Grouper

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"Liz Harris' one-woman Grouper project has been gathering a lot of steam of late, with the haunting Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill sneaking into some pretty diverse top 10 lists last year, and continuing to build momentum. Not unlike her songs, I guess, which surreptitiously churn their way into your consciousness, blending the hallucinatory slow-building swirl of psychedelic experimentalists like Popul Vuh and Flying Saucer Attack with a more generous pop sensibility. This album could be seen as a throwaway, recorded in 2006 it was originally released as an ultra-limited vinyl LP that disappeared long before you ever knew you wanted it. But want it, you did, or should have at least. Cover the Windows and the Walls is a gem, containing some of Harris' best moments. It's a bit less refined than Dragging..., but no less satisfying, with a wash of sound that encompasses some of Harris' finest flowers, and a pop sensibility that is positively shoegaze. The CD is limited too, 1000 copies for the world, and this will be gone before you know it. Don't sleep on it again; it's not to be missed." - Other Music

"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! Absolutely and emphatically recommended." - Aquarius Records

"One of the releases we get asked about most often and an absolute treasure for anyone lucky enough to already own a copy. "Cover The Windows And The Walls" was Grouper's first vinyl-only release back in 2007 and fetches tidy wedges of cash on the second hand market, particularly over the last 12 months when Grouper's status has sky-rocketed. We've just never been able to contain our undying love for Liz Harris and over the last couple of years she has shot to the top of our favourite artists list with her inexplicably mesmerising blend of shoegazer signatures and psych-driven narratives. Put another way, her music partially fits into so many brackets - drone, ambient, doom, folk, acid folk, shoegaze, psych etc etc - and yet doesn't really sound like anything you'll have heard before. On this amazing album almost every piece has decomposed, feedback laden, almost drowned guitar sounds underpinning each note, creating a soup of electric noise not so far removed from My Bloody Valentine's classic 'Loveless'. This is breathtaking, heart trembling music. The opening title track is possibly one of the finest Harris has yet committed to record, with the curving waves of guitar perfectly matched against her unique vocals - still smothered in curls of smoking noise and crumbling ambience. I find it hard to articulate my feelings about this music, it's just the sort of record you can play and fall deeply into, becoming slowly enveloped in some of the most gorgeous and subtle harmonies this side of the spiritual plain. I won't say any more save that this is a strictly limited pressing of 500 copies of which we only have a measly 100 - UTTERLY ESSENTIAL PURCHASE!" - Boomkat