Simple Pleasures

Two simple chords have taken over Matthew Coopers life, writes Dan Rule.

ONE thing that you cant help but notice about Matthew Cooper is his peculiarly charming diffidence. He speaks in a hushed near whisper, he over-explains things, he anxiously backtracks, apologises and laughs nervously to himself.

"Ive kind of always tended to be a bit of a nervous and shy person," he says, taking a deep breath. "But this is one thing that Ive always felt that I could do and that makes sense to me, you know. Its definitely clear like that."

He is referring to the shimmering piano and guitar-fuzzed sonic scapes of Eluvium, his five-year-old solo instrumental project which, in its short life, has become one of the most highly regarded compositional voices in contemporary ambient music.

"I feel as though music and creating music and hearing music are a far more overwhelming part of my life that anything else could even come close to being," Cooper says.

Music runs deep for the ever-quiet Cooper. His opaque, static-rich guitar motifs and fragile piano melodies - mentioned in the same breath as Brian Eno, Kevin Shields and Fennesz - are neither convoluted nor contrived. Unlike so much experimental material, Coopers sound is characterised by sheer compositional economy and emotive expression.

"I often actually worry that my more compositionally minded pieces may not carry the same emotional weight as the more motif and drone-based works," he says on the phone from his home in Portland, Oregon, on the eve of his first Australian tour.

"Its almost as if being aware of the actual instrumentation can distract from the emotional content, whereas a more abstracted series of drones or something can just wash over and envelop you."

Theres no better example of this sensibility than Zerthis was a Shivering Human Image, the 15-minute opus that anchors Coopers 2003 debut long-player Lambent Material - finally released in Australia last year as part of twin-album collection Indecipherable Text - and goes a way to defining Eluviums stunning power. Relying purely on a two-note, fuzz-texture, minor-key guitar motif, the track pulses with the kind of expressive purity and poignancy that make notions of song structure, verse and chorus seem trite.

Having studied classical piano as a child growing up in Memphis and Louisville, Kentucky, Cooper considers the reductive Zerthis as the epitome of his "unlearning" and the birth of Eluvium.

"I had sort of given up on the concept of trying to get somebody to release my music, and so I just started making sounds that I wanted to hear and which I wasnt able to find anywhere else," he says.

"Once in a while, someone does want to hear 15 minutes worth of a little bit of a shifting tone with a nice, warm, rich static to it. So I created that just to have something to listen to. Strangely enough, as soon as I started writing music like that, people started paying more attention."

Cooper has led a prolific existence since, living and working in Portland and releasing three critically acclaimed records - 2004s An Accidental Memory, In the Case of Death, 2005s stunning Talk Amongst the Trees and last years narcotic, piano-based oeuvre Copia.

But rather than spout some extended explanation for his output, the 29-year-old is typically philosophical.

"I think I was really lucky to find Portland and the north-west, which is just a world away from Kentucky," Cooper says. "Its a very inspiring place. Its so open and there are mountains and fir trees and water and the ocean. Its just such an amazing place to sit and think.

"I often think, you know, imagine if I hadnt moved here and I hadnt done all these other things, would I have ever figured out the way that two very simple chords played back and forth for a very long time can actually create something worth hearing."

Eluvium plays with Explosions in the Sky at the Corner Hotel on February 16.

Indecipherable Text is out through Sensory Projects/Inertia

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