As an ambient artist, Eluvium's Matthew Cooper is working in a pretty crowded field, but with a gradually evolving sound and distinctive approach to his genre, his profile continues to rise. Though his 2003 all-piano record An Accidental Memory in Case of Death might have seemed like a left turn in light of the guitar-based drone tracks that came before and after, his records all share an aesthetic: Eluvium's ambient music is music first and ambient second; it leans forward, asks for consideration, and has no desire to slip into the background. That thread continues on his newest full-length, even as his palette broadens considerably.
Incorporating strings, horns, woodwinds, and more piano, Copia is the grandest, most sweeping Eluvium record to date. The word that keeps coming to mind is "regal," perhaps because the lush opening fanfare "Amreik" sets the tone for the album so perfectly. Just over three minutes long, the rich blend of French horns, trumpets and trombones comes together to form a soundtrack for convocation. From there, the record dives headlong into the 10-minute "Indoor Swimming at the Space Station", which layers piano and strings (never quite clear throughout what is sampled, what is live, and what is synthetic) on his most filmic piece to date.
As "cinematic" music goes-- and the adjective is appropriate throughout Copia-- these pieces tend toward widescreen pictures with big budgets. It's grand movie music in the "Adagio With Strings" sense; we're not talking about exercises in subtle shading. With that in mind, Cooper has developed a good sense of pacing and structure, and some of these pieces are terrifically affecting. "Seeing You Off the Edges" is mostly a cluster of held cello notes, but those moments when the melody jumps an octave trigger an immediate pang of longing. "After Nature", a chamber piece that layers violins with heavy reverb, sounds like something that would waft out of the ballroom in The Shining during one of Jack Nicholson's breaks away from the typewriter. "Ostinato" is a gradually unwinding piece for pipe organ with a simple melody, but during the pattern's lowest ebb, when the bass pedal comes in and vibrates the room, it echoes a towering cathedral.
My issue with Copia-- the thing that keeps this record from greatness-- is Cooper's approach to piano. I know people who love Accidental Memory and the dabbling of acoustic keys on last year's When I Live By the Garden and the Sea EP, but this is where I always find myself tuning out. Copia is the first record where piano is fully integrated into other aspects of Cooper's sound; for my money, these tracks are the record's weakest, coming across as unpleasantly leading, sometimes bordering on manipulative. Any sense of mystery-- a quality essential to Eluvium's best music-- evaporates completely during "Prelude for Time Feelers" and "Radio Ballet", where piano dominates. The word "Satie" sometimes comes up when he goes in this direction, which is way off; "Winston" is more accurate. Coming from a guy who owned a few Windham Hill albums back in the day, I don't mean this as a dig; the piano-led tracks are enjoyable and pretty but almost defiantly surface-level.
The nine-minute finale "Repose in Blue", on the other hand, shows Cooper at his large-canvas best, where the on-the-nose emotional pointers work to his advantage. He discards the line between drama and melodrama as he bursts in halfway though a piece of brooding cello drone laced with horns and throws a recording of fireworks against the black sky. The explosions sound like bass and kettledrums as they burst at random without a discernible pattern, and it nicely completes the John Phillip Sousa Americana hinted at on the record's opener. If "Amreik" was a formal procession in June, this is Independence Day a month later, with bombs bursting in air as the orchestra beneath weaves a lament for the radio simulcast. It is, of course, over the top, but to a degree that strikes me as courageous. Eluvium's music isn't a web of possibilities to be explored, but a very specific path to be followed. When it works as well as it does on "Repose in Blue", it takes you to an exalted place.
