f you listen carefully to Tape’s autumnal blend of plucked guitars, skittish electronics, and warm organic sound, you can actually see the landscapes these pieces seem destined to score. As opener “Bell Mountain” pairs repetitive, meditative guitar meanderings with a backdrop of speaker-shifting electronics and percussion, you envision a sprawling wheat field, as plain white and minimal as the album’s artwork, with crickets chirping and dust blowing on a lonely road. The music made by this trio -- which comprises Andreas and Johan Berthling and Tomas Hallonsten -- is entirely instrumental and abstract, and yet its gentle rolling sound fields seem to encompass very concrete places and times.


These places, for the most part, are as simple and lovely as the music itself, lovely like a dilapidated farmhouse or a road surrounded on all sides by thick woods. This is nighttime music, slow and reflective and full of complex emotional webs that only disentangle after midnight. The three musicians cumulatively tackle a huge array of instruments -- there are no individual credits listed in the album -- to create this dense, moody record, and yet their arrangements never become too busy. Resisting the powerful temptation to clutter up their songs with electronic debris, the trio uses laptop effects and glitchy splatter as accents, one more falling leaf in the dry rustle of pre-winter preparations.


Opera is dominated by acoustic guitar, with simple Fahey-esque lines weaving their way through a tight winding path, surrounded on all sides by pulsating harmonium drones, horns, electronics, and hiss-filled field recordings. The tentative plucked opening notes of “Longitude” give way to a dark harmonium drone, bright glockenspiel pings, and the comforting sound of rainfall, creating an interior view into the Brazilian rain forest, perhaps. It’s these tiniest details -- the uneasy click of indeterminable percussion, the distant half-heard rumble of thunder from a distance -- that make this music so worth hearing. Every second of the album is literally packed with sound, but it’s never overwhelming, mostly because every slightest whisper of wind or crackling glitch noise seems to have its own perfectly carved niche within the music. This trio has such an ear for an interesting and naturalistic arrangement of sound that even as the music gets more and packed with texture and detail, everything flows together as smoothly as a creek running down a mountainside.


Opera is an incredibly fine first album from this unique trio. Tape’s approach to making music is all too rare these days, as they comfortably -- and seemingly effortlessly -- straddle the barbed fence between the accessible and the avant-garde. Opera’s multi-layered sonic collages are forged from the absolute cutting edge of electro-acoustic music, at times calling to mind the rattle-and-drone of the Erstwhile catalogue or the chiming laptop compositions of Kim Hiorthoy. And yet Tape is also entirely their own entity, drawing inspiration and techniques from all quarters and blending them into a melodic, accessible, mellow sound that’s all them. That this album can be so lovely and seductive and charming on its surface is one thing; that it can be all that and still reveal such depth and complexity going on underneath is another, and that’s what makes it so worthwhile.