Library Tapes
Alone in the Bright Lights of a Shattered Life

Brief discourse on musical minimalism. Because that is what this is about; there is little else to say or describe: just over half an hour of atmosphere. Slow piano notes, melancholic guitar arpeggios, strictly in a minor key, carefully ensuring the harsh sound of fingers sliding on metal strings is heard (to add that touch of folk that warms the soul with a vague and gentle warmth) and a handful of ambient sounds that very occasionally drift into a saturation soft-noise? The Swedish group Library Tapes is this and nothing more.

Does their first work, "Alone In The Bright Lights Of A Shattered Life", therefore deserve a complete thrashing? If Wilde was right, this would be the appropriate moment for a skilled critic to take the stage, a real expression of creativity, capable of revealing the contents of the work ignored by the author himself. I don’t feel up to contradicting good Oscar, but I certainly can't be this extraordinary man. And yet, I would have something to add... it might be a matter of mood, perhaps a natural predisposition for a certain kind of sentimentality, or the desire to constantly live immersed in autumnal twilights or on pristine snowy expanses, but this album has something to say to those who have the innocence necessary to listen to its voice.

Call it reception aesthetics, give it whatever name you prefer; accuse me of getting lost behind simple and banal suggestions, reproach me for the self-destructiveness of constantly retreating into grey landscapes, reveling in one's own melancholy; reproach this duo for an expressional and content poverty masked as soft and intangible ethereality, highlight their repetitiveness in dwelling in the usual and stale melancholic and nostalgic mood. Go ahead. I wouldn’t know how to disagree with you.

Let me listen to it alone, deceived by the beating of the rain on the windows. Perhaps reading, by the light of a soft lamp, a good book, in search of some small treasure to enrich my life. Here it is, have I found one?

"One should not torment the poet with useless interpretations, but delight in the uncertainty of his horizon, as if the way were still open to many thoughts. " - Friedrich Nietzsche