David Wenngren (aka Library Tapes) is no slouch when it comes to releases, the Swedish chap has amassed so many recordings it’s hard to keep track, but this particular album is a little different. That’s probably down to the involvement of Canadian Christopher Bissonnette, who released the gorgeous and understated ‘In Between Words’ on Kranky a while back. The restrained and elegant ambience of that underrated album translates perfectly to this collaboration as Bissonnette reforms Wenngren’s dusty sounds into elongated, gaseous drones. In a world where the mention of the word ‘drone’ seems to conjure up dark, gloomy worlds and miserable boys in black hoodies, there is something refreshingly elegiac about ‘The Meridians of Longitude and Parallels of Latitude’. While the sounds might be obscured, the emotions are worn on the musician’s sleeves, and illuminated with bright, rippling daylight. As the cover might suggest this is music for bright, autumnal landscapes; and what better time to listen than right now.

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How long does a moment last? Well, it depends. On the speed at which you’re moving, for example. It is said that a particle in a particle accelerator, as it approaches the speed of light, experiences a corresponding slowing down of time. At such a momentum, a single second lasts the equivalent of many years lived at a more sedentary pace. This effect is called time dilation, and is one of many described by Einstein’s famous equation e = mc2.

Each of the five tracks in this first collaboration between David Wenngren and Christopher Bissonnette can be heard as a single discrete moment – a single loop around a particle accelerator, or around the earth. The shortest track is more than seven and a half minutes long, yet they each give the impression of the unfurling of a single sound or sonic texture, whether this be a lush, lulling murmur (as in album opener A Deceptive and Distant Howl) or a thunderous surge (Their Hunted Expression). Moments you could crawl into, or get lost in;  the thoughts of a particle as it drifts at almost the speed of light. The focus on a single oscillating drone, with the occasional subtle scattering of more percussive or fleeting sounds, produces a hold or stretching out of time that is perhaps similar to other temporal distortions such as the time of cinema, or of intense encounters with natural phenomena.

Wenngren’s previous work under the Library Tapes and Murralin Lane monikors will be familiar to many, and Bissonnette’s recent album ‘In Between Words’ was released on the Kranky label to much acclaim. On a superficial level “The Meridians of Longitude and Parallels of Latitude” perhaps has more in common with Bissonnette’s aural environments than with the acoustic instrumentation of Library Tapes, but a closer inspection reveals considerations of form and immersive atmosphere that are hallmarks of Wenngren’s approach. The album is released on Home Normal on 28th October, and is rich with the warmth and tactility one has come to expect from the label (and from the mastering talents of Taylor Deupree). Whether a moment is measured in years, miles, or metres per second is ultimately beside the point: with “The Meridians of Longitude and Parallels of Latitude” it is enough just to be in it.

- Nathan Thomas for Fluid Radio

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