if something will be lost forever.

Höstluft (2007), the first record without Jardsell, turns to a yellow cover with a streetlamp—the only man-made object—set in a landscape that could be called yellow-grey, with a cold sun flooding the surrounding nature. The music changes further: the tracks no longer feature the electronic crescendo finales of the debut. Melody now asserts itself forcefully, with disturbing electronic noises in the background, almost as if to represent the decay of magnetic tape. But the most striking elements are two: Höstluft is conceived as a solo piano record and the electronic contribution is truly minimal; moreover, the tracks always begin and end in the same way, without any development over the minutes. Sometimes perfect melodies surface, as in “Skiss Av Träd” or “Repor”; other times they are simply traced without being brought to completion; at other times they are tiny melodic watercolors of just a few notes with strong impact.

Sketches (2007), as the title already suggests, achieves something that seemed impossible: reducing everything even further to the bone. The pieces are stripped sonic ideas like never before. In some episodes, such as “Fields” or “First Day Of Spring,” strings appear, showing how the new Library Tapes draw closer to the ethereal atmospheres of Max Richter, also thanks to the collaboration with English cellist Danny Norbury. The intimacy of certain ideas like “View From A Train,” the rarefied notes of “The Park,” and the electronic textures over piano in “Snowleaf” still retain a certain interest.

Sketches closes the best period of Library Tapes, who—despite countless later releases—would no longer reach the powerful poetics of the early albums.

Meanwhile Wenngren’s partner, Erica Gunnarsson, releases a piano work under the name Xeltrei. Litotes (2007) is an experiment in dualism between music and silence, where the piano notes are so rarefied they 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 dark-grey atmospheres, ushering in a new season—brighter, but poorer in ideas. The color cover already signals the change: from the blurry black-and-white of the early works to a blue sky and a yellow field, suggesting a landscape vaguely like an Impressionist painting.

Piano and strings dominate everywhere and the music becomes all too predictable. Clearly there are evocative moments, but the anxious sensations insinuated in the early albums turn into background music, too often the same as itself.

Fragment (2008) is the second release in the same year, essentially a clone of its predecessor, updated to Wenngren’s new phase. The eight tracks dividing this sort of ambient concept become music-box sounds performed by piano, with some guitar embroidery and layered strings. At times the alchemy works well, reaching mystical atmospheres worthy of Popol Vuh (“Fragment II”). In “Fragment III” the classic piano compositions with two repeated notes recur—the kind that made Max Richter famous—once again indicating the direction taken. There is also room for a collaboration with French composer Sylvain Chauveau (“Fragment VI”), who in those years was drawing attention with albums of minimalist piano music.

Three occasional projects and a solo album

Still in 2008, Wenngren creates the occasional project Forestflies, releasing Structure/Chaos. The six tracks, titled simply with the names of the instruments used, are experiments in electronic filtering of sparse instrumental pieces, ranging from the shadowy romanticism of “Cello 2,” to the Basinski-like abstraction of the drones in “Guitar And Cello,” to the constant ambient flow of “Processed Vocals And Strings,” and the moving “Piano And Violin,” the only piece where Wenngren offers glimpses of his graceful piano minimalism.

In 2009 Wenngren pauses the Library Tapes project, but does not stand still. He founds his new label Auetic and begins two collaborations under the projects Le Lendemain and Murralin Lane. In the first he works with the aforementioned cellist Danny Norbury and creates Fires (2009), a very melancholic LP for piano and cello seeking a modern chamber minimalism. In the second, under the name Murralin Lane, he searches for more original paths thanks to the participation of Swedish singer Ylva Wiklund.

Our House Is On The Wall (2010) is the first record by David Wenngren to feature a voice, but this should not surprise: here Wiklund’s singing is an instrument among alien sounds created with processed echoes that capture recordings made at dawn around Wenngren’s country house, where the album was entirely produced. The piano disappears completely, allowing experimentation with wholly different, abstract, evanescent sonorities, with sounds reminiscent of a Geiger counter’s bits in a kind of low-fidelity post-atomic slow-core.

Wenngren then releases his first—and so far only—work under his own name, titled Sleepless Nights, composed at various moments between deep night and the first glimmers of dawn during a period of insomnia suffered by the Swedish artist. Its austerity translates into short compositions describing a dark and strongly evocative ambience, summed up in electronic beds over which gusts of cello or scattered piano notes insist, no longer imbued with crystalline serenity and almost never juxtaposed to form proper melodies. Wenngren’s insomnia then reaches hallucinatory peaks, arching into slowed modulations of claustrophobic drones, which in “For D.N” ripple into persistent distortions, while “06.08, When Everything Is Quiet” perfectly describes the exhaustion of nocturnal wakefulness, with dull, nearly immobile piano notes.

The return of Library Tapes

The new work released under the name Library Tapes, Like Green Grass Against A Blue Sky (2010), is not far from the paths Wenngren had traced 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—more expanded than ever in Wenngren’s discography and at the same time particularly unsettling and obsessive, with the magnificent cello sound of Danny Norbury in evidence. Otherwise, once again the piano is the real protagonist in “Enslig,” with a sound reduced almost to silence, and in “Klosterg.,” a peculiar episode with sudden accelerations. Field recordings and noise aspects have by now practically disappeared. Library Tapes’ music increasingly tends toward a formula repeated without major innovations.

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, an album containing four long compositions (around ten minutes) of atmospheric drone music that do not stand out for originality.

