Eluvium - The Flooding of Sound

Matthew Cooper, a composer originally from Portland but based in Louisville for years now, is not simply another artist devoted to exploring abstract ambient landscapes through the modulation of sounds and electronic frequencies, but a musician who alternates and often combines the use of synth with a remarkable "classical" sensibility. The result, in its various forms, is music that flows sometimes through placid, almost imperceptible movements, sometimes with emotional force, in gradual crescendos, perfectly in keeping with the slow, liquid, expansive quality suggested from the very etymology of the moniker under which Cooper composes and performs all his work. Eluvium's music is in fact a continuous stream, a cohesive sonic tide in constant expansion, rising little by little until it fills the mind, the heart and the imagination, with the sole gentle force of its few, hazy elements.

Eluvium made its debut on the music scene in 2003, with the five tracks on Lambent Material, built almost entirely from the slow movement, simple yet steeped in solemnity, of a handful of notes filtered through synth, alongside which only occasionally emerges the clear sound of a guitar ("Under Water It Gloved") or the measured sound of piano ("There Wasn't Anything", "I Am So Much More Me That You Are Perfectly You"), just enough to thin out the misty blanket enveloping compositions with slender structures, patiently and precisely carved around delicate iterations of notes. Although, indeed, some tracks already feature acoustic elements or sounds otherwise unfiltered by electronics, Lambent Material immediately and strongly defines Cooper's artistic profile, placing him in the wake both of modern composers (from Eno to Basinski) and of the drone and electronic explorers associated with the Kranky roster, such as Labradford and Stars Of The Lid. It's no coincidence, in fact, that the album's core is the over fifteen minutes of "Zerthis Was A Shivering Human Image", pervaded by reverb and guitar drones, at times rather harsh, chasing and intertwining with each other for the track's entire length.

If the warm hints of piano and acoustic guitar on Lambent Material already suggested that it would be reductive to confine Eluvium's music to the sole territory of ambient-drone, on the following An Accidental Memory In The Case Of Death Cooper fully reveals the other side of his artistic profile, which on closer inspection isn't so different from, let alone disconnected from, the first: An Accidental Memory In The Case Of Death is a short album, dazzling in its mere twenty-five minutes steeped in emotions released by the notes of the piano alone.

A common denominator with the debut album is the idea of a liquid sound that, slow but inexorable, tends to saturate the listener's perception of it. This work does not lack compositional crescendos that emphasize the instrument's emotional potential ("Genius And The Thieves", "The Well-Meaning Professor" and the wonderful "Perfect Neglect In A Field Of Statues") and, with them, the grace with which Cooper performs it; yet the tracks here tend to take on movements that are predominantly horizontal rather than vertical, while otherwise keeping the structural traits of the debut record unchanged, here simply translated into piano scores, simple and deeply moving.

It's an album unique in its own way, in how it compellingly combines neoclassical perfection with postmodern sensibility, Erik Satie-style minimalism ("Nepenthe"), and romanticism worthy of Rachel's' "Music For Egon Schiele", and in how it reveals that sometimes it's enough to change the formal means of expressing a musical idea to achieve a result that feels old yet thoroughly contemporary.

After this magnificent digression, with the following Talk Amongst The Trees, Cooper returns, in a sense, to his roots, presenting a work focused almost entirely on guitar and keyboards alone, unfolding in the usual wave-like movements, in intricate compositions that unwind through the familiar iterations of sound, here developed and reshaped to their fullest extent. Roughly half the album's total length is in fact taken up by just two tracks, the opening "New Animals From The Air" and "Taken" (together just under half an hour). The first is a fresh flow of sounds chasing one another, abstract guitar chords, drone and synthetic streaks surfacing here and there in a flawless mechanism that manages to stop time in a kind of subtle, elusive "ambient symphony"; the second is instead a very long guitar mantra, stretched almost to excess across its seventeen minutes, peppered with reverb and synth flourishes standing in for strings, up to its moderate final crescendo.

Decidedly more placid and cohesive, on the other hand, are other tracks with a more classically ambient bent, such as "Show Us Your Homes", "We Say Goodbye To Ourselves", and likewise the drone and feedback expanses of "Everything To Come" and "Calm Of The Cast-Light Cloud". So, when "One" arrives to close the dreamlike circle opened almost an hour earlier, what remains of Talk Amongst The Trees is the sense of an album with flawless, well-balanced songwriting, if a little too conventional, since, in its "cultured" and cerebral elaboration, Cooper partly gives up the distinctive traits of a sound that isn't simply electronic and ambient.

