On 2007's Höstluft, the Swedish musician David Wenngren (a.k.a. Library Tapes) used ghostly pianos and sparse field recordings to create what sounded like Erik Satie compositions on dirty vinyl. Austere piano etudes either floated unadorned or hid inside a haze of scratchy ambiance. As if recognizing that he couldn't push this extreme minimalism much further (the next step would have been silence, and John Cage beat him to that by more than 50 years), Wenngren shifted into a heftier mode with last year's Sketches EP, where Danny Norbury added cello accents to the emboldened piano themes. Of course, "hefty" is relative: Like most of Wenngren's music, Fragment was stark, allowing for little interference between the listener and the limpid melodies.
A Summer Beneath the Trees is still pretty ascetic, but by Wenngren's usual standards, it's practically Wagner. A lot of the credit for this newfound mass is due to Peter Broderick (who also played on the superlative Fragment EP), a young musician from Portland who worked as a session man with M. Ward, Zooey Deschanel, and others, before moving to Copenhagen to join Efterklang. Here, Broderick complements Wenngren's piano with a wide variety of accompaniment: violin, guitar, accordion, trumpet, celesta, viola, and banjo. Höstluft and Fragment were almost accidental music-- like walking by a house and catching a couple minutes of someone picking out a melody on a beat-up old upright inside. This is the fullest, most finished-sounding Library Tapes project since it was an official duo (with Per Jardsell), and may suit listeners who need more than a few endlessly revolving piano notes better than recent offerings. For fans of Max Richter, Tim Hecker, and Eluvium, A Summer Beneath the Tress is a can't-miss album.
It is also, by and large, an exceptionally melancholy album that never slips into outright pathos. Its bucolic title is belied by the music's wintry strains. "The Sound of Emptiness" parts one and two are slow, shrieking dirges; landscapes of nothing but wind and rocks. "Pieces of Us Were Left on the Tracks..." features one of Wenngren's typical, glittering piano themes, buttressed by mournful strings and contrapuntal guitar. These tracks and others like them convey a strong presentiment or memory of loss. More importantly, they serve as foils for the record's handful of triumphant moments, and render them more affecting by contrast. One exemplary track, "Above the Flood", begins with heartbroken piano, but lights up unexpectedly with jaunty, staccato strings, and ends with positively joyful flourishes. And on "The Modest Triumph", the strings take the lead for a sweeping theme that sounds like elation incarnate. As such, it's neither a stereotypically sad record nor a happy one-- it's just human, highlighting emotional extremes to imply the whole range between them.
