Jesu / Eluvium - Split (Temporary Residence Limited / Hydra Head Records, 2007)

A1 Jesu - Farewell (6:28)
A2 Jesu - Blind & Faithless (3:31)
A3 Jesu - Why Are We Not Perfect? (6:43)
B1 Eluvium - Time-Travel Of The Sloth Parts I, II, & III (19:46)

...ce split permet la collaboration entre Jesu et Eluvium. Ce dernier est un projet electro/ambient, mené depuis 2003 par l'américain Matthew Cooper. On trouve au total trois chansons de Jesu, pour une seule d'Eluvium.

Ce split est tout simplement impressionnant. Tout débute par "Farewell" qui est un véritable hit dont seul Broaderick a le secret. Entre force et douceur, la mélancolie des nappes se noie dans un tourbillon sonique. On peut songer au pauvre Kevin Shields qui aimerait tant pouvoir recomposer des chansons de ce niveau. L'instrumentale "Blind & Faithless" à la ligne de basse entraînante passe bien trop vite. "Why Are We Not Perfect" emmène Jesu vers le downtempo. Le rythme lourd se marie parfaitement au chant limpide de Broderick. La partie finale est magnifique avec l'arrivée des guitares saturées.

Eluvium vient clôturer ce split par presque vingt minutes de nappes apaisantes comme pour méditer sur les bienfaits d'une telle collaboration.
XSilence

This is a record I've been waiting for pretty much since the first whispers of it bubbled up on one internet forum or another. At first I was slightly puzzled, in one corner we have Justin Broadrick, founder member of Napalm Death and Godflesh and all round metal deity, then in the other corner we have Portland's Matthew Cooper, purveyor of some of the most blissful hazy ambience and post-classical experimentation you're likely to hear. It could be a strange pairing, but then in recent years Broadrick has progressively stripped the metallic crunch from his productions (now under the Jesu moniker) and begun to lean more and more into the world of Thames Valley shoegaze. Some might call it nu-gaze (isn't everything 'nu' these days?) but by harnessing the power of My Bloody Valentine, Ride and Lush, Broadrick has smudged his earlier post-industrial metal into something a little more jubilant and a little more enjoyable. Even those of you familiar with Broadrick's earlier Jesu material might be surprised at the three tracks on this split LP. Although his work has been getting progressively 'popier' since the release of the earth-shattering 'Silver' EP a couple of years back, this is possibly his least metal record to date and at times sounds like it wouldn't have been out of place on Morr Music's genre defining compilation 'Blue Skied and Clear'. We open on 'Farewell' with its verse/chorus/verse structure and a slice of pure pop - all reverberating chords, carefully programmed drum machines and Broadrick's keen sense of sound engineering adding that unmistakable gloss. However it's with the side's second piece that the record really gets into its stride; 'Blind & Faithless' takes Ulrich Schnauss' template (breakbeats, synthesizers) injected with enough humanity and style to leave you with a piece of music totally out on its own. It might only be short, but its brevity only serves to leave you gasping for more. This in itself should surely be enough to demand the asking price, but then we flip the record over and are treated to one expansive piece from Eluvium, this time seeing Matthew Cooper in collaboration with Temporary Residence boss man Jeremy deVine. The two manage to conjure a simply peerless haze of gaseous synthesized harmony, drifting environmental recordings and Cooper's signature lilting piano melodies (last heard on his excellent 'Copia' album). In just one track Cooper seems to have distilled his entire catalogue and has created a piece you can lose yourself in totally, and like all the best ambient producers refuses to let it sink into the background. What initially could have been an odd pairing of acts ends up becoming one of the most hazy, genuinely well-meaning collections of dream pop I've heard this year, and I'd expect it to be nudging into the upper regions of many an end of year chart in a few months time. Apparently the record is already sold out at the source so you'd better act fast if you want to bag one of these beauties. Highly Recommended!
Boomkat

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Eluvium - Indecipherable Text (Sensory Projects, 2007)

1-1 The Unfinished (4:39)
1-2 Under The Water It Glowed (5:12)
1-3 There Wasn't Anything (4:43)
1-4 Zerthis Was A Shivering Human-Image (15:37)
1-5 I Am So Much More Me That You Are Perfectly You (5:50)
1-6 Untitled 1 (For Piano) (4:07)
2-1 New Animals From The Air (10:48)
2-2 Show Us Our Homes (4:47)
2-3 Area 41 (0:59)
2-4 Everything To Come (5:41)
2-5 Calm Of The Cast-Light Cloud (5:31)
2-6 Taken (16:56)
2-7 We Say Goodbye To Ourselves (2:10)
2-8 One (7:48)
2-9 Untitled 2 (For Orchestra) (5:34)
2-10 Untitled 3 (For Rhodes And Tape) (7:53)

Réédition des deux premiers albums d'Eluvium plus trois inédits...