Along roughly the same lines are the two mini-albums released after Talk Amongst The Trees: the first, part of Temporary Residence's "Travels In Constants" series, consists of a single track (Behind Your Trouble) running over half an hour, in which Cooper extremely amplifies some of the suggestions present on the previous album, extending his ambient distortions, at times a bit too pronounced, into complex, dreamlike and enveloping textures in their own way (at certain points one is almost reminded of the more cerebral Kevin Shields), but ultimately a bit too self-referential. Equally transitional is the other mini-album, When I Live By The Garden And The Sea, which nonetheless opens with the excellent "I Will Not Forget That I Have Forgotten", where a few piano notes repeat with warm emotion throughout the track while guitar swells, distorted as ever but stretched out, rise first in a crescendo worthy of the best post-rock constructions, finally giving way to a calm ending, still furrowed by small electric rough edges. Less striking, however, are the remaining three tracks, which still follow in the footsteps of Talk Amongst The Trees, pairing the usual liquid sounds with constant noise ("Ass I Drift Off"), or with sonic settings of ethereal, Nordic-tinged contours.

After the sometimes intricate experiments of his latest works, Cooper starts again from the very idea behind "I Will Not Forget That I Have Forgotten" to conceive his most ambitious work: one aimed at giving full shape to a kind of "orchestral ambient", in which the "reason" of his meticulous ambient compositions and the "feeling" of his piano passages could find a perfect balance, no longer confined to the admittedly magnificent solitude of An Accidental Memory In The Case Of Death, but set within the context of a far more elaborate instrumentation.

The result is Copia, almost fifty-five minutes of dreamlike flow, shaped in various forms that include, in turn, drone beds and faint distortions but also warm piano sounds, horns and strings, whose interplay combines electronic modernity with classical romanticism, following a sensibility that is once again not far removed from the emotional approaches that have made the fortune of so many recent post-rock productions.

In this undertaking, however, Cooper never strays too far from a conceptual framework centered on the essentialness of sounds created or filtered through electronics, aimed at a result that is homogeneous yet shifting through gentle movements, intended to evoke foggy, solitary landscapes that are nonetheless far from alien to elements of deep emotion. Warm, human components can indeed undoubtedly be found in the two pieces where piano decisively takes over, namely "Radio Ballet" and especially "Prelude For Time Feelers", a jewel of crystalline grace, made up of a few graceful piano notes that gently grow in intensity as they wrap around an underlying expanse, eventually transformed into a liberating crescendo of impetuous synthetic orchestration. The same holds true for the seemingly more even and repetitive compositions, which likewise see frequencies and expanses chasing and overlapping one another, never weighed down by heavy numbness but simply aimed at tracing a drawn-out inertia ("Reciting The Airships"), or just barely propped up by layered, persistent rarefactions ("Seeing You Off The Edges"), or still capable of inspiring a sense of muffled Nordic calm, as in the ten minutes of waking dream that is "Indoor Swimming At The Space Station", scattered with faint melodies, piano touches and gentle noise ripples.

As in many of his previous works, Eluvium's music isn't made up of serene contemplation alone, but also leaves room for a latent unease, here distilled through the nocturnal tones of "Requiem On Frankfort Ave." and "After Nature" — where only the sound of strings converses with the synths — or flowing unequivocally through the near-complete stillness of "Ostinato".

Across all the album's various facets, Cooper always maintains an intensity that is both striking and elusive at once, steering clear both of the risk of overly laboured expressive excess and of cheap, cloying romanticism. Copia appears, in fact, to be the ideal culmination of Eluvium's artistic journey, since it embodies a modern orchestral take on ambient minimalism, through which Cooper manages to balance his electronic and classical souls in a highly personal way, giving shape to a work capable of transcending the already well-established forms of a musical expression that, indeed, is not exhausted by form alone.

Before following up on Copia, Cooper let exactly three years go by, during which he limited his usual prolific output to just Miniatures — for the first time released under his given name — and the monumental reworking of "Settler", offered to the Balmorhea's "All Is Wild, All Is Silent Remixes" by Balmorhea.

Between the option of change and that of relentlessly carrying on along already well-trodden ground, Cooper decidedly leans toward the former, at least on a formal level, since, although he grafts new elements onto his music, he doesn't lose its underlying character.

Similes thus appears as a new and even bolder balancing act, poised on a narrow ridge that on one side presents the results achieved on the previous album, and on the other sees the unprecedented introduction of rhythmic and vocal elements. Cooper's understated, not entirely self-assured singing is a striking presence, but alongside it dense sonic blankets continue to flow in subterranean fashion, now in gradual transition towards brighter reflections and electroacoustic textures more teeming than ever before.

In the eight compositions on Similes (three instrumental and five sung), there is indeed a recurring intersection of hypnotic loops, impalpable drones and song-cocoons whose unchanging progress often opens out into simple piano melodies and a myriad of liquid, dreamlike reverbs.

