30 For 30: Grouper

I turn 30 on February 18th. I want to celebrate this, and get myself back into writing, by spending a few weeks rambling about the 30 things that have meant the most to me over the years. These will be from music, movies, books, videogames, and maybe even art and other things for good measure. I feel like my life has been much more about the things I've experienced than it has the people I've known or the places I've traveled to, and these 30 things have helped to make my 30 years more than worth all the innumerable bad things. Expect heartfelt over-sharing and overly analytical explanations galore! In part 9, I talk about insomnia and a musician who sounds like a dream.

There are generally a few nights each week where I suffer from insomnia. It's not that I don't sleep at all, it's that I can't turn my mind off and I get restless. That yawny/sleepy feeling never kicks in so I toss and turn for an hour or two before getting up and doing something to kill time until I'm actually able to sleep. Some weeks I have two or three of these kind of nights in a row, depending on what's going on in my life at the time, and it's always at these points that I now reach for Grouper, the music project of Liz Harris.


There's something almost subconscious about her music, as if you're listening to songs pulled into our world from a dream. It's for this reason I think her music means the most to me when I'm in the grip of insomnia. This music has the texture of dreams, which isn't to say that it's all calm and pretty sounding. Particularly on her earlier records, there is a dark and claustrophobic quality to some of it that speaks to people who have fitful wake-up-every-hour-or-so sleep patterns or frequent stress nightmares.

'Hold A Desert, Feel Its Hand' (2005)

Still, it's definitely the more serene and otherworldly aspects of Grouper's music that I love most. Every night during one particularly lengthy bout with insomnia, I used to play A I A: Alien Observer very quietly, over and over, until I fell asleep. You might assume that an album putting me to sleep would be an insult but there's a huge difference between a metaphorical “putting me to sleep because it's so boring” and a literal “putting me to sleep because it calms me down.” In fact, Grouper released a two track album called Violet Replacement with a 51 minute song called 'Sleep' that seems expressly designed for this purpose.

'Alien Observer' (2011)

Beyond the way the music of Grouper makes me feel, though, Liz Harris means something to my life because I'm inspired by the searching quality of her output. From the beginning, she has continually experimented with the way her music sounds and pushed herself to try new things. Just when she seemed to get more streamlined and songwriting focused with the masterful Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill, she followed it up with a double album that sounds like a more focus take on the eerie and atmospheric style of the previous album, Cover The Windows And The Walls. I have a split record she did with Inca Ore which features her playing a lot of piano, something she still doesn't do too much, giving it a unique quality. Then there's the interesting collaborations she's done more recently, of which I think the Mirroring project with Tiny Vipers is a near-perfect combination of their two styles. So I guess what I'm getting at is, I'm inspired by the way Liz Harris does whatever she wants to. She is never content to keep making the same album over and over, yet there's a consistency to her style which would be ruined if she made too dramatic of a change. Try to imagine what Grouper would sound like as a full band, with drums and all, and it wouldn't be the same.



As much as I don't like judging people by what kind of music they like, I do think in certain cases you can learn something about their personality using this method. Grouper has always been a good litmus test for me, since I think you have to have a specific mindset and taste to 'get' it. I guess this is true with many cult bands or movies, but in Grouper's case I think there is just such a small percentage of people who will become as obsessed with Liz Harris's music as I am that I feel closer, somehow, to my fellow devotees. To put it another way, in an ideal world I would be married to Liz Harris. But in an acceptable world, I would be married to someone who also can't stop listening to Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill.

'We've All Gone To Sleep' (2008)

Grouper- A I A : Alien Observer/ A I A : Dream Loss

It's difficult to express the kind of impact Grouper's Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill (hereafter referred to as Dragging) had on my life. “Difficult” because the impact has been subtle; I can't point to any specific revelations or feelings it's given me yet I know it's had an impact all the same. I think about it or hear its songs sometimes when I'm daydreaming or just after I've woken up. There is something profound and moving in the music of Dragging that speaks to me on a level similar to My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. In both cases I can specifically define how the music works, how it was made, what genre it belongs to, and so forth, but all this objective talk of the “form” the music takes doesn't begin to capture the subjective experience, its “function” if you will. Yet these are albums that a wide variety of people have very similar subjective experiences with and I think that speaks to the success of the creators to bring their specific visions and ideas to life.

Superficially, Liz Harris's 2011 double album as Grouper, entitled A I A : Alien Observer/A I A : Dream Loss, sounds identical Dragging. She uses the same haunting, ethereal vocals, floating in from the distance on dense fog walls of reverb and delay, and the same indistinct guitar/organ drones, simple repeated melodic motifs, and soundscapes. The total effect is like standing in dense fog with the music seeming to hang in the air and also simultaneously to be slowly drifting away from the listener. So, pretty much like Dragging, then? Kind of. The subjective experience of this double record is quite different from Dragging. The songs on these two albums are longer, less structured, and less traditional. The music feels more unsettled and uncertain than the last album. This mostly comes on Dream Loss, where Harris even brings in some distortion on the noisy 'I Saw A Ray', a track that would seem more at home as an instrumental on a No Age record or perhaps on Wye Oak's recent Civilian.