Reissue of the two first LP of Eluvium with three unreleased tracks....

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Eluvium - Copia (Temporary Residence Limited, 2007)

1 Amreik (3:18)
2 Indoor Swimming At The Space Station (10:29)
3 Seeing You Off The Edges (5:03)
4 Prelude For Time Feelers (5:48)
5 Requiem On Frankfort Ave. (2:41)
6 Radio Ballet (3:12)
7 (Intermission) (0:50)
8 After Nature (1:51)
9 Reciting The Airships (4:35)
10 Ostinato (6:08)
11 Hymn #1 (1:31)
12 Repose In Blue (9:18)

“Copia” est l’album le plus accessible d’Eluvium, et à certains égards, le plus réussi également. Alors que “Talk Amongst The Trees” relancait les tonalités post-rock dans une ambiance sereine, “Copia” s’en inspire… mais va plus loin.

Il y a toujours cet univers brumeux, dont la première piste “Amreik” s’en fait l’écho parfait. Mais il y a de nouvelles couleurs, d’une mélancolie joyeuse, de vert sans doute, d’un homme perdu sur la colline. Et cette histoire, c’est “Prelude For Time Feelers”. Un morceau au piano qu’Eluvium alimente lentement de son cor résonnant au loin dans la montagne.

“Copia” est l’album d’un musicien qui lâche ce qu’il a de mieux dans un instant de lumière. Du reste, il n’y a qu’à écouter.

Orkestra

As an ambient artist, Eluvium's Matthew Cooper is working in a pretty crowded field, but with a gradually evolving sound and distinctive approach to his genre, his profile continues to rise. Though his 2003 all-piano record An Accidental Memory in Case of Death might have seemed like a left turn in light of the guitar-based drone tracks that came before and after, his records all share an aesthetic: Eluvium's ambient music is music first and ambient second; it leans forward, asks for consideration, and has no desire to slip into the background. That thread continues on his newest full-length, even as his palette broadens considerably.

Incorporating strings, horns, woodwinds, and more piano, Copia is the grandest, most sweeping Eluvium record to date. The word that keeps coming to mind is "regal," perhaps because the lush opening fanfare "Amreik" sets the tone for the album so perfectly. Just over three minutes long, the rich blend of French horns, trumpets and trombones comes together to form a soundtrack for convocation. From there, the record dives headlong into the 10-minute "Indoor Swimming at the Space Station", which layers piano and strings (never quite clear throughout what is sampled, what is live, and what is synthetic) on his most filmic piece to date.

As "cinematic" music goes-- and the adjective is appropriate throughout Copia-- these pieces tend toward widescreen pictures with big budgets. It's grand movie music in the "Adagio With Strings" sense; we're not talking about exercises in subtle shading. With that in mind, Cooper has developed a good sense of pacing and structure, and some of these pieces are terrifically affecting. "Seeing You Off the Edges" is mostly a cluster of held cello notes, but those moments when the melody jumps an octave trigger an immediate pang of longing. "After Nature", a chamber piece that layers violins with heavy reverb, sounds like something that would waft out of the ballroom in The Shining during one of Jack Nicholson's breaks away from the typewriter. "Ostinato" is a gradually unwinding piece for pipe organ with a simple melody, but during the pattern's lowest ebb, when the bass pedal comes in and vibrates the room, it echoes a towering cathedral.

My issue with Copia-- the thing that keeps this record from greatness-- is Cooper's approach to piano. I know people who love Accidental Memory and the dabbling of acoustic keys on last year's When I Live By the Garden and the Sea EP, but this is where I always find myself tuning out. Copia is the first record where piano is fully integrated into other aspects of Cooper's sound; for my money, these tracks are the record's weakest, coming across as unpleasantly leading, sometimes bordering on manipulative. Any sense of mystery-- a quality essential to Eluvium's best music-- evaporates completely during "Prelude for Time Feelers" and "Radio Ballet", where piano dominates. The word "Satie" sometimes comes up when he goes in this direction, which is way off; "Winston" is more accurate. Coming from a guy who owned a few Windham Hill albums back in the day, I don't mean this as a dig; the piano-led tracks are enjoyable and pretty but almost defiantly surface-level.

