It’s not often that you go to the 9:30 Club and witness three very different shows in one night. Usually you find that the opener, or openers, as in this case, have at least some relative similarity to the main act. And perhaps a case can be made that the instrumental post-rock of headliner Explosions in the Sky, the punk-pop of The Paper Chase and the ambient electronica of Eluvium, all have a sense of drama to them, but whereas Explosions and Eluvium are like epic poems, The Paper Chase is just soap-opera-y. In fact, the disparity is so large that a stronger case could be made that the only thing linking The Paper Chase and Explosions in the Sky is that they are both from Texas.

When we arrived at the 9:30 Club Saturday night at 6:30 p.m. for the early show, we expected that the first of two openers would probably be the lesser of the two. Eluvium, a solo electronic act, proved us wrong by bringing a finely wrought and elegant set. Set to the visual imagery of nothing more than birds flying in the sky, Eluvium (a.k.a. Matthew Cooper) played, looped and layered guitar and keyboard, using pedals and a computer. To say his set was entrancing is understating his effect. He incorporated the sounds of pianos, guitars, strings, and woodwinds into his more electronic backdrop to create a building, ethereal, and at times isolating, atmosphere. Lest we start waxing philosophical here, we’ll just say that the music fit perfectly with the projection of the birds on the screen behind Eluvium — through the set they were soaring beautifully and occasionally sparsely, while towards the end of the set and the height of the build-up there were hundreds of birds over what appeared to be the top of a large sea barge. His set was contingent on this juxtaposition of the natural and technological, and he pulled it off in a highly palatable way. Let’s just say we’ll be listening to Eluvium’s newest album, Copia, on repeat in the days to come.