In 2014, friends and label-mates Mark T. Smith (guitarist for Explosions in the Sky) and Matthew Cooper (multi-instrumentalist laptop composer Eluvium) hit upon what seems, in retrospect, like a no-brainer collaboration. Joining skyward-facing post-rock to earthy ambiance, they clasped together like yin and yang, with the guitarist's widescreen beauty wending among the producer's sheer harmonic forms. They called their project Inventions, an ironic name for a band that sounded exactly how you imagined it would (personally, I'd have gone for Eluvium in the Sky with Diamonds).
It seemed like an idea that would work once and then quickly become redundant, but less than a year later, the duo proves that presumption wrong. Maze of Woods is a cut above your average sparkly instrumental zone-out music. It's still a welcoming, familiar pastiche of ambient, drone, shoegaze, and post-rock. It's also much thicker with compositional (instead of just textural) ideas, surprises, and a wealth of new sounds, like the majestic streaks of noise tearing apart the delicate tones of "Moanmusic" and scraping over the final track like an apocalyptic carriage arm.
Sometimes, you can tell a lot about a record by its remixers, and the ones included with Maze of Woods' bonus material—A Winged Victory for the Sullen, Leyland Kirby, and the Field—help to frame the record proper. The album's use of short, slack loops echoes Kirby's the Caretaker project: A chorus wobbles on a tilted photograph in "Feeling the Sun Thru the Earth at Night", and distant string-like passages crop up in "Slow Breathing Circuit" like an amnesiac's memory. Meanwhile, the Field is reflected in the album's liberal use of drum machines, samples and towering, diaphanous chords.
For all of its dreamy moods, Maze of Woods frequently edges toward electronic pop, and is more expansive and dynamic than the debut. "Escapers", with a broken beat and dub-echoed voices, wouldn't raise an eyebrow on an Aphex Twin hard-drive purge, the storm clouds of "Peregrine" abruptly clear out into a bright Boards of Canada knock, and Orb-like twinkles scatter over big frosty peaks on "Wolfkids". Smith's guitar is often recognizable and he provides a variety of delicate effects, from hollowed-out thwacks to what sounds like a glockenspiel made of lasers.
The album also makes subtle but widespread use of the kinds of clipped, deformed vocal samples we're used to hearing in electronic music. A length of unintelligible aria twists through "Springworlds" like a lost ribbon, and chattering voices are woven deep into the piano-rich fabric of "Peregrine". Throughout, and to the album's benefit, the duo's individual identities are more fully dissolved, so they can be more malleable in pursuing the idea behind a given song.
