Hostluft

The Swedish duo Library Tapes has cultivated a music that seems surrounded by an ineradicable silence, even as felt hammers sound steel strings into the air. Their previous albums evoked Max Richter: Pianos dominated, but a broader instrumental palette comprised a sparkling exterior. Last year's Feelings for Something Lost was entrancingly murky, like a scene reflected in a mirror coming unsilvered.

Höstluft resides in that same dim glass, but after the departure of bandmate Per Jardsell, David Wenngren chose not to fill in the empty spaces, and his first solo effort as Library Tapes is even more spectral than the collaborative efforts. Comprised solely of piano and scratchy field recordings, Höstluft's ghostly themes emerge glittering from clouds of roughhewn texture, cycle tenuously for awhile, and then either peter out abruptly or slip back into the haze. The album's fluid, rudimentary nature imbues it with an eternal quality: Wenngren stays hard on the damper pedal to attain a consistently lulling, legato purr.

The presence of Philip Glass seems writ large in the record, but influence travels in mysterious ways. In a brief email exchange, Wenngren intimated to me that he wasn't overly familiar with the composer. But Eluvium, a mainstay in Library Tapes's RIYL line, is heavily indebted to Glass: "Prelude for Time Feelers", from his latest album, Copia, unambiguously cribs its yearning theme from "Mad Rush". Höstluft's repetitive etudes, lacking horns and strings, actually resemble Glass's piano music more closely than Eluvium's homage does, although they favor blunt simplicity over subtle shading. And while even Glass's most retiring music has a sweeping quality, Library Tapes is resolutely ethereal, enticing the listener to lean in. This contrasting affinity is especially apparent in the conch shell whorls of tracks like "Skiss Av Träd" and "Dis/Dagg/Dimma".

Höstluft's starkness reveals nuances that create affinities with diverse pian