Portland-based ambient musician Matthew Cooper returns with his Eluvium project this year, and he will release his LP False Readings On via Temporary Residence on September 2nd. We last reported on the musician this past May when his track “Uncharted Your Lessoning” was part of Red Bull Music Academy‘s Shattered Streams, where it looped for a day while slowly “decaying”. Cooper’s music was a natural fit for a project seeking to engage “modern listening habits” in intriguing new ways, and for his upcoming Eluvium LP the musician tackles an equally weighty subject matter with an hour-long meditation on “self-doubt, anxiety, and separation from one’s self”.
What started as a musical project exploring “cognitive dissonance in modern society” soon became a mirror by which the artist was forced to confront his own existential dilemma. While the process must have been creatively harrowing, a track like “Fugue State” is emotionally engaging and ultimately uplifting. Muted shades of looped melody are alternately taken up and layered into cloudy expanses–as organ notes swell–before operatic blasts of treated vocals burst through this song’s blue-gray mood with rousing radiance.
