Intelligent Dance Music has become a much heralded thing, but intelligent ambient's just as difficult to pull off without landing in snoresville. In that vein, Stockholm, Sweden's Tape succeeds where other "folktronica" acts noodle themselves into a corner or fall prey to an over-determined laptop. On Milieu, the trio's second album, the compositions are carefully and emotionally layered, a midnight Fahey/Parch pantomime against a rusted silo.
Birthed patiently by lamplight, Milieu's unspoken landscape is inhabited by a sleepytime progression of percussive washes, analog whirls, acoustic arpeggios. Beneath it, there's a sense that the ever-present vibraphone and glockenspiel are tapping out a secret language. It follows the tone set by its successor, Opera, but the nocturnal rumbles are more tuneful with less static downstrokes. Overall, there are more flourishes to rustle the upper branches: Andreas and Johan Berthling and Tomas Hallonsten blend acoustic instruments, electronics and field recordings in a way that shows the stitching but isn't collagist. It's the barroom mope of Tom Waits' Closing Time re-approached by Tortoise.
Or perhaps it's just easy listening. The tracks are brief and contain enough spaciousness to allow counterpoint and rhythmic variance, but also solid melodies and even hooks. Some kindred spirits are Cincinnati-based Joshua Treble, Tim Hecker, Talk Talk, a less avant Gastr del Sol, or an ultra-concise Fennesz. The closest approximation for me, however, is The Books, though Tape show more restraint and are apt to stick to a single voice rather than to pour all the samples on the table.
The album opens with "Oak Player", a gentle folk recital with vibraphone, guitar arpeggios, bells, flutters, brushed cymbal taps and rides, synth notes, chimes, and maybe a harmonium, among other things. I once saw a guy in a tuxedo play an orchestra of variously filled water glasses, and this comes close to eliciting similarly understated awe. There isn't much to it, but what's there is done skillfully. It's the kind of compositional purity that people often mar with sappy vocal samples or clips, and here they continue the firefly minuet without puncturing the spell. For me, it's a late Spring night on a roof in the suburbs-- catching the honeysuckle smell of an overgrown lot across the street-- listening to the street lights turn off and on and off. Buds, birds and unopened flowers emerging from a cardboard box.
"Sponge Charms" continues treading between melancholia, nostalgia and joviality. Horns, keyboard, and guitar are backed by a tableau of static and loosening cables that drift through the same soporific ring of the first track: tiny toys walking in twos, cricket cut-ups, the aquatic-evoking sounds of a tape rewinding, New Years noise makers muffled beneath a foot of snow and ice and performed as accompaniment to a waltz. The track empties out with the sweeping sounds of dried weeds, sand, pine needles, underwater monsters-- a small-scale take on Nurse With Wound's Salt Marie Celeste, but in a cedar pond. There's a definite sense of submersion.
Otherwise, I love the sloppiness of the synthesizer on "Golden Twig": The garish highs and lows mop over the lapsteel and vibe as accented flutters move between speakers like insects escaping a net, butterflies losing their maps, someone choreographing a bug light. And on "Switchboard Fog", the album's strongest track (and its closer), you can feel another sort of agglomeration, a ragtag orchestra of tired hobos building to a rousing crescendo of piano, accordion, synthesizer, and violin and finally getting it right: One note at a time leaps to an ecstatically lilting, jam-packed ending. It's actually heartbreaking, like the finale of some tear-jerk film.
A number of these eight tracks create similar epiphanies, like you're bearing witness to a colt being born in some stable somewhere-- all damp and new and creaky on its legs, looking left and right and figuring what this new container involves, if escape's a possibility. It can be unwise to make effusive claims for tiny music, but by allowing the space for this sort of interpretation, Tape's creation also increases in size. These Swedes never come forward to say much about who they are or what they're doing; they allow the music to amble with charmed grace, leaving it to you to provide the picture.
