Smalltape
“It’s progressive rock. There are jazz influences and there’s pop, but at the end of the day, it's definitely not mainstream pop or mainstream jazz.”
Philipp Nespital has been making adventurous progressive music for a number of years now, and people are starting to take notice. Smalltape’s fourth studio album 'Tangram' has been winning influential friends, with Prog’s own Dave Everley calling it a “low-key masterpiece” in a recent review. Based in northern Berlin, he is a freelance composer, engineer and sound designer by day, making music for corporate entities and art galleries. Smalltape is an extension of that same productivity where he doesn’t need to work to a brief.
So what was the idea behind 'Tangram' ? “I wrote a song called 'Tesselate' which deals with the philosophical idea that our lives shatter and then you gather those pieces and put them back together. You gather pieces, you lose pieces. I was just coincidentally thinking of the tangram and then, all of a sudden, it just literally fitted together. I realised that having the frame of a tangram as an idea is a really good metaphor for the record.”
To avoid confusion, a tangram is a Chinese geometrical puzzle consisting of a square cut into seven pieces. The album brings together a plethora of genres across its nine songs - or seven, like a Tangram, if you count the majestic, quixotic 'No Time' as one song divided into three. It’s a great concept, but haven’t we heard that title somewhere before?
“I know, I wasn't aware, but I’ve heard that a lot of times now,” says Nespital, laughing. He’s referring, of course, to the Tangerine Dream album of the same name from 1980. “A lot of reviews asked if there was a connection but I'd never heard of that record. I'm sorry for not being such a rock person.”
Nespital describes his music as inhabiting somewhere between art rock, jazz and cinematic soundscapes, which sounds a bit like prog to these ears. “Yeah, it’s progressive rock,” he accepts. “There are jazz influences and there’s pop, but at the end of the day, it's definitely not mainstream pop or mainstream jazz, so I think that is absolutely correct.”
Moveover, it was a prog supergroup that really got the juices flowing back in the early part of the century for Nespital: “The crucial moment in my life when I first considered being a musician was when I heard the first Transatlantic record 'SMPT:e' that came out in 2000. I remember listening to it on vacation when I was 12 or 13 and it just blew my mind!”
Virtuosity is a feature of Tangram. Nespital's main instrument is the piano though he is a multi-instrumentalist who performs the vocals and also plays most of the drums on the record. Furthermore, he has some great musicians along for the ride too. Israeli saxophone player Omri Abramov brings soprano sax class to various tracks, while Bruce Soord of Somerset progressive rockers Pineapple Thief drops a solo on 'Second Chance' : “I was his support act during his last European tour, playing my solo show as Smalltape. We spent two weeks on tour and he's a nice guy, so I asked him, and he said, ‘Yeah, sure’, and he did it.” Nespital shrugs, looking pleased with himself. “And the solo is brilliant. So cool.”
- Jeremy Allen
Lineup: Philipp Nespital: pianist, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, sound designer, producer.
Sounds like: Progressive rock meets jazz fusion with a heightened pop sensibility.
Current release: 'Tangram' is out now via MidJune Records.
Website: smalltape.net