Eluvium

As Eluvium, Matthew Cooper produces ambient music marked by patient detail and often anchored in sparse, evocative piano lines. His expansive catalog, which first took shape during the early 2000s through extended guitar drones treated with heavy processing, later broadened to embrace electronic textures and classical elements. All of those strands converged on the 2013 double album Nightmare Ending, after which further explorations of introspective instrumental forms appeared on releases such as 2023’s (Whirring Marvels In) Consensus Reality.

Born in Tennessee, Cooper spent his formative years in Louisville, Kentucky, then moved to the Pacific Northwest in the early 2000s. There he launched the Eluvium project, initially shaping ambient pieces from sustained tones sourced from guitar. The first release, Lambent Material, appeared on Temporary Residence in 2003. That shoegaze-drone recording was succeeded the following year by the solo-piano album An Accidental Memory in the Case of Death. Talk Amongst the Trees arrived in 2005, extending the approach of the debut with added electronic elements, and was followed by Cooper’s contribution to Temporary Residence’s Travels in Constants EP series. Another EP, When I Live by the Garden and the Sea, surfaced in 2006. Copia, the early-2007 full-length, adopted a more symphonic character than earlier work.

As strings, vocals, piano, and clearer classical references entered the music, Cooper cultivated a dedicated audience among listeners drawn to post-rock and experimental indie. Sensory Projects, an Australian label, issued his first two albums (augmented by previously unreleased tracks) under the title Indecipherable Text, while Eluvium also collaborated on a split LP with Jesu.

Cooper briefly stepped away from the Eluvium moniker to release the 2008 album Miniatures under his own name. In 2009 Temporary Residence presented Life Through Bombardment, Vol. 1, a seven-LP box set that gathered most of the Eluvium discography to that date. Similes, issued in 2010, introduced percussion and vocals to an Eluvium recording for the first time and was supported by two EPs centered on its tracks—The Motion Makes Me Last and Leaves Eclipse the Light—along with the limited-edition single-piece album Static Nocturne, which runs fifty minutes. The soundtrack to the film Some Days Are Better Than Others, credited to Cooper alone, came out on Temporary Residence in 2011. The next year he again used another name, issuing the IDM-styled 7-inch “Worker” on Lefse Records as Martin Eden.

Nightmare Ending, the long-developed double-disc project featuring a vocal appearance by Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan, reached stores in 2013. Early in 2014 The Contemporary Austin art museum released the limited-edition LP Catalin, containing two pieces written for an installation by Charles Long. Shortly afterward a CD of Cooper’s original compositions accompanied Wisdom for Debris, a book of paintings by Jeannie Lynn Paske, who had supplied artwork for numerous Eluvium releases. Also in 2014 came the self-titled debut by Inventions, Cooper’s duo with Explosions in the Sky’s Mark T. Smith, plus the Eluvium EP Pedals/Petals on Vinyl Films. Inventions followed with their second album, Maze of Woods, and two EPs, Remixed and Blanket Waves, in 2015.

Temporary Residence issued Life Through Bombardment, Vol. 2 in 2016, a vinyl box compiling Eluvium material from Similes onward and including the previously unreleased disc Curious Things. Later that year the studio album False Readings On appeared. The digital-only Shuffle Drones arrived the next year, presenting twenty-three tracks each under a minute that were designed to connect seamlessly when played on random, thereby generating endless variations of drone pieces. Piano Works, Vols. 1 & 2 emerged in 2019, marking the first solo-piano recordings under the Eluvium name since An Accidental Memory in the Case of Death. Virga I, the opening entry in a series of ambient works, was first offered digitally in December 2019 and then on vinyl in early 2020, with Virga II following the subsequent year. For 2023’s (Whirring Marvels In) Consensus Reality, Eluvium combined algorithmic procedures with conventional songwriting to examine humanity’s intricate ties to technology. Sections of the album were assembled remotely through video conferencing involving members of Portland experimental electronics duo Golden Retriever as well as musicians from the American Contemporary Music Ensemble and the Budapest Scoring Orchestra.