Nightmare Ending

Ambient-drone masterpiece. This is the seventh studio album Portland musician Matthew Cooper has recorded under the Eluvium name, and it’s a rapturously beautiful synthesis of electronics and real instruments—organic music for the 21st century. The sonic complexity of the music somehow gives each piece widescreen proportions and astonishing coziness at the same time; these compositions are engulfing, warm, melodic, melancholy, dramatic, earthy, and gritty. Music that asks the listener to create an accompanying narrative, to imagine.

(Flagrantly non-objective aside: When I first heard Eluvium and a few related artists as an impressionable early teen, my life changed. If you play this, maybe you’ll change some listener’s life, too.)

No words (except 2-7), no FCCs. Favorites: 1-1, 1-4, 2-2, 2-4, 2-5, 2-7.

Disc 1
1. *(9:06)—Stately, neoclassical, bold, major-key. Features piano and organ. Baroque music for the computer age.
2. (7:10)—The swirling, droning counterpart to track one. Brighter, darting tones slide in.
3. (2:15)—Harsher, more metallic tones. Chugging sounds.
4. *(8:42)—Builds slowly and grows noisy. Drones that sound like distant horns, harbingers of something grand yet threatening.
5. (3:53)—Piano. Soothing, welcoming, uplifting.
6. (6:17)—Subdued drones and piano. Chilly, wind-like sounds.
7. (5:22)—Shuffling, machine-like. Glitchy midsection. Triumphant finale.
Disc 2
1. (3:26)—Heavily reverbed piano, swooshing sounds. Fades into track 2.
2. *(8:49)—Sad, epic. Soft, weeping loops. Crescendos gradually to a huge, piano-driven climax.
3. (4:01)—Piano. Simple, peaceful.
4. **(9:18)—Classical feel to this. Muted, drifting first half. Around -4:15, the sounds surge forward, a fuzzy picture brought into blinding clarity. Second half is elegiac, ecstatic, drop-everything-you’re-doing-and-listen beautiful.
5. *(4:20)—Piano. Light, delicate, fluttering.
6. (2:50)—Bass drones, mechanical sounds, slow piano. Long fade-out.
7. *(8:16)—Only vocal piece. Features Ira from Yo La Tengo. Slow, majestic. Layer upon layer of sound appears, and then at -1:00, a soft close.