The nine-minute finale "Repose in Blue", on the other hand, shows Cooper at his large-canvas best, where the on-the-nose emotional pointers work to his advantage. He discards the line between drama and melodrama as he bursts in halfway though a piece of brooding cello drone laced with horns and throws a recording of fireworks against the black sky. The explosions sound like bass and kettledrums as they burst at random without a discernible pattern, and it nicely completes the John Phillip Sousa Americana hinted at on the record's opener. If "Amreik" was a formal procession in June, this is Independence Day a month later, with bombs bursting in air as the orchestra beneath weaves a lament for the radio simulcast. It is, of course, over the top, but to a degree that strikes me as courageous. Eluvium's music isn't a web of possibilities to be explored, but a very specific path to be followed. When it works as well as it does on "Repose in Blue", it takes you to an exalted place.

Mark Richardson, Pitchforkmedia

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Eluvium - When I Live By The Garden And The Sea (Temporary Residence Limited, 2006)

1 I Will Not Forget That I Have Forgotten (5:20)
2 As I Drift Off (3:47)
3 All The Sails (5:45)
4 When I Live By The Garden And The Sea (7:32)

Un an et demi après le somptueux Talk Amongst the Trees, Eluvium (qui a ralenti son rythme de production), nous livre, toujours sur Temporary Residence, un EP d’une vingtaine de minutes, joliment intitulé When I Live by the Garden and the Sea.

Le premier titre (I Will not Forget that I have Forgotten) s’inscrit dans la lignée du deuxième album de Matthew Cooper (An Accidental Memory In The Case Of Death), à savoir un néo-classique à base de profonds accords de piano. Fort heureusement, le musicien ne s’en tient pas là et ajoute une texture tremblotante, enveloppant le tout et conférant une densité certaine au morceau. Petite surprise dès le début de As I Drift Off puisqu’on retrouve, enchâssé dans des nappes de guitares cotonneuses à souhait, un sample d’une voix masculine semblant dire un discours de manière enflammée. N’étant présent que quelques secondes, celui-ci laisse ensuite pleinement la place aux variations sonores des guitares qui, jouant sur le traditionnel flux et reflux, peuvent offrir un titre, quoique ramassé (moins de quatre minutes), impressionnant par sa sombre luminosité.

Travail identique dans All the Sails pour une réussite encore plus éclatante, la superposition de nappes parvenant ici à se doter d’un lyrisme particulier, tout entier centré sur la légère saturation conférée aux six-cordes. Enfin, le morceau-titre qui clôt le maxi opère dans un registre moins touffu avec deux pistes seulement : la première avec une guitare en accords allant en crescendo et la seconde constituée par un trémolo de notes issues d’un vibraphone. Résultat, un morceau qui témoigne à la fois d’une gracile fragilité tout en disposant d’une base suffisamment solide pour avancer sans crainte ; en tout état de cause, la conclusion idéale d’un brillant EP.

François Bousquet, EtherReal

Released last year, 'When I Live by the Garden and the Sea' was intended as a companion EP to the heartbreakingly beautiful 'Talk Amongst the Trees' and to make way for the imminent 'Copia' album, something which I think it does perfectly. I'm a huge fan of Matthew Cooper's work, and it's nice to see him here linking his piano work with his more textured guitar-based Eno-esque ambience. The EP begins with 'I will not Forget that I have Forgotten' which does exactly this, layering his emotive piano playing over layer upon layer of dense distorted ambience. It works too, leaving the listener by the end of the piece an emotional wreck, dragged through heartache and passion by Matthew Cooper's unique compositional sense. It surprises me actually that he hasn't been invited to score some kind of film or other yet, this is music I would have thought would be perfectly matched with independent cinema; blurry, individual, emotive, melancholic. By the time you reach the EPs final and title track, you will realise why Eluvium has such a strong presence in the ambient/experimental scene right now, as xylophone sounds breeze over synthesized pads and a fuzz which drifts like a midnight tide. Utterly gorgeous stuff, and a perfect introduction (or maybe even conclusion) to the man's patented sound - recommended.
Boomkat

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Eluvium - Travels In Constants (Vol. 20) (Temporary Residence Limited, 2005)

01 Behind your Trouble

Une demi heure de joli voyage électronique....