In this context, singing is only an accessory element – a finishing touch, like the acoustic sounds and the faint rhythmic ripples – that unfolds drowsily in parallel with other, equally independent harmonic streams. Yet there's no shortage either of misty drone currents and samples of luminous orchestral ambience, perfectly suited to blending with Cooper's discreet vocal timbre. And it's precisely in pieces like “Weird Creatures” and, above all, “Making Up Minds” that Cooper's shift towards a kind of ambient singer-songwriter mode (!) proves successful, as further melodic cues are absorbed by the masterful modulations that continue to stay true to the recognisable hallmark of Eluvium's productions.

Although in ways different from the past, on Similes Cooper confirms his ambition to scramble styles and modes of expression, along hazy guidelines that are once again extremely evocative.

The dark side of Similes is soon explored by Static Nocturne, a single fifty-minute track released in a limited edition in late 2010 on Cooper's own label, Watership Sounds.

Throughout the composition, in constant and feverish evolution, there's no shortage of emotional piano passages, but these are merely miniatures immersed in an extremely saturated primordial broth, drawing on field recordings and noise-streaked textures to bring forth a succession of ambient gusts teeming with an undulating movement, within which dense orchestral filtering engages in dialogue with noisy slashes and an endless series of reverbs, sketching out polychrome nuances and giving rise to a sonic result of rare density.

While just under half the work is marked by a kind of crescendo stamped with crackling noise and melodic hints deliberately kept in the background, the heart of the composition grows into dissonant harshness, channelling distortions that serve as an ideal counterweight to the polished opening passages. Past the half-hour mark, the mists through which faint melodic structures could be glimpsed take on a ruthless post-industrial harshness, before fading into the long farewell of the final ten minutes, a very lengthy ending that subsides into a newfound placid calm. Destined to remain a “minor” work, Static Nocturne exemplifies a sense of inaccessibility and isolationism, which, at least for the time being, returns Cooper to his original field of choice: that of instrumental filtering and the densest ambient-drone mists.

Another momentary deviation from Eluvium's main path, Cooper carries out with the soundtrack to Matt McCormick's film Some Days Are Better Than Others, credited simply under his own first and last name.

The indissoluble bond between Cooper and Eluvium nonetheless fully recurs throughout the thirty-five minutes of music accompanying the images. Unchanged are the dawn-tinged backdrops of compositions which, being tied to the images, are not however allowed particularly extensive development, while a prominent role is often given over to a whole series of vintage organs and keyboards with dreamlike, almost playful tones, which shape liquid fragments and dust-mote embraces, suspended between analogue notes and fading sequences.

The brief dialogue between sinuous organ passages and landscapes of misty stasis unwinds placidly throughout the compositions, occasionally taking on more structured forms, particularly in the few cases where track lengths exceed three or four minutes, as in the luminous dance that gently shakes the muffled blanket of the touching “Camille And The Ocean”.

A work that by its very nature is transitional and disjointed, the soundtrack nonetheless represents an enjoyable testament to Cooper's inspiration, an artist who, even on occasions like this, never fails to display a class that easily transcends whatever labels his output happens to be filed under.

Another two years would pass before the musician decided to return to his main project. And as if wanting to mirror the flow of a wave even in the hypothetical trajectory of his style, it seems the time had come for Eluvium too to change direction. After travelling a long way towards the shore, treading different sands with each track, the process reverses, and so the ripple vanishes, sinking back into the sea from which it came. Thus, Nightmare Ending acts as a true missing link between Copia and Similes, sounding like the record Cooper never made between 2007 and 2010. His music becomes emotionally disarming once again in the heavenly opening of the splendid “Don't Get Any Closer” and in its fading into the flowing drones à-la-Pan American of “Warm”, in the faded watercolour of “Sleeper”, in the intangible, delicate tear of “Covered In Writing” and in the frail storm of “Rain Gently”. The sonic encounter between the motion of waves and its reproduction in Eluvium's music takes place in the Fennesz-like immersion of “Unknown Variation”, but the Austrian's aesthetic also seeps through from the pulsing heart of “By The Rails”, while the smoky “Strange Arrivals” vigorously inherits from the latest Harold Budd. The piano vignettes deserve a chapter of their own: this time there's no “Prelude For Time Feelers”, but the emotional depth of the reflective “Impromptu (For The Procession)” and, above all, of the poignant “Entendre” remains extremely high, as does that of “Chime”, the only track given over to guitar and its reverberations. The farewells, meanwhile, are entrusted with bridging the future and the past: “Evenom Mettle” blends the ethereal mixture with voracious rhythms, while “Happiness” sits alongside the ambient-pop of “Similes” thanks also to a guest vocal turn from Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo.

