Here’s the gist: the remix sounds more like Eluvium than the new song does.

On “L.A.P.D. vs. N.Y.P.D.” dada Matthew Cooper truncates Pacific UV’s spiritualized “rock” into a chiming loop blanched by progressively deeper swamps of ambience, dragging the song under and forcing aesthetic submission. At two points Cooper throws in a sense-heightener, dappling cymbal splashes that dart back and forth over the channels, the second instance of which gives out to inhale before the submerged loop marches off into soundless depths. This is the Eluvium that most of us are accustomed to -- a slow mountain-mover that carries sonic wreckage on lapping waves of distortion, letting tidal repetition erode cognitive barriers until the ocean’s spitting up debris and jellyfish on your front porch. Try surviving Lambent Material (2003) or Talk Amongst the Trees (2005) without being swept out of your here and now, each invasive gift broken, glowing, and fragile.

“Prelude For Time Feelers” is the song that Temporary Residence is showcasing from Eluvium’s Copia, due out February 2007. Here, Cooper begins with a clear piano figure that recalls his 2004 EP An Accidental Memory in the Case of Death. But where that release found Cooper constrained by his approach (one-take solo piano pieces with no overdubs), this new track’s not a third over before Moby-esque string swells are pouring out over its brim. It’s still a flood of the senses, but perhaps the greatest attribute of “Time Feelers” is the way that it, through contrast, illustrates what made Eluvium’s past work so affecting: it was devastation internalized. By blowing up a fragment of a melody until its minutiae hung in the air, Cooper found a way to abstract the sound of the tsunami and earthquakes that wrack the innermost parts of a person, to mime to scale (and what a small/huge scale it is) the cataclysms that reduce emotional walls to rubble and reveal an ineffable beauty in their wake. “Prelude For Time Feelers” is all surface -- bright and pretty surface, yet surface; as such, it can’t help but disappoint.

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