Ambient Week ’07–Day 1–Eluvium

This week I’m going to try a little exper­i­ment. I’m going to post once a day for every weekday (M-F) on an ambient album from 2007. Try not to fall asleep.

Those of you who’ve been reading gui­tarpants since our ear­liest posts may recall that Eluvium’s Talk Amongst the Trees made both mine and Mike’s year-end lists for 2005 (10^th and 7^th, respec­tively). I’m going to make a bold procla­ma­tion here: I won’t be sur­prised if it makes at least three of our year-end lists for 2007. Most of my ambient-grubbing friends have been fiending for the new Stars of the Lid über alles, but now that both …and Their Refine­ment of the Decline and Copia have stepped trem­bling into the harsh light of internet scrutiny, I can’t help feeling it’s Elu­vium who comes out on top. Which is not to say that the new SotL isn’t stun­ning (it is), but Copia makes a more con­cise, more affecting state­ment. …Decline is a album best suited to a hazy afternoon’s catnap, per­fect for sculpting a suite of day­dreams, while Copia’s more melodic flow rewards active listening.

On piano-driven tracks like “Pre­lude for Time Feelers,” “Radio Ballet” and “Reciting the Air­ships,” the album occa­sion­ally approaches the kind of starkly emo­tional pas­toral sound found on recent genre clas­sics like Helios’s Eingya and Max Richter’s The Blue Note­books. If this sounds like a big depar­ture from the tex­tured min­i­malism of Talk Amongst the Trees, it is. Cooper hasn’t entirely divorced him­self from those early works, how­ever. “Indoor Swim­ming at the Space Sta­tion” and “After Nature” strongly recall Talk’s “New Ani­mals from the Air.” Else­where, opener “Amreik” throws horns deep into the mix, an addi­tion that when paired with Eluvium’s existing kind of med­i­ta­tive ambiance bears ref­er­ence (to me, anyhow) to Alexandre Desplat’s Birth score.

In all, it’s a great addi­tion to Cooper’s cat­alog of releases, expanding Eluvium’s sound without losing touch with what’s come before. It’s a beau­tiful record, and easily one of the best of an already fan­tastic year.

Try: “Pre­lude for Time Feelers”

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