“Clockwork Fables” holds out a hand, reaching for something, anything to touch. Eluvium’s newest album, the magnificent (Whirring Marvels In) Consensus Reality, explores humankind’s need for meaning. Matthew Robert Cooper’s searching, minimal piano arrangements of “Clockwork Fables” are also looking for connection, even if we’re not sure what we’ll find on the other side of that fog. Everyday moments are cast in steel and wistful resonance as a beacon, a moth’s light.
These tendrils are heightened by the imagery in the video. “The video was made from using various pieces of my life taken from my phone,” Cooper explains. “Presented mostly as day-to-day life and a touch of perception and memory in the silent objects and stillness that surround a person.” The ordinary images – a tree swaying in the hand, stacks of books, birds flying over a beach – feel otherworldy and distant through the treatments used. “The visual style was once a somewhat unique concept probably most synonymous with Richard Linklater’s ‘Waking Life.” Cooper continues, “I layered the renders on top of each other in a non-destructive manner to try and see what varying results could be produced and to what level I could make the mundane feel infected by the technological.”
(Whirring Marvels In) Consensus Reality is out now on Temporary Residence Ltd. Available via their website, Bandcamp, or streaming.
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