Since first mentioning I own the Grouper LP Cover The Windows And The Walls, my inbox has been pounded harder than a pornstar’s asshole. At least a dozen people have contacted me asking to transfer my record to digitized files that can be enjoyed by Internet Grouper groupies around the world. Apparently someone else tried it, but it came out poorly? I don’t know, it’s a pretty weird sounding record, maybe they got it right and your ears got it wrong. As a little joke, I made the infinite drone at the end of side 2 its own track and recorded it for a minute or two before fading it out. All the tape his is intentional, maybe that’s why people think the other homemade “rips” of this album sound shitty.
From the Root Strata website:
“Cover The Windows And The Walls is the first vinyl only release by Portland resident Liz Harris under her Grouper moniker. Slightly shedding back the layers of billowing twilight distortion and murmur, these songs reveal more of the acoustic guitar & vocal core that has always been at the center of Grouper’s tape hiss blues. This record is a stunning document of shimmering dream melodies that feel a lot more like ancient rituals rather than songs. Playing to her strengths, Liz has created her most arresting material to date. ‘Lost in a Dreamworld, West Coast Natural'”
From the Aquarius Records website:
“It doesn’t really seem possible that the music of Grouper could get any more beautiful, any more majestic and epic, or any more mysterious and dreamlike. No, but what it can do is change, and grow, expand, and subtly alter its shape and timbre, it’s coloring and shading, which is what it has been doing, on every single outing, but never so much as on Cover The Windows And Walls. The core of Grouper’s sound remains unchanged, dense bleary eyed fields of druggy reverb, thick swirls of blurred vocals, smeared into indistinct melodies, all abstract and shimmery, soft focus and billowy, the musical version of those soft fuzzy grey clouds that fill the sky at twilight. It’s still an impossible blend of Arvo Part, Morton Feldman and Skullfower, but the new record sounds a little bit more, well, folky maybe, or perhaps slightly less tripped out. A lot of it has to do with the vocals, which have attained an until now unheard of clarity. Which in no way means you can actually hear the vocals, they are still another gauzy layer in Grouper’s blown out soundscape, but, sometimes, they -are- a bit clearer, you can actually pick out words here and there, sometimes even whole lines. Before, if we hadn’t been told, we wouldn’t necessarily have even known that the main element of Grouper’s sound was in fact vocals. They were that indistinct and that drenched in FX. But here, it actually sounds like a singer, singing songs, but just barely, it’s almost like listening to some super lonesome stripped down folk, recorded onto a wax cylinder, and then broadcast through a huge speaker mounted at the very bottom of an elaborate cave system, the songs careening back and forth and picking up more and more reverb and echo with every bounce, until they become this blissed out beautiful blur. Thick buzzing single guitar notes spread out into wavery fields of murky muted twang, which wrap themselves serpent like around the equally disembodied vocals. Imagine a field recording of ghosts performing ancient folk songs, a whispery thrum, so barely audible, that it’s nearly impossible to capture, but once it is, and the sound is turned up enough to be audible to the human ear, it becomes this gorgeously distorted smear of sound. What else can we say about Liz Harris and her Grouper project? We’ve hardly heard anything this beautiful and mysterious ever. EVER!”
Grouper
Cover The Windows And The Walls
MegaUpload DL Link
Tracklist:
01. Cover The Windows And The Walls
02. Opened Space
03. Down To The Ocean
04. Heart Current
05. It Feels Allright
06. You Never Came
07. Follow In Our Dreams
08. Drone