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Eluvium - Talk Amongst The Trees (Temporary Residence Limited, 2005)

1 New Animals From The Air (10:47)
2 Show Us Our Homes (4:46)
3 Area 41 (0:58)
4 Everything To Come (5:40)
5 Calm Of The Cast-Light Cloud (5:30)
6 Taken (16:56)
7 We Say Goodbye To Ourselves (2:09)
8 One (7:44)

Un peu moins d'un an après la sortie d'un mini album de compositions pour piano (An Accidental Memory in the Case of Death), Matthew Cooper aka Eluvium revient aux sources ambient de l'album qui l'avait révélé en 2003, Lambent Material. Un nouvel opus qui s'inscrit dans une longue tradition, aussi bien dans l'esprit des pionniers du genre que de celui d'un Stars of the Lid qui aurait préféré la sérénité chaleureuse à la noirceur inquiétante et glacée, et dont les huit nouvelles pistes partagent une thématique commune, en parfaite adéquation avec la pochette du disque: huit voyages dans des paysages embrumés, guidés par un son ambient très atmosphérique, qui allie densité et textures travaillées. Malgré cette unité dans le sujet abordé, l'éventail des tonalités utilisées permet à Eluvium de préserver une certaine diversité au fil des pistes, et l'une des réussites principales de Talk Amongst the Trees réside dans la qualité de ses transitions, leur naturel assurant la cohérence de l'ensemble.

Qu'il s'agisse de sa gestion du temps, de son utilisation raffinée de la guitare et des claviers ou de son art de disposer ses boucles dans l'espace et de superposer ses différentes strates, sa maîtrise technique apparaît une fois de plus au grand jour, indéniable comme le sont aussi les qualités esthétiques de cet album qui se place en éloge de la production soignée. Dans des environnements où la distinction est rendue difficile en raison d'une vision floue, des séquences mélodiques émergent et Eluvium nous fait profiter d'un univers hypnotique et captivant, mais lorsque le décor est planté, on regrette parfois que certaines pistes ne soient touchées par une relative stagnation. Des progressions avortées ou des prolongations un peu vaines font en effet naître une légère sensation d'amertume, cette impression de voir en Matthew Cooper le bon élève récitant trop docilement sa leçon... parfois à l'image de son interprétation assez scolaire (au piano) dans son second album.

Fort heureusement, ce défaut tend à s'estomper pour finalement disparaître au delà du premier tiers, où ses compositions prennent de l'ampleur: un palier d'ailleurs bien symbolisé par le titre Calm of the Cast-Light Cloud qui incarne une longue remontée, depuis des profondeurs abyssales jusqu'à la surface. Comme sur Lambent Material où Zerthis Was a Shivering Human Image illuminait l'album durant un quart d'heure, c'est sur l'exercice longue durée (près de dix sept minutes, ici) que Talk Amongst the Trees connaît son apogée. Car contrairement aux premiers morceaux, le titre Taken s'appuie en effet sur une évolution constante, où la guitare parvient sans cesse à reprendre de nouveaux souffles et à s'élever vers des altitudes stratosphériques pour un résultat particulièrement puissant. Enfin, après un intermède lumineux (We Say Goodbye to Ourselves), One offre lui aussi un visage plus évolutif pour clôturer l'album, avec un contraste entre tonalités massives et palpitations aiguës.

A défaut de signer un album très original, Matthew Cooper exploite ses techniques au maximum et livre au final un disque d'ambient globalement plaisant: on ne peut de toute façon pas lui retirer le fait que Talk Amongst the Trees apporte son lot d'émotions et de sensations à l'auditeur qui traversera ici un royaume harmonieux.

Webzine Mille-Feuilles

Now and again an album will come along that seems to actively eschew the conventional palate available to those looking to express themselves through music, preferring instead to assemble a unique canon of sonic shards which challenge and delight in equal measure. No prizes for guessing then that 'Talk Amongst the Trees' is just one of these records, composed and performed in its entirety by Eluvium (aka Mathew Cooper) and seemingly intent on not giving the listener even a glimpse of recognisable instrumentation. But, just as vocals in a foreign language give you opportunity to admire the voice as an instrument, uncluttered by the need to process the actual message being relayed, similarly 'Talk Amongst the Trees' removes the distraction of its composite parts freeing you up to enjoy the soundscapes for what they are. The record opens with the fuzzy hearted 'New Animals From the Air', where an effortless fog of aural balm is evoked through organic elements coalescing around a gently chiming heart that brings to mind the spirit, if not the sound, of Markus Popp's Oval. Similarly, 'One' is almost monastical in its sound but again lacks any firm auditory fragments that would draw your attention away from the piece as a whole, whilst only 'Taken', with its guitar led mantra, could be considered conventional in its approach to incorporating identifiable instrumentation. Like lint from your speakers, it may at first seem insubstantial but once it snags you'll find yourself dragged in ever deeper. Recommended.
Boomkat

