The Swedish pianist, violinist, and composer David Wenngren seems to regard minimalism less as a classical tradition than as an ascetic dare. In Library Tapes, which has been his solo project with a host of revolving collaborators since the early 2000s, Wenngren paces up to the minimum threshold where groups of tones pass into music, and not a step farther. His compositions hover and linger, straitened but far from severe, wrenching maximum feeling from one idea at a time. Once a melody has been stated in full, it’s gone.
Across dozens of releases, Wenngren’s miniatures have gained depth but not mass, from the solo piano and field recordings of his earlier work to his collaborations with cellist Danny Norbury, multi-instrumentalist Peter Broderick, and ambient musician Christopher Bissonette. Wenngren doesn’t shy from titles likeSketches, Fragment, and Patterns (Repeat); he seems leery of hanging conceptual baggage on his music.
If the modestly evocative title The Quiet City gives the impression of something a bit heftier, it’s apt. Wenngren is deconstructing the piano trio—a form consisting of piano, violin, and cello—and strewing its parts into musical haiku. But these are still sketches, fragments and patterns, and Wenngren still declines to elaborate on anything once it’s been said. Often, the songs fall short of two minutes, and almost never cross three, as if they were fortuitous weather that could hold for just so long. This, as the naturalistic titles suggest, is more or less what they are—10 walks in the woods, largely but never exactly the same, each already settling into irretrievable stillness.
But it’s rare for Wenngren to have this many musicians on one album. His usual piano tone is offset by pianist Olivia Belli, who plays on bookends “Entering” and “Leaving.” The latter, with Julia Kent’s roving cello, is the highlight, a bright and propulsive take on Library Tapes’ sleepy drift. And pianist Akira Kosemura’s consummately innocent voice is right at home on “Brighter Lights.”
As the cast grows, the material they play remains exceedingly stark and simple. Some of it would be fit for a baby’s mobile if not for the sustain and processing, a Library Tapes hallmark, that extends each touch of a string or a key into clouds of ambiguous chords and drones. In “The First Signs,” Kent and violinist Hoshiko Yamane play keening lines that leave pulsing afterimages on the silence that follows, and it’s here, between each moment and its reverberation into memory, where Wenngren cultivates his poignant sense of weightless time.
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