Martin Eden – Verions from Lefse Records on Vimeo.
Matthew Cooper started making music under the name Eluvium in 2003, and since then we have never known what to expect from each release: minimal ambience, solo piano, modern classical, static noise, stately and sonorous pop. Restlessness, restfulness, wonder, and wanderlust. Emotionally direct, and emotionally indirect. A listen to the Eluvium catalog is a wide-eyed stroll through a museum of different eras of the human experience. The diversity of sounds has been held together with a gorgeous but beguiling unity that always lets you know that Eluvium is your guide along this stroll.
It was a bit of a surprise to hear that Cooper’s latest project would be released under a different name, but a listen to that project makes the reasoning evident. It is a world of off-kilter beats and unidentifiable instrument loops and keyboard swells. It somehow manages to be cold and alien and warm and human. The album’s centerpieces, “Verions” and “Hum”, are woozy and swirling and darkly beautiful head nods that hint at some of the assumed influences for the album (The Field, Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, and Kraftwerk), while sounding a world apart from them. And a world apart from Eluvium.
The name for this new world of sound is Martin Eden. His debut LP, Dedicate Function, is now available on Lefse Records. He presents his first new music video from the album for “Verions”. Directed by Peter Luckner, the video is a multimedia collage that is a reaction to the line from the Jack London novel – Martin Eden: “Something’s wrong with your think-machine.” Check out the dreamscape over at XLR8R.
Martin Eden
Dedicate Function
(Lefse Records)
Street Date: Oct 9, 2012
1. vlad
2. short cut
3. verions
4. plantes
4. etc_etc
5. hum
6. return life
Links: Label