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Eluvium - An Accidental Memory In The Case Of Death (Temporary Residence Limited, 2004)

1 An Accidental Memory (1:11)
2 Genius And The Thieves (2:26)
3 Perfect Neglect In A Field Of Statues (5:25)
4 Nepenthe (3:42)
5 In A Sense (1:45)
6 The Well-Meaning Professor (7:34)
7 An Accidental Memory In The Case Of Death (4:23)

Un an tout juste après son merveilleux premier album fait de plongées captivantes de guitares et de drones composites, Eluvium revient avec An Accidental Memory In the Case of Death, variation pour piano d’un peu plus de vingt-cinq minutes qui est toutefois présentée comme un album.

Envolées les guitares envoûtantes, emportées les nappes travaillées et enveloppantes, disparues les fascinantes sensations de flux et reflux, place est faite à présent à un piano solo qui égrène arpèges accrocheurs (Perfect Neglect in a Field of Statues qui, étrangement, lorgne vers un Yann Tiersen de BO) et suites de notes mélodieuses et sensibles....

Cela dit, quand Eluvium apporte une densité certaine à ses notes de piano par la conjonction d’une mélodie dans les hautes et d’un profond fondement dans les graves, l’ensemble s’anime d’une vie intérieure réelle (In a Sense). De même, quand il prend son temps et choisit, ostensiblement, de faire durer un morceau (The Well-Meaning Professor), il explore une gamme entière d’harmonies non encore convoquées jusqu’alors, se laissant même aller à des envolées débridées qu’on aurait aimé entendre plus fréquemment sur un disque qui apparaît, in fine, comme un brillant exercice de style mais qui ne s’avère pas pleinement convaincant.

François Bousquet , EtherReal

Eluvium’s An Accidental Memory in the Case of Death, the follow-up to last year’s electronically-driven Lambent Sounds, consists of nothing more than sole member Matthew Cooper playing acoustic piano for 27 minutes. Admirers of the ambient first album have reason to be skeptical; the minimalist piano pieces on Accidental Memory bear no apparent relation to Lambent Sounds’s surging waves of noise, and seem like the work of a completely different artist.

Then again, the move from Eno-inspired ambient works to solo piano composition may not be as dramatic as it first seems. After all, the godfather of ambient music, Erik Satie, wrote his most famous pieces for solo piano. Cooper’s debt to Satie is immense, and Accidental Memory might well be taken as a deliberate homage to the composer. But whereas Satie viewed his pieces as “furniture music” – music to be listened to as ambient noise rather than consciously attended to – Cooper’s pieces refuse to be relegated to the background. Although he generally adheres to the dreamy and detached aesthetic espoused by the likes of Eno and Satie, Cooper injects a sense of deep emotion and drama into his music, hinting at the passions stirring beneath its calm and impassive surface.

Like many of Satie’s pieces, the songs on Accidental Memory favor order and stability over dynamics and expression. Cooper plays with metronomic precision, giving each note equal value, and rarely changes volume or tempo. As a result, the pieces have an almost Baroque mechanical perfection to them, sounding more like perfectly designed machines than the emotional expressions of a human being. It’s precisely this mechanical quality, however, that makes Cooper’s music so moving; his pieces sound as though they are straining to maintain an ordered form amid impending abstraction.

“Perfect Neglect in a Field of Statues” begins with an almost banal Mozartian melodic motif accompanied by a classical repeating bass pattern. As the melody grows more insistent, though, the orderly left hand, faced with the inevitability of structure, insists upon it with mad intensity. “The Well-Meaning Professor” goes through a similar process, as a calm Debussy-like theme gives way to manic keyboard pounding. For the only time on the album, order and restraint crumble, and passion breaks through in the form of uneven rhythms and flubbed notes.

