ELUVIUM - Nightmare Ending

A return to form for the producer of one of the alltime great ambient/classical albums, 2007's Copia. After an ill-advised journey into vocal music on his last album, 2010's Similes, Matthew Cooper has returned to his instrumental roots on his latest, with the exception of one track featuring guest vocals from Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo. This new album has already jumped to the top of my Best Of 2013 list.

"Intended as a follow-up to 2007′s Copia, Nightmare Ending incubated while Cooper dove down a more pop-oriented channel in 2010 with two EPs and a full-length. Featuring both vocals and something like percussion for the first time, Similes showed that Eluvium’s elegiac movements could be mapped onto the verse-chorus-verse blueprint. This experiment in constraint proved to be the exercise necessary to finish Nightmare Ending, a double album that plays out as the sum of all Cooper has learned through Eluvium. The title could allude to the release that comes after a long period of creative frustration—the feeling of finally getting it all out." - Consequence of Sound