Review Summary: Beauty for beauty's sake.
It's only when things are removed from you that you truly realise how much you loved them... No, I'm not going to ramble on about a dead relative or pet, I'm talking about something much worse than that. At 4:37 this afternoon, someone decided to unplug me from
Copia. Now before you all send cards wishing me the best with clumsy, well meaning poetry attached, I would like to let you know that the disaster was swiftly rectified... and also that I learned something from the experience. That thing being: in the 4 hours that I had been listening to the LP, my mind had become emotionally dependent on the beauty emanating from it. The unplugging didn't only bring silence to my ears, it also brought with it a sense of this connection being severed.
Now that it's dark and I've fortified my position so that anyone attempting to remove me from my precious will have to put in a considerable amount of effort to do so (which, knowing them, they won't), it's become apparent that to my mind the music has become a living, breathing thing. When listening to
Copia, I'm not just passively letting the music flow over me as I would with many other ambient works, I'm having what can best be described as a conversation with it. In this conversation,
Copia sets the base and the tone and I both assign whatever meaning I desire to the sounds I hear and play extra tracks in my mind which end up shaping the LP into something truly personal.
It's not the case that my imagination does the bulk of the work,
Eluvium provides one hell of an experience. It takes everything at its own pace, with the pure ambient pieces slowly unfurling around you and the piano slipping inside to supply something more solid yet no less peaceful. The introduction of the piano does add a larger sense of insistence, however, and although initially useful in drawing the listener in to the conversation it quickens the pace by just a few too many degrees once you're inside. This is easily forgotten, especially when the closing tracks spin round again, but to see just a minuscule chip in
Copia in disheartening, because this is an LP that charms you. In effect, you end up wanting to love it... and you do.
But the best thing about
Copia, and I've left it till last for a reason, it it's purity; it distinctly lacks any disturbing undertones or attempts at vocal samples at all. This further pushes home the fact that this really is the listener's album and they can let their mind do what they want with it. Let's think of
Copia as a book, it doesn't excel simply due to the fact it's beautifully put together, it excels because in the presensce of beautiful art the mind will go to beautiful places.