Precisely composed and performed music certainly doesn’t need to be unemotional or cold, but the contrast between restraint and artfulness and undisciplined abandon raises the question of how exactly the two approaches intersect. Much of the music on Accidental Memory suggests that the carefully considered beauty of a perfect melody may be no less “human” or emotive than impassioned improvisational wailing. Eluvium’s compositions keep romantic exuberance and excess at arm’s length, but sacrifice none of music’s potential for emotional expression.
By Michael Cramer, Dusted Review

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Eluvium - Lambent Material (Temporary Residence Limited, 2003)

1 The Unfinished (4:38)
2 Under The Water It Glowed (5:09)
3 There Wasn't Anything (4:40)
4 Zerthis Was A Shivering Human Image (15:35)
5 I Am So Much More Me That You Are Perfectly You (5:49)

Piano et guitares se heurtent et se complètent pour emmener l'auditeur dans un sillon de mélodies exquises. Peu voire pas de crescendos, de progressions; les seuls mouvements s'effectuent lentement, dessinant des lieux obscurs. Cette musique ambient est d'une telle densité que d'écoutes en écoutes, les plus imperceptibles détails agissent avec un effet insoupçonnable (ex: des ondes radio sur "Under the water it glowed")

Si Cooper définit sa musique comme l'écho qui perdurerait indéfiniment après un concert de Sonic Youth, on est plus tenté de rapprocher Lambent Material des travaux de Brian Eno (Music for airports, Music for films) de Labradford , voire de Sylvain Chauveau ("There wasn't anything"). L'album met peu de temps à prendre aux tripes, grâce à la profondeur des compositions ou grâce à des boucles acharnées. La boucle chaotique et complètement envoûtante de "Zerthis was a shivering human image" prouve en 15 minutes combien une guitare lancinante et trafiquée peut amener aisément l'auditeur à l'état second.
Soit Dit En Passant

In the dictionary, the literal definition for Eluvium reads: the debris from the disintegration of rock. One listen to Matthew Cooper's (aka Eluvium) flawless debut album, even peripherally, and you can't help but smirk at how perfectly appropriate the moniker is. Sounding somewhat like the echoed resonance of a Sonic Youth show after everyone has stopped playing and the crowd has gone home, Cooper himself isn't guilty of the mass destruction, he's merely there to pick up the beautifully broken pieces. Resting comfortably and confidently in the spirits of Brian Eno's Discreet Music and Ambient Music For Airports, Eluvium is a freakishly beautiful affair. If it was ever possible for a warm gust of wind to send chills through every bone in your body, then Eluvium is that warm wind. It is pure, epic rock music... after the lights go out.
Temporary Residence Limited

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Matthew Robert Cooper - Miniatures (Gaarden Records, 2008)

A1 Miniatures 1
A2 Miniatures 2
A3 Miniatures 3
A4 Miniatures 4
B1 Miniatures 5
B2 Miniatures 6
B3 Miniatures 7
B4 Miniatures 8
B5 Miniatures 9

Le premier album que Matthew Robert Cooper (Eluvium) sort sous son vrai nom, chacun des morceaux constituent effectivement une miniature soit simples, soit plus orchestrées, tout en douceur....

Since every one of Matthew Robert Cooper's Eluvium releases has highlighted a slightly different musical persona—the solo pianisms of An Accidental Memory In The Case Of Death followed by Talk Amongst The Trees' elegiac drones and Copia's neo-classical chamber settings, for example—the most curious thing about Miniatures isn't the degree to which it stylistically differs from his other works but why he opted to issue it under his birth name. It's an incidental point musically, however, and ultimately more a marketing issue for Gaarden Records than anything else. Hopefully no one'll be too misled by the title either, as only about half of the thirty-four-minute album's nine pieces could be classified as miniatures, if duration is used as a barometer that is. One thing that is different is that it's Cooper's first proper vinyl release (2000 copies with the first 1000 on coloured vinyl).

The collection begins strongly with a beatific organ-styled opener whose hypnotic ebb and flow points the listener skyward, and the slow and measured unfurl of the song's interwoven melodies proves to be as haunting as anything in the Eluvium catalogue. The subsequent pieces alternate between shorter interludes—three piano nocturnes (number two gentle, four dramatic, and eight romantic), a robust church organ piece (five), and gentle interlude of glassy tones (six)—and more elaborate set-pieces. In number three, strings swell into an oceanic mass while a slow-motion melody softly calls out its yearning theme at its center, and in seven, the repeating tinkle of an Eno-like melody floats along the surface of a peaceful, ambient-styled piano meditation (that Cooper, for whatever reason, clutters with extraneous field noises); miniature nine ends the album gracefully with sweeping melancholia clothed in a full-bodied orchestral arrangement.

Regardless of instrumental differences, all of the pieces exude Cooper's signature blend of sweetness and longing, making Miniatures a more than worthy addition to Cooper's discography and, for listeners new to his work, a perfect starting point given the degree to which its individual pieces point in the direction of the individual Eluvium releases.
Textura

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