Music has a way of bringing out many emotions in the listener. Whether it is fun music in the summer while you are having a good time or the making of a mixtape for a girl that you are trying to impress, music plays a very important role in all of our lives. We all have that one album that seems to bring out absolute emotional disparity in ourselves. The album, that, when you play it, you find yourself completely comforted, and at the same time it can also bring you to absolute tears. The first time I fully listened to Eluvium's new album Copia, I felt my chest tighten and my breathing become faint. Matthew Cooper has truly released an album that may very well end up being one of my all time favorites.
If you are not familiar with Eluvium, it is the moniker of ambient artist Matthew Cooper. He has been compared to Brian Eno and Fennesz, but don't let that fool you as he stands on his own name and has a sound that is unmistakably his own. If you are familiar with his work, one of the best ways to compare this album to past albums of his would be to take the layers of guitar heard on Lambent Material and Talk Amongst the Trees and convert them to pieces for a symphony orchestra with strings, woodwinds, and horns making the layers while Cooper takes his piano playing on An Accidental Memory in the Case of Death and combines it all together. While this may sound similar to a description you could have heard for When I Live By the Garden and the Sea, that EP could not prepare you for this album at all.
When I talk about this album and it's display of emotional disparity, I truly mean it. The same songs will have you feeling a range of emotions with each new listen. "Indoor Swimming at the Space Station" will make you feel as though you were still in the amniotic sac, suspended in amniotic fluids and surrounded by the love of your mother. It is such an untroubled piece that exudes innocence and the feeling of unconditional love.
Cooper's piano pieces have become even more realized on this album and "Prelude for Time Feelers" is evidence of this. A lilting 6/8 piece that really shows Cooper's ability as a composer with a keen ability of working with layers, it is undoubtedly one of the best tracks on the disc. The layers are very carefully placed and some are very subtle but add an infinite amount of texture to the piece. Let it be the staccato string parts that come in eventually that swirl back and forth in stereo or the amazing level of low end that balances out the piece after the cue of Cooper playing a single note on the lower register of the piano. The piece wraps up in a grandiose style leaving nothing but a small section to carry into the next piece.
"Radio Ballet," "(Intermission)," and "After Nature" show off Cooper's abilities and range as a trio of three short pieces. "Radio Ballet" is a single solo piano piece, like the one found on An Accidental Memory in the Case of Death. "After Nature" is the complete opposite, a full orchestral piece completely devoid of piano. "(Intermission)" falls in between the two as a piece of mostly field recordings with swells rising up underneath it all. These three pieces all lead you into "Reciting the Airships," another breathtaking piece.
"Repose in Blue" finishes up the album with a piece of sheer ambient genius. Working with strings again, once all the layers of strings begin to pile upon each other you start to lose track of where one layer ends and where the next begins until it fuses into one single layer of the sun singing out over the clouds with the roar of thunder rolling in from the distance.
Brian Eno once said that "ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting." With this album Matthew Cooper made an ambient album that absolutely refuses to be ignored. This truly is Cooper's masterpiece and possibly the most important ambient record of the decade, surpassing Stars of the Lid's Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid. To score this any less than a 10 would honestly be criminal. If you were to purchase one album this year, Copia should be it.
