Shade
Listening to Liz Harris’ music as Grouper, the word that comes to mind is “psychedelic.” Not in the cartoonish sense—if anything, the Astoria, Oregon-based artist feels like a monastic antidote to spectacle of almost any kind—but in the subtle way it distorts space and time. She can sound like a whisper whose words you can’t quite make out (“Pale Interior”) and like a primal call from a distant hillside (“Followed the ocean”). And even when you can understand what she’s saying, it doesn’t sound like she meant to be heard (“The way her hair falls”). The paradox is one of closeness and remove, of the intimacy of singer-songwriters and the neutral, almost oracular quality of great ambient music. That the tracks on *Shade*, her 12th LP, were culled from a 15-year period is fitting not just because it evokes Harris’ machine consistency (she found her creative truth and she’s sticking to it), but because of how the staticky, white-noise quality of her recordings makes you aware of the hum of the fridge and the hiss of the breeze: With Grouper, it’s always right now.
Recorded over the last 15 years, and alternating between stripped-down folk and thickets of distortion, Shade takes Grouper’s careful balance between intimacy and inscrutability to a new extreme.
With its sharp tonal distinctions from track to track, the first Grouper album in three years calls attention to Liz Harris…
Liz Harris' music as Grouper is always beautiful, but Shade is perhaps the first of her albums that reflects most, if not all, of the different ways in which it's beautiful.
Liz Harris's latest album as Grouper contains some of her most and least accessible work, from more simplistic cuts to swirling rave-ups.
Over the past two decades, Liz Harris has embarked on a series of northward moves up the Pacific — Los Angeles, Portland and then further no...
Grouper hits differently: this is a known fact. The music of Liz Harris seems to tap some limbic accord, its density of humming waves and layers
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