Articles
Spotlight 15
Favourite Labels 2014

Albums
Poppy Ackroyd + Lumen
Avec le soleil sortant ...
Balmorhea
Brooklyn Rider
bvdub
Cern
Del Sol String Quartet
Nick Gill
Stefan Goldmann
Hammock
Chihei Hatakeyama
Robert Honstein
Jonas Kopp
David Lackner
Last Ex
Neil Leonard
Little Phrase
The Mark Lomax Trio
LA Percussion Quartet
Manual
Near The Parenthesis
Newman and Cox
Nuage
Pan & Me
Bobby Previte
Marc Sabat
Hein Schoer
Wadada Leo Smith
SPC ECO
Subotika
Tape
Templeton + Armstrong
Ken Thomson
Ulterior Motive
Joris Voorn
Andrew Weathers
Ezra Weiss Sextet
Stefan Wesolowski
Keith Worthy

Compilations / Mixes
Aphelion
EPM Selected Vol. 3
Universal Quantifier

EPs / Cassettes / Mini-Albums / Singles
Balmorhea
Blu Mar Ten
Michael Jon Fink
Oceanic Triangulation
Northumbria and Famine
Total Science
Simon Whetham

Tape: Casino
Häpna

Tape shares with Kiln many properties. Both are long-standing—long-enduring might be a better way of putting it—musical outfits that release albums rarely and whose members assume a rather self-effacing public profile. In the case of Tape, the Swedish trio was born fourteen years ago when brothers Andreas and Johan Berthling joined forces with Tomas Hallonsten and followed that with the release of their first Tape album, Opera, on Häpna two years later. Milieu, Rideau, Luminarium, and Revelationes followed with some degree of regularity thereafter, bringing us to Casino, which the trio recorded in Stockholm last December.

Though the group's supple blend of acoustic and electronic sounds hasn't changed, it's reached a level of refinement on Casino that's hard to miss. As one might expect from a project that's been operating since 2000, there's a maturity and ease to the band's playing that's apparent throughout the forty-minute album. A typical track sees either guitar figures by Johan or piano playing by Hallonsten functioning as the structural core and melodic essence, which Andreas augments with laptop-generated treatments. The album's meditative, dream-like quality is strengthened not only by the compositions but by the absence of a rhythm section, a move that frees the musicians from having to adhere to a strict, unwavering tempo, and for whatever reason, the seven tracks find the group in an oft-wistful frame of mind.

In “Seagulls,” organ playing imbues the electric guitar with warmth, while the comparatively sparsely arranged “Repose” finds Andreas threading all manner of abstract textures in amongst the others' restrained guitar and organ expressions. In similar manner, elegant piano melodies gently flow through “Alioth” alongside the insistent babble of synthesizers and electronics. Ample space appears between the guitar phrases in “Merak,” a move that in turn grants lonely, melodica-like sounds ample opportunity to impose themselves on the listener, after which “Eagle Miaows” closes the set with five minutes of gentle uplift.

November 2014