If Dragging was a water album, Alien Observer and Dream Loss are wind and cave albums. The vocals on the aptly named 'Wind Return' from Dream Loss sound like they were recorded on a portable mic while standing on a windswept beach at dawn, Harris getting louder and less coherent to be heard over the wind and water. The title track of Alien Observer tells a tale of wanting 'to take a spaceship to the stars', which would seem to suggest a spacey sounding track, but it's the simplest arrangement (and shortest song) on the two records. A simple bubbling keyboard line and Harris's almost-discernible vocals come through relatively restrained reverb, suggesting a deep cave either on a high mountain or far under the sea.

By any normal standards, the A I A albums are monotonous and distant-sounding, neither engaging the listener nor providing any memorable songs. Hell, half the time the songs bleed into each other, as 'I Saw A Ray' does into 'Soul Eraser', as if the delineations between tracks are meaningless. Yet judged by the standards of capturing a moment, a feeling, or an atmosphere, Alien Observer and Dream Loss are as perfectly realized as Dragging even if the things they make you think or feel are more vague and less comforting than that record.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Great Album Covers- Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill

My original inspiration for doing this blog series about album covers came from a random old booklet that was included with some records I had ordered from Insound.com In it, there was an essay from someone talking about Grouper's Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill, and it really got me to thinking about how certain album covers had filled me with strong feelings, like dread or sadness or love, in a similar way to what the essay was talking about.

I have to confess that for some reason the album art never shows up when I play this album in iTunes, and I don't own the vinyl, so the cover art rarely occurs to me when I listen to the album. The music seems more tranquil and...aquatic than this cover would make you think. It's also a more accessible record than her new double album, but I'll get to that eventually.

I feel like the lighting is what makes this cover work. If it were better lit, it would look like a silly little girl in a Halloween costume pouting at her parents. But with some haze and darkness going on, the little girl becomes a figure of uncertain menace, like coming across Bigfoot in the forest and being unsure how afraid you should be.

Weekly Whiskey Episode 8

Hey presto, it's episode 8!

Grouper- Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill

It could that I'll have to eat my words someday, but the more time that passes since the 1991 release of Loveless by My Bloody Valentine, the less likely it seems the band will ever release another album. Kevin Shields has made too many announcements over the years that have never come to fruition, and despite their surprising reunion and subsequent shows in '08 and '09, little news has come about any new recorded output. As with rumors and speculation about Neutral Milk Hotel ever recording again, it's best to not get your hopes up. Besides, what do you really want out of a potential follow up to Loveless? It's such a complete and perfect album; anything My Bloody Valentine could possibly record would either be too slavishly similar or too different to be comparable. Even other bands who have taken inspiration from it, or have outright copied its sound, don't come close.

Every so often, though, there's an album that has a similar quality to it that reminds me of Loveless. It's an indefinable trait or atmosphere that has me grasping at adjective straws: dreamlike, haunting, sex-less, warm but emotionally detached, etc. Boards Of Canada's music is this way for me. No, it doesn't sound anything like Loveless, but it shares those qualities. Grouper's Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill, however, shares those qualities and sounds like Loveless. Kind of. The easiest and laziest way to describe this album is that it's like an acoustic guitar flipside to Loveless's electric guitar squall. The patient chording and reverb soaked vocals and guitar of 'Traveling Though A Sea' could easily be turned into a Loveless track if you sped it up a little and suffocated it in beautiful-but-noisy electric guitars. Hell, Liz Harris's vocals, though obviously female in origin and quite lovely at that, could easily mix into the ambiguous male/female mix of Loveless.

But Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill is no mere Loveless sound-a-like or follower. Panda Bear's solo acoustic album, Young Prayer, is another point of reference, and makes sense considering Grouper has opened for Animal Collective. But it's still only a point of reference. Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill has its own distinct feel and pacing, beginning with the red herring of 'Disengaged', which leads you to believe the album is going to be a lot more brutal and difficult than it is. Somehow Harris wrings a lot of variety out of just her vocals, acoustic guitar, and what must be some kind of subtle keyboards/organs. And of course, the ever present reverb. In fact, the reverb on this album isn't like anything else I've heard: it's like reverb from natural locations, such as abandoned tunnels, high ceiling'd haunted mansions, and bottomless canyons. All of this bundled up with tape hiss that sometimes is audible, sounding less like a shoddy bedroom recording and more like another texture. The stirring of leaves in a forest on a windy day, say, or perhaps someone running the sink in the kitchen while you're laying on the couch trying to take a nap.

There is no wasted space and no accidents on Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill. Everything is completely purposeful and precise even if the whole thing never sounds as polished and sterile as that description suggests. There's a naturalistic perfection to the album, like a perfectly formed diamond erupting from a volcano or the mathematically precise shells of certain animals. I don't really know anything about Liz Harris or the recording of this album, and I don't want to. It would spoil the magic to know what she's singing on the borderline-angelic title track, or what the story is behind the instantly memorable album cover, or what kind of effects pedals she uses to make that sound that segues 'Tidal Wave' into 'We've All Time To Sleep.'

I listen to a lot of music, but it's very rare I come across something that's as immediately arresting as Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill. It's the sort of thing you hear and all you want to do is lie down somewhere comfortable and listen to it, over and over. It's been the soundtrack, over the past month or so, to both some happy times for me as well as some very recent and incredibly painful news about one of my family members. This is an album that makes me feel and think things which make all of the old stand-by adjectives I usually bestow on other music hollow and overblown in comparison. With any luck, the cult around it will only grow with time just as it has for My Bloody Valentine and Neutral Milk Hotel.

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5