Eluvium /// “Everything To Come” /// Talk Amongst The Trees
What You Should Have Heard, 2000-2009, day three: I can think of no genre with a bigger gap between accomplishment and acclaim this decade than ambient music. Without Kranky doggedly releasing the likes of Stars of the Lid, Loscil, Windy & Carl, Tim Hecker et. al., who knows where drone-seeking, overly anxious and orchestrally minded listeners would turn after deciding to give Eno’s Music For Airports a rest. Well, probably to Eluvium (née Matthew Cooper), whose ghostly Talk Amongst The Trees is equal parts golden afterlife and earth-bound sorrow. Opener “New Animals From The Air” is eleven minutes of hypnotic smoke curls. Centerpiece “Taken” climbs an endless, spiraling M.C. Escher staircase for a quarter of an hour. Haters gonna say it’s the same stuff repeated ad nauseam, but they’re paying too much attention. Eluvium’s best work is something to marinate the room in, to play (as Eno would have it) on the very border of your consciousness. Only when you’ve forgotten it’s still on will you be able to enjoy its imperceptible shifts and virtuosic decays. Loops recycle and degrade, coalesce and split, elemental against a backdrop of pure white annihilating fog. In a word: prehistoric.
