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"Dreaming the same dreams, not knowing of each other. Invoking old times at new places, side by side, not knowing of each other. Longing for yearning; light of dawn and midday sun. A world which lets itself be sensed, not known; the first light of your rosy-fingered youth; birches and concrete, touch and go.
The new album by Swedish group Tape is a luminarium of sound where past and present merge at the speed of light."
Tape is the trio of Andreas Berthling, Johan Berthling and Tomas Hallonsten from Stockholm, Sweden. This is their fourth album and it was recorded in their Summa studio in Stockholm.
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It was in April 2003 when I met Tape’s Johan Berthling and Häpna co-founder Klas Augustsson in Stockholm for the first time. They handed me a proper pile of CDs, and to me it was love at first sight. I was truly intrigued by Häpna’s colourful blend of different releases covering a spectrum from sound art, field recordings, improv, minimalism, folk and ( – for lack of any better words to describe Sheriff's outerworldly music – ) chamber rock. And there was Opera, the debut by Tape, which managed to sum up the labels brilliant catalogue.
A week after this meeting I wrote in a review –
”Using a wide array of instruments like guitar, harmonium, melodica, field recordings, percussion, computer, harmonica, zither, piano, accordion, soprano sax and trumpet, Tape's music lives at the intersection of a 21st century chamber music and an imaginary folklore. I write this on a train from Weimar to Berlin (the distance to my girls at home is growing bigger and this always makes me feel a little melancholic), riding through the marvellous green and sun-flooded Mark-Brandenburg countryside. Slowly passing by vast yellow rape fields and ancient, abandoned factories, the music on my headphones seems to fit almost too perfectly. The sun and nature are certainly core ingredients of Opera and its slowly floating melodies carry the spirit of travel, not on an aircraft, but submerged in a landscape instead.”
In the meantime Tape have distilled their sound with their following albums Milieu, Rideau and the most recent collaboration with Tenniscoats more and more into an organic song-like format. While all of them are excellent, Tape’s essence can be found in Opera.
Listening to Opera again after almost six years, it proofs to be a truly great and timeless album.
– Stephan Mathieu, January 2008
Opera plus is a reissue of Opera (Häpna H.9), with three new tracks taken from the original 2002 sessions. Now in digipak with new cover art.
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When Milieu, the sophomore album by Stockholm based trio Tape, first came out at the tail end of 2003, it sounded like nothing else.
Seemingly improvised but still so tenderly composed, it took cues from both the most gentle free jazz and Brian Eno’s ideas of ambient music but at the same time leaning against both Swedish folk music and broken pop balladry. In the end Tape created something entirely unique.
For quite some time it felt like they – brothers Andreas and Johan Berthling and Tomas Hallonsten – were on their own, whether anyone bothered to listen or not they’d still be walking deeper and deeper down their own musical path, into a very private forest of their collective heart and mind.
Slowly, almost as pacelessly as the music itself, they started making friends. And in the process they sold out all copies of the record. That is why Milieu is finally being reissued and restored in this expanded format.
While doing so Milieu – together with its forerunner Opera – became something of a stepping stone - some of us would argue it was the blue print – for, if not a new pop the at least a new way of approaching it and a new way of what it could achieve.
Tape had very little to do with traditional experimental music, they never fitted into jazz and – although many tried to – their beautiful songs could not by any means be labelled electronica.
Instead it was the genuine gentleness itself of Tape’s music that spoke to their soul mates across the world. Milieu opened a door to a musical heart their contemporaries had been trying to reach for a long time. Tape now presented them with the key.
At least that’s what it felt like for me.
Wherever I went the following year I seemed to make friends through Milieu. In Berlin, in Glasgow, in Tokyo. In a book store in Chicago, at a tiny concert with Tenniscoats, Maher Shalal Hash Baz and the pianist Bill Wells among the dragon flies in the southeast of Japan and in an empty Scottish vegetarian café – the love we felt for Tapes music brought us together. We’re all still very close.
