ELUVIUM
Lambent Material (Temporary Residence Ltd.)
Reviewed by Erick Mertz

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Transplanted to Portland Oregon via Louisville Kentucky, Mathew Cooper is the man with the devilish grin and steaming chamomile tea behind the flawless Eluvium composition Lambent Material. Reminiscent of Brian Eno's Ambient Music For Airports or Sigur Ros' (), the five songs over 35 minutes collected here are as taut and emotively drowning as their influences. Dreamscapes from all across the netherworld gather here, plant seed and flourish with streaming guitar and piano accompaniment. In fascinating contrast, the songs on Lambent Material feel like pastoral bits of a truly technical marvel.

A song like "Under the Water It Glowed" is like climbing through a milky, silt filled stream toward a faint glow of sunlight. Its droning astro-guitars a la My Bloody Valentine make for pure aural inertia one could get lost in. More tangible is "There Wasn't Anything" featuring gentle piano against an ever so faint backdrop of mumbling nonsense conversation. Cooper leaps into 15 minutes of searing repetitive guitar noise on "Zerthis Was A Shivering Human Image" but reels back into sleepy time on the album's last song "I Am So Much More Me That You Are Perfectly You." It is surprisingly diverse and satisfying for something that ends so soon.

Quite literally, the definition of the word Eluvium is debris leftover from the disintegration of rock. Music, so elegantly similar to the sound of a room filled with the fractured clamor of vacancy, is indeed a rare stone.

© 2003 - Erick Mertz