Music Is Dying Now: Grouper

22 сент. 2012 г.

Grouper

Grouper is the solo project for electro-acoustic ambient/noise musician Liz Harris, of Portland, Oregon. Harris' music is a mixture of softly-strummed guitar, Wurlitzer keys, and delicate vocals. Reverb and tape delay effects are used widely throughout Harris' recordings.

Harris’ first album was 2005’s Grouper, a self-released full-length CD-R, followed later that year by Way Their Crept on Free Porcupine (re-released in 2007 on Type Records). Other recordings include 2006's He Knows, released as a 3" CD, the 12" Weird Forest release Wide in 2007, and a 7" called Tried.

She released a collaboration album with Xiu Xiu in 2006, entitled Creepshow, as well as contributing a remix of "Tonite & Today" to 2007's Remixed & Covered compilation.

Harris released her third full-length album, Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, in 2008. Stereogum's Outsiders column included Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill in their Best LP's of 2008, and Gorilla vs. Bear ranked the album #2 of the year, noting that "2008 was a banner year for hazy, ethereal dream-pop, with Grouper's devastatingly beautiful Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill firmly implanting itself at the pinnacle of the broad genre." It featured at number 37 of Pitchfork Media's 50 Best Albums of 2008 – a previous review on the site praised the album as "druggy and sexy and arty and pretty". A review on Drowned in Sound called it "deeply meditative, almost spiritual... one of the most delicate, affecting albums of the year".

In the spring of 2009, Grouper was the supporting act for the high-profile Animal Collective tour in support of the latter's successful 2009 album, Merriweather Post Pavilion. NBC Washington's "Concert Picks" column said of Grouper, "The ambient one-woman post-rock band Grouper also makes this show a must-see (if you have tickets or connections or luck – otherwise, sorry, it’s sold out, sold out a long time ago). Liz Harris’ spooky, ethereal and surreal sounds are based on her acoustic, often avant garde guitar plucking and her quiet, hazy vocals. The minor key melodies are pretty despite a suspenseful nightmare quality."

Grouper was chosen by Animal Collective to perform at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival that they curated in May 2011.

Early in 2012, Grouper took a show entitled Violet Replacement on the road around the UK and Europe. Based around a pair of longform tape collage pieces which originally took shape for commissioned performances in New York and Berkeley, it further sinks her presence deep into its surroundings, turning the mix inside out.

Along similar lines, at Berlin's Club Transmediale festival in early February of 2012 Harris premiered a new work called Circular Veil in collaboration with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. Somewhere between an installation and a performance, it found her extending the pastoral drones and warm tape noise of her more concise music outward into seven hours of music, designed to mimic one full sleep cycle. The idea for that performance was seeded during a conversation with friend, composer and sound artist Lawrence English. The pair had collaborated together, and he had told her about performances he used to take part in that were specifically designed for people to sleep to. "I'd heard a bit, here and there, about shows that used to happen like that in the nineties but I had already designed this one piece for Berkeley Art museum specifically to be music you could listen to and fall asleep during." While that piece was only an hour long - a far cry from Circular Veil's full seven hours - the conversation piqued Harris' curiosity enough to attempt something grander in scale. "I ended up thinking about whether or not you could take those sort of tones and spread them out," she explains, "and literally make it something someone would sleep to - the length of an entire sleep cycle."