Sun Peeking Through (2012), with the participation of Danny Norbury and Julia Kent, is a pure modern classical work with all the genre’s stylistic markers, struggling to surprise, even though the title track remains interesting and at times (“Found”) one can catch sounds close to the film-score work of the Nick Cave/Warren Ellis duo.

The 1631 Recordings albums: David Wenngren’s new creation

In 2015 David Wenngren founds a new label, 1631 Recordings, an extremely prolific imprint that becomes a reference point for modern classical.

Escapism (2016), the first album released on the label, is in a sense a synthesis of what had been expressed in previous works, but it has the merit of containing piano melodies that stay in the memory (“Running By The Roads, Running By The Fields”), also thanks—once again—to Julia Kent, who brings elements halfway between an austere ambient that entirely renounces any temptation toward minimalist repetition and a chamber classical music that is deliberately simple and essential, built on continuous dialogues between piano and cello.

The album takes off with the delicate vibraphone tolls of “Introduction I,” followed by the cello that immediately sets the melancholic mood of “Escapism.” Soon after, the piano bursts in; the pianistic flight of “Running By The Roads, Running By The Fields” seems to revive the sound of master Max Richter and his “Vladimir’s Blues.” The piano and vibraphone notes of “Feathers” open shafts of light that expand more and more until they give life to the magnificent, airy “Silhouettes,” a true waking dream and the album’s most liberating moment. The finale is left to the oneiric “Achieving Closure,” where the piano disappears to make room for brief percussion tolls and strings.

In the same year, an elusive release—available only on audiocassette—also comes out: Sketches, Outtakes & Rarities Vol. 1 & 2, collecting discarded tracks or simply sketches never developed.

In late 2016 Wenngren closes the year strongly with his first soundtrack, for Swiss director Jan Gassmann’s film Europe, She Loves. Gassmann’s film, through the lives of four European couples living in very different countries (Ireland, Estonia, Greece and Spain), underlines the fragility of their love stories, trying to highlight what they share in common. In such a delicate narrative, Library Tapes’ music—again with the help of Julia Kent—proves perfect for describing the four cities and the four couples at the center.

After years of repeated mannerisms, the short EP Komorebi (2017)—a nineteen-minute composition divided into five parts—represents a positive change. Excluding the usual dialogues between piano and the cello of Julia Kent, in “Komorebi pt.1” and “Komorebi pt.2” the music approaches Brian Eno’s ambient, with repetitive synths and an organ sound creating particularly dreamlike atmospheres bordering on the psychedelic.

The solo piano albums

This change is short-lived: it stops immediately with Patterns (Repeat) (2018), this time with the collaboration not only of Julia Kent but also Japanese violinist Hoshiko Yamane. The return to a predictable form of modern classical is frankly not exciting and, apart from the piano pieces (“Patterns,” “Achieving Closure” and “Repeat”), there seems to be little to save. In 2020 this album gains new life with the release of Patterns (Revisited), an expanded ambient version of the pieces performed by Hoshiko Yamane, for strings and synth only, overall preferable to the original.

By now David Wenngren’s creature seems to have little else to say, and the EP Summer Songs (2020) tries a new path alone for solo piano, without collaborations. Seven small sketches for solo piano, airy musical watercolors just thirteen minutes long dedicated to summer. The minimal piano scores remain sparse and extremely simple, never enriched with other instruments (save for rare recordings), as if seeking distant memories of summers long forgotten, impossible to bring back except through serenity and quiet.

Summer Songs thus belongs to that type of EP made up of occasional sketches that many musicians have released over the course of their careers. There are obvious references to modern sonata form, of course, but they extend as far back as the godfather of minimal piano John Cage. Works in total solitude, born of momentary inspiration, ranging from joy-filled awakenings (“Summer Morning”) to relaxed repeated patterns (“With Windows Open”) to visions of intense blue skies (“July Skies”).

No layering, no overlap: everything is reduced to the minimum up to “Above The Quiet City,” a track that anticipates the subsequent LP The Quiet City (2020). If the previous record was entirely played alone, the new one is instead a kind of modern-classical multinational: it features the cellist Julia Kent, pianist Olivia Belli, Michael Muller of Balmorhea, violinist Hoshiko Yamane and composer Akira Kosemura. This multi-collaboration does not bring major innovations, except in the final section of repetitive minimalism with Olivia Belli and Julia Kent holding a frenetic dialogue between piano and cello.

Dusk (2021) rediscovers the prepared piano (“At Night,” “Safe Heaven”) without ever reaching the levels of the debut’s “Broken Piano,” pursues romantic melodies (“Hanami,” “Lullaby”) and attempts pianistic flights in the style of Max Richter (“Fleeting Waltz”). Overall it is a solid solo piano record, as is its follow-up LP clone (even with the same cover) Sunset (2022). Worth noting above all is the odd opening, so close to a classical sonata form (“Red Clouds”) that it makes one feel just how much distance has passed since the beginnings.

The same sonic outline returns for A New Context (2023), marked by greater use of environmental recordings and, in general, a more bucolic sound, as the cover suggests, showing a countryside photo. Nature becomes the main theme: a rainy morning (“Another Morning Rain”), a bike ride through fields (“The Bicycle Waltz”), the changing seasons (“November Skies,” “A Summer Waltz”). The crisis of ideas is reaffirmed 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 pieces like “Mercy” and “Through Glass.”