Eluvium - An Accidental Memory In Case Of Death

No - this isn't the new Eluvium, it's... the old one.  I saw this guy live when he opened for Mono a couple months ago, and to be honest it blew me away.  His careful keyboard work, along with the guitar and loopstation stuff he had going on, it really sounded fantastic.  To be honest, I'm not sure now if his albums can live up to the live thing, but in any case this album is hard to fault.  Consisting just of piano melodies, it's a breath of fresh air after one listens to such heavily instrumentated music as Broken Social Scene or Autolux.  Like Max Richter, Eluvium takes a classical sound and subverts it slightly - these aren't new classical compositions (nocturnes and sarabandes) so much as they are modern music done on a piano.

The first song introduces a melody briefly which is returned to at the end - a haunting little thing that I find myself whistling, badly, to myself at the strangest times.  The sound of the piano is more or less consistent throughout the record - warm and sustained, with either reverb on it or maybe it's just one of those actual piano pedals.  In any case, it's nice, and sounds organic and well-played in a technical sense, but without the sort of studio sterility that occasionally accompanies piano recordings.

The songs in general are different enough from one another, but share a few characteristics - most have a one-handed repeating figure while the other hand travels and harmonizes.  Not an especially surprising development, but just so you know, that's how the songs seem to be formed.  I'm not very good at describing simple, elegant music such as this, so I'll let you decide for yourself whether this is the kind of music you want - chances are you've already decided or already have this anyway.  Enjoy..

Here's "An Accidental Memory In Case Of Death," by Eluvium.