After a few years of sporadic, “minor” appearances, in 2016 Eluvium returns in its most dazzling guise yet, in a new, moving union of ambient and sacred song, a genuine spiritual experience. On False Readings On it's as if the samples of operatic voices and a cappella choirs came from the most heart-wrenching requiems ever written. Joined to trails of guitars and synthesizers, shaped into an orchestral form with extremely blurred edges, they reach the ear like the caress of the most loving of mothers.

At the sound of that unmistakable little organ, the world appears stripped of any material or ideological adornment, rediscovering a unity long since lost. Even the humblest interludes, easily mistaken for amateurish youthful sketches, let a glow of placid serenity filter through with each listen, useful for reabsorbing the emotional weight of the main tracks. The long closing suite, then, ventures into pure transcendence: an immense choir of voices reaches total saturation as the melodic line overlaps with it, arriving at an overflowing peak that resembles an eternal vision beyond good and evil.

Almost ten years after Copia, Cooper delivers a work that is not a mere spin-off of it but its ideal next step, the long-awaited new consolation finally found. False Readings On represents, if not his masterpiece, then at the very least the definitive consecration of what it's now fair to call the Eluvium sound, as well as of his artistic personality and his unmatched ability to shape the listener's emotional sphere through his music.

In 2017, Cooper created a brief experiment capable of becoming an ambient suite of infinite length. Shuffle Drones is a mosaic of twenty-three small, interchangeable tiles each lasting 32 seconds (except one, the last of the original sequence): by triggering a random playback sequence, the listener brings to life a sonic flow intended to challenge "modern listening habits, and to offer something peaceful, complex, unique and ever-changing".

And indeed chance can work here at its best, leaving us at the mercy of a listening experience whose beguiling unfolding extends ad libitum without ever hitting a snag or formal flaw. An ambient record with the lightness of a simple, brilliant idea: quietly poetic, relaxing and prêt à porter.

Two years later, a compilation reaffirms Eluvium's role as one of the pioneers of the current modern classical wave, a genre later brought to a wider audience by the likes of Frahm, Arnalds, Richter and Jóhannsson. Back in the now-distant 2004, the piano miniatures of An Accidental Memory In The Case Of Death marked a considerable turning point for the instrumental fringe of indie music. Pianoworks thus presents those compositions in full, alongside a selection of tracks from Copia and Nightmare Ending. The pieces on the first volume, on the other hand, are all previously unreleased, forming a kind of didactic and emotional handbook for keyboard beginners: thirteen exercises of studied simplicity that carry on the gentlest romanticism of Chopin and Satie, through waltzes, nocturnes and quiet, timeless daytime interiors.

This gives us the chance to have Cooper's entire body of acoustic compositions within reach, the bare expression of a talent whose foresight and solidity continue to mature fifteen years on, even though they were already evident in less suspecting times.

Virga I (2019) came about as the first in a planned series of ambient works, sketched out in solitude at home during a forced isolation caused by a snowstorm. Three long, typically ambient tracks make up what could arguably be called the most traditional album under the Eluvium name. If that's true, though, it may also be the most anonymous. Despite repeated listens, the loops that follow one another feel like overly cold abstractions, mere sonic carpets repeated without any clear direction. It's probably a Basinski-esque record, but one that fails to reach the tragic pathos of the master, who in 2020 was still able, with "Lamentations", to convey real tragedy.

Of the three long tracks, the title track itself seems the least compelling. "Abyss Forms" is a classic loop piece that plays on the sonic disintegration of its medium. Nothing new, but it's a track one can get lost in. Much the same can be said of the closing "House Taken Over", probably the most intimate and successful piece, offering greater variety and a residual connection to Cooper's earlier career. This isn't an outright negative verdict, but the impression is that Cooper is still searching for a new identity, and that this is merely a transitional work on the way to new shores.

Where the previous releases stemmed from specific circumstances that forced periods of isolation – a snowstorm for the first, the pandemic for the next – Virga III grows out of a reflection born from observing the minute universe in contrast with our historical reality. On one side, marginal biological ecosystems such as those found in drainage channels; on the other, a socio-political present marked by violence and oppression.

From this premise emerge unexpectedly luminous soundscapes, atmospheric abstractions as far removed from the Basinski-esque decaying structures of Virga I as they are from the restless tones of its predecessor. The tracks forgo expansiveness in favor of concise cores – with the exception of the dream-ambient drift of "Communication" – inclined towards a quicker build to climax. Representative of this compositional choice are the title track, with its crescendoing loops painting an emphatically charged melody, and, even more so, the moving solemnity of "The Fires At Night".

Eluvium's voice shines again here, at times recapturing the very trait that made him one of the most representative artists in ambient music at the turn of the millennium.

Contributions by Matteo Meda ("Nightmare Ending"), Michele Palozzo ("False Readings On", "Shuffle Drones", "Pianoworks"), Valerio D'Onofrio ("Virga I"), Peppe Trotta ("Virga III")

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