Grouper AIA: Alien Observer
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About
As Grouper, Liz Harris combines aspects of ambient, psychedelic, and folk music as well as dream pop into music that is equally mysterious and moving. The singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist uncovers different nuances within her style on each of her many releases, which range from the lush and relatively poppy territory of 2008's widely acclaimed Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill to 2012's sprawling double-album A l A to more intimate works like 2018's Grid of Points. By borrowing from all of these approaches on 2021's Shade, Harris highlighted the emotional intimacy underpinning Grouper's music from the beginning.
A resident of the Pacific Northwest, Harris was born in Northern California and grew up in a Fourth Way commune in the Bay Area. Since the community was known as "The Group," the commune's kids called themselves and their parents "groupers." It was a term that reflected Harris' identity as well as how she loosely organized the free-flowing elements in her music, and she adopted the name Grouper for her self-titled, self-released 2005 debut album.
Part of the distinctiveness can be traced to Harris' voice, which floats above the music and can sound delicate and shrouded and mist and can also evince an approachable earthiness. Particularly on Alien Observer, she layers her voice in a way that occasionally brings to mind Julianna Barwick, but Harris sounds comparatively distant and less immersive. Her voice haunts these songs instead of leading them; it's a presence and not a personality, and the voice and instruments are in balance, serving each other without any one element becoming more prominent.
The other aspect that sets Grouper apart is an approach to sound that feels somehow both cruder and more sophisticated than the majority of the lo-fi crop. It's crude in the sense that it seems to hearken back to the dark, home-recorded songs of an earlier era. David Pearce's music as Flying Saucer Attack, recorded mostly during the 1990s, was often referred to as "rural psychedelia," and that description would fit this pair of records. This music feels both spacey and expansive and also oddly intimate and grounded, the work of someone who has mastered her tools and knows how to get the most out of them. The sophistication comes from the care in presentation. This music doesn't sound like it was built from mistakes or thrown together, it seems precisely ordered and arranged even while it's often muffled and warbly and distorted. Every sound exists for a reason. — (via Pitchfork)
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Label: Kranky
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue
Country: US
Reissued: 2019 / Original Release: 2011
Genre: Electronic, Rock
Style: Experimental, Ethereal, Ambient
File under: Ambient / Experimental/ IDM
⦿
Share
- Regular price
- $48.00 SGD
- Regular price
-
- Sale price
- $48.00 SGD
- Unit price
- per
Couldn't load pickup availability
About
As Grouper, Liz Harris combines aspects of ambient, psychedelic, and folk music as well as dream pop into music that is equally mysterious and moving. The singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist uncovers different nuances within her style on each of her many releases, which range from the lush and relatively poppy territory of 2008's widely acclaimed Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill to 2012's sprawling double-album A l A to more intimate works like 2018's Grid of Points. By borrowing from all of these approaches on 2021's Shade, Harris highlighted the emotional intimacy underpinning Grouper's music from the beginning.
A resident of the Pacific Northwest, Harris was born in Northern California and grew up in a Fourth Way commune in the Bay Area. Since the community was known as "The Group," the commune's kids called themselves and their parents "groupers." It was a term that reflected Harris' identity as well as how she loosely organized the free-flowing elements in her music, and she adopted the name Grouper for her self-titled, self-released 2005 debut album.
Part of the distinctiveness can be traced to Harris' voice, which floats above the music and can sound delicate and shrouded and mist and can also evince an approachable earthiness. Particularly on Alien Observer, she layers her voice in a way that occasionally brings to mind Julianna Barwick, but Harris sounds comparatively distant and less immersive. Her voice haunts these songs instead of leading them; it's a presence and not a personality, and the voice and instruments are in balance, serving each other without any one element becoming more prominent.
The other aspect that sets Grouper apart is an approach to sound that feels somehow both cruder and more sophisticated than the majority of the lo-fi crop. It's crude in the sense that it seems to hearken back to the dark, home-recorded songs of an earlier era. David Pearce's music as Flying Saucer Attack, recorded mostly during the 1990s, was often referred to as "rural psychedelia," and that description would fit this pair of records. This music feels both spacey and expansive and also oddly intimate and grounded, the work of someone who has mastered her tools and knows how to get the most out of them. The sophistication comes from the care in presentation. This music doesn't sound like it was built from mistakes or thrown together, it seems precisely ordered and arranged even while it's often muffled and warbly and distorted. Every sound exists for a reason. — (via Pitchfork)
↓
Label: Kranky
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue
Country: US
Reissued: 2019 / Original Release: 2011
Genre: Electronic, Rock
Style: Experimental, Ethereal, Ambient
File under: Ambient / Experimental/ IDM
⦿
Share

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