An introduction to... Erased Tapes
Discover five essential artists who define Erased Tapes, from Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds to Kiasmos and Rival Consoles. Our guide explores modern classical and ambient music's most distinctive independent...
Some labels build a sound. Erased Tapes built a mood.
Founded in Berlin by Robert Raths, Erased Tapes has spent nearly two decades proving that a piano and an empty room can be as expansive as any orchestra. It's become the defining home for a strand of music that sits somewhere between contemporary classical, ambient and electronic — intimate, unhurried, built as much from silence as from notes.
If you're new to the label, these five artists are the way in.
1. Nils Frahm
The label's defining voice
No artist better represents Erased Tapes than Nils Frahm. His piano-led compositions — part classical, part electronic, always deeply human — helped define what modern ambient and neo-classical music could sound like, and remain the clearest reference point for the label's entire aesthetic.
Frahm's process is as distinctive as his sound: he's known for using heavily modified and prepared pianos, recording the mechanical noise of the instrument itself — pedal creaks, hammer strikes, the physical presence of the room — as part of the composition rather than something to be edited out. The result feels intimate in a way few electronic or classical records manage, like you're sitting close enough to hear the performer breathe.
Spaces, released in 2013, is a live album assembled from recordings across several years of touring, and captures that intimacy particularly well — long, improvisatory pieces that build gradually, driven as much by mood and momentum as by conventional structure. It's an unconventional way to introduce an artist, but it captures something a studio album often can't: the risk and presence of a genuinely improvised performance.
Frahm's influence extends well beyond his own catalogue — much of what people now think of as the Erased Tapes sound traces directly back to the template he helped establish in the label's earliest years.
Recommended album: Spaces
2. Ólafur Arnalds
Cinematic minimalism from Iceland
Ólafur Arnalds writes music that feels enormous despite being built from very little — strings, piano, and a great deal of empty space, arranged with a patience that lets each element breathe rather than compete for attention.
Arnalds began his career in Icelandic hardcore and metal bands before turning to composition, and that background shows in unexpected ways: a willingness to build tension and release it, even within otherwise gentle, restrained arrangements. His work often incorporates self-built software instruments — including a system of self-playing pianos he developed with a collaborator — blurring the line between composition and generative process.
re:member, released in 2018, showcases that hybrid approach fully. Built partly around those self-playing piano systems, the album generates some melodic material algorithmically in response to Arnalds' own playing, creating pieces that feel simultaneously composed and spontaneous. It's a genuinely inventive record, technically ambitious without ever losing sight of melody and feeling.
His work has since carried him well beyond the label, into film and television scoring — including an Emmy-winning score for Broadchurch — but the foundations of that cinematic instinct were laid here, in the patient, spacious compositions Erased Tapes gave him room to develop.
Recommended album: re:member
3. A Winged Victory for the Sullen
Ambient music as slow-motion cinema
The duo's collaborative work — Dustin O'Halloran and Adam Wiltzie, both established composers in their own right before joining forces — stretches simple melodic ideas across long, patient arrangements, closer in spirit to film scoring than conventional song structure.
Their music unfolds at an almost glacial pace, built from sustained strings, muted piano and long stretches of near-silence that make every melodic entrance feel weighted with significance. It's a deliberately unhurried approach that asks real patience of the listener, but the reward is some of the most purely atmospheric music the label has released — music that seems to exist outside of conventional time altogether.
Their self-titled debut album, released in 2011, established the template the duo have refined across several subsequent records: minimal in its individual elements, maximal in its emotional weight. It's frequently used in film and television precisely because of how effectively it can carry mood without demanding narrative attention.
For listeners drawn to Erased Tapes' more contemplative side — music for reading, working, or simply sitting with your thoughts — A Winged Victory for the Sullen represent that instinct taken to its most patient, cinematic extreme.
Recommended album: A Winged Victory for the Sullen
4. Kiasmos
Where ambient meets the dancefloor
A collaboration between Ólafur Arnalds and Icelandic producer Janus Rasmussen, Kiasmos takes the label's melodic, textural instincts and pairs them with rhythm — proof that the Erased Tapes aesthetic could work on a dancefloor as easily as in a quiet listening room.
The project began almost accidentally, as a side collaboration between two friends with very different primary projects — Arnalds' classical-leaning compositions and Rasmussen's more club-orientated production work. What emerged was something that belonged fully to neither camp: melodic techno built around the same patient, emotionally rich sensibility that defines the rest of the Erased Tapes catalogue, but with a genuine rhythmic pulse underneath it.
Their self-titled debut album became something of a crossover success, finding an audience well beyond the label's usual ambient and neo-classical listeners, and proving there was real appetite for electronic music that prioritised feeling over pure functionality. It remains a favourite for DJs looking for something with genuine emotional depth to work into a set.
Kiasmos represents an important thread in the Erased Tapes story: proof that the label's core sensibility — patience, melody, emotional directness — could translate into rhythm without losing any of what makes the rest of the catalogue distinctive.
Recommended album: Kiasmos
5. Rival Consoles
Electronic music with a beating heart
Ryan Lee West's Rival Consoles project brings a warmer, more emotionally direct edge to modern electronic composition — melodic, richly textured, and never cold, even at its most rhythmically insistent.
West builds his tracks from a mix of analogue synthesisers and field recordings, often incorporating recordings of his own physical movement and studio environment into the final mix — a way of keeping the music tethered to something human and specific rather than purely digital. The results sit somewhere between ambient composition and more propulsive electronic music, frequently building from sparse, meditative openings into something considerably more intense.
Persona, one of his most acclaimed records, explores exactly that tension — the space between control and instinct, composition and improvisation — across a set of tracks that move fluidly between restraint and release. It's an album that rewards loud, focused listening as much as background use, revealing more detail and structure the closer attention you pay it.
Rival Consoles represents the more rhythmically driven end of the Erased Tapes spectrum, proof that the label's patient, emotionally direct sensibility extends well beyond piano-led ambient music into genuinely compelling electronic composition.
Recommended album: Persona
Why Erased Tapes Continues to Matter
In an era of three-minute playlist filler, Erased Tapes has spent nearly twenty years making the opposite argument — that music can be slow, spacious, and demanding of your full attention, and still find a genuinely devoted audience.
Across the catalogue you'll find remarkable consistency, not because every release sounds identical, but because every artist shares the same underlying instinct: patience over spectacle, feeling over flash, and a willingness to let silence do as much work as sound.
Whether you're drawn to Nils Frahm's intimate piano worlds, Ólafur Arnalds' cinematic strings, Kiasmos' rhythmic detour, or Rival Consoles' warmer electronic textures, every record feels connected to the same quiet, considered world — one built more around mood and atmosphere than conventional song structure.
That's what makes a label genuinely worth following rather than just occasionally dipping into. One record leads you to the next, and soon you've fallen into the whole catalogue. If this is your first visit, we hope it's the beginning of that journey.