Recommended by
Milieu
Tape are a Swedish trio – brothers Johan and Andreas Berthling, with friend Tomas Hallonsten – who came together in the early noughties. Their modus operandi is small-scale compositions that are sufficiently open to admit improvisation, when it suits, and the material is built from a complex of acoustic instrumentation, field recordings, and electronics. Milieu was their second album; on it, you can hear laments that pull from folk and post-rock (the lovely opener, “Oak Player”), spiralling guitar-and-electronics duets (the following “Sponge Chorus”), and open-ended suites that recall Talk Talk’s later period. There were a number of artists exploring similar terrain around this time – Mountains, Minamo, Town & Country – Tape stood out for the pop poetics concealed within the scrum of abstraction.