Jefre Cantu introduced me to Grouper. We were talking about bands he’s worked with through his Root Strata label, and he picked up a copy of Cover The Windows And The Walls and told me that I needed to have it. He mentioned that it was limited to 300 copies, and that there were hardly any left. Grouper had a rapidly growing fanbase.
Since then I’ve tried my best to acquire the entire recorded output of Grouper (real name: Liz Harris), but as her fanbase grows, it becomes harder to track down some of the releases. The most recent split 7″ with City Center was sold out in a day. A copy of Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill recently fetched $110. To say that there is a thirst for her music would be a huge understatement.
“When describing Grouper, the most mentioned comparisons seem to be Arvo Part and Morton Feldman, Part no doubt because of the vocal/choral aspect, and Feldman because this is definitely a sort of dreamlike minimalism, but Grouper is definitely something else entirely. A murky dreamworld of shimmering guitar and indistinct voices, swirling clouds of smeared melody, drifting whirls of warm thick delay, and dense layers of mumbly reverb. It’s the sonic equivalent of wandering through some ghost town, almost everything obscured by thick fog, the streetlights, like distant lightning bugs, warm orange glows, staining the fog like a child’s fingerpaints, even sound can barely travel so you exist sonically in a tiny muffled and muted cocoon, like listening to the world around you with ears full of wet cotton. Drifting disembodied vocals drenched in thick dubby FX are spread out paper thin into nearly transparent sheets of gauzy whir, like a chorale of ghosts, singing in some vast underground cavern. Within all of this murk and fog, lurk heartbreaking melodies, perfect little melancholy pop songs, but almost completely obscured from view, so instead of hearing songs, it’s like barely remembering a little melody, or getting a tune stuck in your head only to have it fly away moments later, and struggling to remember just how that song went. A strangely emotional sonic trigger for lost memories, and indescribable landscapes, amorphous sounds, and a world both familiar and completely alien.
Unlike her freenoise / dronerock / whatever contemporaries, who are happy to just make a big loud sound, or push a few buttons and start a low rumbling drone, with Grouper, it’s more like the songs started out as proper songs, verses, choruses, sweet little melodies, gentle lilting vocals, but those songs were left in a corner, and allowed to get dusty, then set outside where they leaned for weeks, propped up against the side of the house, getting rained on, dappled with morning dew, they began to rust, and decay, weeds grew up around them, small animals made nests in them. Eventually, they were collected, and placed in a dusty old wagon, where they spent the majority of the journey, getting bumped and jostled, pieces breaking off, bits smearing into other bits, becoming less and less obviously songs, and more like the decayed husks of songs, still beautiful, and lovely in their own way, but lonely, and forgotten, until one day, they were all gathered up and placed in order, dusted off, polished up until they glow with some dim inner light, and thus they become Wide, and we close our eyes and listen…” – Aquarius Records
Grouper
Wide
MediaFire Download Link
Tracklist:
01. Make Me Over
02. Little Boat – Bone Dance (Audrey)
03. Imposter In The Sky
04. Giving It To You
05. Agate Beach
06. They Moved Everything
07. Black Blood
08. Shadow Rise, Drowned
09. Wide
