Library Tapes - A Summer Beneath The Trees [2008]

For Fans Of: Feeling melancholy

Genres: Ambient, Piano, Experimental

Preview:

I've been meaning to throw this up for a while now. Library Tapes was formed by Swedish musicians David Wenngren and Per Jardsel, who recorded two albums together before Jardsel quit the band in 2006. Wenngren has since continued to release his own material, as well as collaborations with various other artists under various other names, all of which are worth listening to at least once. A Summer Beneath The Trees features him together with Peter Broderik, who complements Wenngren's piano with violin, guitar, accordion, trumpet, celesta, viola, and banjo. When I started to write about this, I honestly had no idea how to truly to describe it, other than to say it's one of those pieces of music you can truly be moved by. I had trouble even deciding which track to put up for the preview, because really you have to listen to the whole thing beginning to end. One track just doesn't cut it. So instead of trying to illustrate how this album might make you feel and why you should listen to it, I'm just going to take a short cut and use another reviewer's, ahem, review, of it. He used the exact words I would have used if I would have thought of them first:

"It's neither a stereotypically sad record nor a happy one - just human, highlighting emotional extremes to imply the whole range between them."

Library Tapes has released a number of other albums, all of which are excellent, and you can preview them all via the bandcamp. Recently, Wenngren announced that he's letting fans buy a small piece of a piano track he's compiling for 5 euro. Basically the idea is that you send him a piano piece you want him to use, and he names it after you or whoever you want it to be named after, and once he has all of them, they will be arranged in a much longer composition he's putting together. All the details/info for the project can be found on his website, or through the Facebook event he created for it. I think it's a really neat project, and a great way to get fans involved.