Oregon's Eluvium is the project of ambient composer Matthew Cooper.
He debuted with the mini-album Lambent Materials (Temporary Residence, 2003), containing the 15-minute droning suite Zerthis Was A Shivering Human Image, a massive tsunami of guitar distortion.
Its short guitar tracks rehash ideas that have been tested before by musicians
of the previous generation.
There Wasn't Anything is a piano and horn sonata that has an amateurish charm.
Cooper used only the piano for the pensive pieces of his second
mini-album, An Accidental Memory in Case of Death (2004).
It is neither ambient nor new-age music: it is
neoclassical music in a speedy carillon-like style
(Genius And The Thieves,
Perfect Neglect In A Field Of Statues).
Nepenthe leans towards Satie
and An Accidental Memory In The Case Of Death towards Christmas carols.
The seven-minute The Well-Meaning Professor employs minimalist repetition.
Overall, it is a rather monotonous and bland album, which would have benefited
from a slower tempo.
He then returned to the guitar drones for Talk Amongst The Trees (Temporary Residence, 2005), whose centerpieces are
the crystal waves and flickering refractions of New Animals from the Air
and the gently wavering geometric 16-minute fantasia Taken,
reminiscent of Johann Pachelbel's Variations (although its crescendo is
far more insistent).
But the album also includes the galactic/gothic study Everything to Come,
and the gloomy/dense Calm of the Cast, that show different sides of the
same art.
The spiritual zenith, One, is a moving "om" to the universe via floating
nebulae of interlocking patterns.
Cooper does with the guitar what used to be done with electronic
keyboards. In fact, his instrumental pieces are more closely related to the
electronic poems of the past than to the ambient music of his contemporaries.
Chamber instruments (strings, horns, keyboards) replaced the shoegazing guitars
on Copia (Temporary Residence, 2007), that stands as his neoclassical
album and the crowning achievement of his progression towards counterpoint.
While generally employing minimalist repetition and grand orchestral gestures,
the twelve pieces cover a broad spectrum, both in terms of ambition
and style, from the piano ballad Radio Ballet to the
requiem-like Ostinato for solo organ, from intimations of
Pachelbel's adagio (Amreik) to
impressionistic vignettes (Seeing You Off The Edges),
from orchestral nebulae (the nine-minute Repose In Blue)
to Beethoven-esque piano sonatas (Prelude for Time Feelers).
The standout is the romantic build-up of the ten-minute Indoor Swimming.
Eluvium/ Jesu (Temporary Residence, 2007) was a split with Justin Broadrick's .
Life Through Bombardment is a career retrospective up to 2009.
Cooper reinvented himself as a singer-songwriter on
Similes (Temporary Residence, 2010), notably containing the eleven-minute
Cease to Know that after three minutes of
calm whispered words becomes a simple loop of undulating melodic drones.
The double-disc Nightmare Ending (2013) contains one touching moment:
Covered in Writing (9:18), which has the melancholy undulating quality of
Pachelbel's "Canon". It also contains one intriguing soundscape,
Unknown Variation (8:42), where
found sounds populate an unstable magma.
The problem remains the same: this is as simple and superficial as ambient music gets.
There is no sense of depth: this is horizontal, linear ambient music, the
opposite of "profound".
Most of the ideas feel very old, dating from the 1980s if not 1970s,
and even the process feels outdated: a loop of some simple melodic theme
that evolves slowly, with little or no creative detours. A bit of
background noise is the most that Cooper can think of in terms of counterpoint.
Then the piece is left to grow louder and noisier for an eternity.
Rain Gently (8:49) is both emblematic of this method and one of
the acceptable results.
Don't Get Any Closer (9:06) has the piano singing on a dancing pattern for endless minutes and finally in the last two minutes the piano morphs into a cathedral organ.
There isn't enough movement to justify the duration of these pieces.
When there is, usually the sound effects are embarrassing, so trivial.
Hence, the music often feels dull. Not necessarily boring or ugly, but dull.
Even if he edited this album down to 20 minutes, it would probably still feel
too long for what it has to communicate.
The album ends with a Broadway-style piano ballad, Happiness (8:16),
which, as mediocre as it is in terms of singing and playing, actually feels like
a breath of fresh air.
Cooper then formed Inventions with
Explosions In The Sky's guitarist
Mark Smith. They released the album
Inventions (2014), which sounds largely improvised on the fly but
containing the desolate Flood Poems,
a second album, Maze Of Woods (2015), containing
more sophisticated compositions like the solemn elegy Peregrine
and the ghostly chant of Feeling The Sun Thru The Earth At Night,
and the EP Blanket Waves (2015) containing two lengthy compositions,
cinematic fantasies that (unlike Eluvium's stereotypical compositions)
go through a number of metamorphoses:
Blanket Waves (14:12) and Hearing Loss (11:52), particularly
the latter,
which begins with a casual conversation and an operatic choir but then ends
with a
percussive maelstrom, a requiem-like choir and death bells.
False Readings On (Temporary Residence, 2016) runs the gamut from the
stately operatic soprano of Strangeworks to
the seven-minute Philip Glass-ian Fugue State.
The operatic voice returns to haunt the
seven-minute Regenerative Being, a crescendo drenched in
hyperbass vibrations, tense strings and bird songs, and sailed by an angelic
piano pattern.
The
glacial 17-minute epic Posturing Through Metaphysical Collapse engages in
the slow-motion crescendo of a melodic fragment sung by a choir which,
after eight minutes, collides with a nasty radioactive drone that quickly obliterates the music leaving, by the end, a new form of the same melodic fragment.
The
nine-minute Beyong The Moon For Someone In Reverse intones a trombone-like melody floating over a loud hissing, and halfway it seems to die but instead it reincarnates into a cosmic choir.
Abrasive and hissing drones copulate in Rorschach Pavan.
Shuffle Drones (Temporary Residence, 2017) contains
23 orchestral snippets, each about half a minute long.
Since they all begin and end with the same sounds, they can be played in any order. Hit the "reshuffle" button and you are letting
chance create an ambient composition. Hit the button again and chance will
create a new ambient composition. You can create an astronomical number of
compositions. The idea is not new:
Gescom (i.e. Autechre) did the same with Minidisc (1998).
The temporary peak of Cooper's self-indulgence was the
double-disc Pianoworks (Temporary Residence, 2019), that contains
25 facile piano sonatas in the vein of
An Accidental Memory in Case of Death and
Prelude for Time Feelers.
Virga I (Temporary Residence, 2019) contains three lengthy electronic pieces.
Virga I (19:55) is a little more than a loop of gentle voice-sounding drones.
Abyss Forms (11:19) features some movement, as the choir (now more
similar to anguished ghosts) is disturbed by a siren-like hiss.
House Taken Over (10:48) is a darker piece with psychedelic overtones.
It's all too facile.
Virga II (2021) continued in the same direction with four more lengthy
pieces, but also a bit more variety and movement:
the celestial droning electronic music Hallucination I (13:41) becomes a sinister cosmic buzz;
the stormy, dense and noisy Scarlet Hunter (8:40) overflows with angst;
and
Virga II (11:07) has a symphonic dimension.
Only Touch Returned (10:03) is sterile repetitive background muzak.
(Whirring Marvels In) Consensus Reality (2023) is bland ambient music for string ensemble.
