Eluvium's Matthew Cooper has eschewed the use of electronic and digitalmanipulation for his second album on Temporary Residence, preferringinstead to sit down a piano, turn the microphone on, and record thepure output of his fingers on the ebonies and ivories. What I came toenjoy most about last year's Lambent Material(a beautifully narcotic album) was the stark monotony of the tones.There was very little variation in a given song: piano restructured byway of electronics and effects. Each measure was laid out economicallyand in the perfect amount to satisfy the movement of the piece. Here,however, Eluvium produces an undiluted and more robust sound, full ofvirtuosic piano suites without any tampering on the end production. Thepace is slightly faster, the playing more frenetic (sounds simply slideinto each another), and the output is altogether a differentexperience. The sound is palpably lonely, as if you are peeking inunnoticed on a master at work alone is his studio, a painter engaged inthe first brush-strokes on a canvas. Likewise, Eluvium grants us accessto the very inner workings of his musical creations, isolating thesub-atomic particles of them. These particles are kinetic and lush andelegant in their spareness. The pensiveness is evident in every songregardless of length, be it only one-minute long ("An AccidentalMemory") or seven-minutes ("The Well-Meaning Professor"). Ironically, asong like "Nepenthe" is more lambent than anything on Lambent Material:notes flicker and collide, gliding up and down in arpeggios andcascades. It is not a long album; 27 minutes and suddenly the end hits.I feel as though I've been truly listening in on a daily practicesession (half an hour of piano playing squeezed in between a biologylab report and the Proust reading). Throughout my listenings of thisalbum, I could swear that I heard a telephone ringing, not in thebackground of the music, but somewhere in my apartment. I don't knowwhat aural resonance or vibrational frequency was causing thisphenomenon, and so it makes me think that someone, somewhere is tryingto get through to me. But I don't care. The music is still playing andI am a little transfixed by what I hear. Read More