I guess what makes Tape’s music so special is that it plays just like short stories. The trail of thoughts I want to a great short story to start in my head and heart. Where the sentences, the dialogue, are just a blank canvas for the reader to project her own loves and regrets on. And in music there’s no need for translation.
The sound of Milieu remind me of the books of Tove Jansson, the Finnish writer of the beautiful stories from the Moominvalley (especially the masterful Moominpappa at Sea and Moominvalley in November). I’m never sure if they’re really about childhood summers and winters long gone, the ones that I somewhere deep inside just know never really were as good as they seem when I try to remember them.
Or if they’re about me now, all grown up and pushing 40.
Tape stir up such forgotten feelings, they restore fading pictures we don’t really want to share with anyone else. Or in some cases have forgotten they were ever there in the first place.
The aching slowness of these melodies awaken reluctant nostalgia; a forced sentimentality. And they do so without the aid of words, only with the purest music; the electricity in the air that surrounds the captured moment.
– Andres Lokko, London W11, January 2008
Milieu plus is a reissue of Milieu (Häpna H.14), with four new tracks taken from the original 2003 sessions. Now in digipak with new cover art.
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Tan-Tan Therapy is a distillate of the last two years, when Tenniscoats and Tape have socialised, toured together and exchanged musical ideas and experiences. The album gives a slightly new picture of Tenniscoats. Found here is a fuller dynamic spectra and richer use of diverse sound elements than usually found in their live shows. Yet the album has a concise pop feeling to it, in a calm and multi-faceted way. The level of details and the different sound world is to a large extent due to the musicians of Tape, as they have been involved both in the production and the writing of arrangements on the record. To Tenniscoats’ original setting, various horn instruments, double bass, zither, organ, glockenspiel and electronic instruments have been added. The recordings were made in an intuitive way during a couple of days in Stockholm and Cologne with Tape (Andreas Berthling, Johan Berthling, Tomas Hallonsten), Andreas Söderström (Ass), Leo Svensson and Lars Skoglund and fellow musicians.
Saya and Ueno are also members of the Japanese music collective Maher Shalal Hash Baz. They live outside of Tokyo.
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Born in Helsinki, at the age of six moved to Täby outside Stockholm due to mother's new marriage, always had a longing back, will not return. Sang and wrote songs in Granada 1998-2004. Granada released three albums and one ep produced by Björn Olsson and Mattias Glavå on record labels Universal, V2 and Look Left Recordings. This record was recorded in the Kungssten industry area in Gothenburg during a rainy summer and cold winter with among others Dungen as musicians and Mattias Glavå as an indisposable producer. Tried to make music I've always loved, melodies I grew up with (the soundtrack to Brideshead Revisited, Carpenters, Elton John's darling seventies' tunes, Vesa Matti Loiri's interpretations of Eino Leino's poetry, Woody Allen movies, Saarikoski) nature poetry drug-and-alcohol abuse, nostalgia, the Finland of my dreams, falling in love, sorrow, homesickness. I've tried to not be too shy and inhibited. I've made it I think he he.
- Anna Järvinen
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“When we moved to tent and the light was golden and we were young, and the magazine was all there was to bring, and you woke in the night when the birds were singing just for you and the smell of soil and the warm breath over through you, ohh it moved you. All there was to it, was the morning of my life.”
The overall idea behind the first two A Taste of Ra records was for me to work with my voice, instruments and recording techniques on a more personal level.
On this final record in the trilogy, I’ve taken a different approach. It started off with one song that I developed and visualized together with Jari Haapalainen into six movements. Together they create a sense of a film-like dramatic pattern. Then we tactfully decided on the right locations and casting for the recordings, while Johan Berthling made some beautiful arrangements for three of the movements. After recording and mixing, I realized that we had created a musical monster that will challenge and hopefully inspire listeners for a long time to come.
- Nicolai Dunger
