Drone music directs a listener's attention to texture. Once you know you're getting long tones and gradual changes, you focus on the sort of details. The timbre is what provides the mood, and is what separates the Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid from the very, very awake sounds of Aube. The best stuff finds that crucial edge between "too pretty" and "too noisy" and rides it like a water-skier pushed along by the lip of the boat's wake.
Matthew Cooper's Eluvium project has on occasion found this edge. I'm thinking in particular of the 15-minute "Zerthis Was a Shivering Human Image"-- the closing track on his debut LP, Lambent Material-- which throbs with damaged energy even as a layer of drone buried deep in the center hints at a ultimate serenity. Perhaps thinking that he'd said his piece with the held tones, the next Eluvium album, An Accidental Memory in the Case of Death was a collection of short piano pieces. Heard by some as kin to the impressionistic minimalism of Harold Budd, An Accidental Memory strikes me as a riff on some of the dramatic cues from the soundtrack to On Golden Pond. Nice enough, I suppose, but insubstantial.
With Talk Amongst the Trees, Eluvium returns to drone with a renewed sense of purpose. While there's nothing here anywhere near the intensity of "Zerthis", the album provides enough tension and variety to keep things interesting. The exquisite 10-minute opener "New Animals from the Air"-- with its billowy mass of backward guitar seeded with overdriven guitar patterns-- is the sort of thick sonic blanket which Windy & Carl used to tuck us under. In a similar vein, "Calm of the Light Cloud" delivers on the promise of its title, filling available space with layers glowing harmonics. Throughout Talk Amongst the Trees, Cooper has it down when he aims for immersive warmth. Slightly darker tracks such as the quiet "Show Us Our Homes", which has two separate metallic seesaw patterns swaying lazily and falling out of sync, and "Everything to Come", with its anxious, distorted whine, retain a sense of relaxed contemplation.
As with Eluvium's debut, this album's peak comes on an extended centerpiece. This time the boost isn't provided by a threat of noise, but by a sense of cinematic grandeur. The 17-minute "Taken" is built from a series of strummed guitar chords that seem to be continually climbing upward on an Escher staircase. As it marches along "Taken" becomes almost heroic, even after you realize that it actually changes little with each passing minute. It's a big effect on an album consisting mostly of smaller, quieter ones. But still, it holds together. That prickliness that pushes my favorite drone tracks over the top is lacking, but it's clear that Cooper had other ideas that happened to turn out quite well.
