#eluvium

It opens with the glacially paced “A.M.” a series of long, blowsy tones that overlap and interleave themselves, emerging as slowly as the first rays of light on the horizon, but gaining grandeur and density as the piece develops. There are a few, very few, spoken words interspersed, but mostly this track is about tones, some bright and trumpet like, others shifting and reedy. There’s not so much a melody as a sense of tidal movement.

“Hallucination II” is even more event-less, an airy hiss topped by slowly evolving synth washes. It’s the kind of thing that, if you consider it long enough, you may start to sense patterns, complexities, emotional resonances, though whether they are there in the music itself or in you is an open question. Think of it as the musical equivalent of a Mark Rothko painting, at first glance an undifferentiated block of color, but on further inspection, full of subtle variations.

The title track is the disc’s most emphatic, the one that comes closest to a structured melody, with its church organ blasts of meditative sound. It’s rising motif is sheathed in breathy distortions. You hear the melody as if it’s shrouded in wind and mist, and it is all the more beautiful for the indefinite haze that clings to it.  

This is not music for half-listening. You have to immerse yourself to make any sense of it. And yet, if you do, it will transport you to other, calmer places, imaginary environments that keep all that threatens at bay.