Liz Harris

‘Grouper’ is the stage name of Elizabeth (Liz) Harris from Portland, Oregon.
Her debut album, Way Their Crept, was released on the Free Porcupine Society label in 2005. This was followed a year later by ‘Wide’ on the same label. Last year she put out a brilliant limited edition LP ‘Cover The Windows And Walls’ (on Root Strata) . Now her third ‘official’ full length on Type Records is about to hit the streets – charmingly entitled ‘Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill’ .
She has been involved in collaborative releases contributing a track to Xiu Xiu’s ‘Remixed & Covered’ and four tracks to a split release with Inca Ore, but it is her solitary work which is the most transfixing.
Grouper may seem a paradoxical name for a woman who in an interview with Rich Hopkins of Digitalis said: “I like doing things myself, and in my own way, I think because I tend to work slowly and sort of obsessively, which doesn’t always work well involving another person.”
The word “grouper” actually comes from the name of a type of fish found on warm and tropical seas.it derives from  ‘Garoupa’ a word in the Russian dialect of the Enchained Forest region of Siberia, and not from the English word for  ‘group’ . So now you know!
I doubt if Liz Harris did too much research into fish species when she came up with the name but while listening I found myself making a tenuously fishy link by thinking of the lines of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ wherein John Lennon urges us “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream”.
The Beatles’ track was groundbreaking in that it was one of the first to introduce Avant-Garde effects like processed vocals and taped loops into commercial pop. The words too, about surrendering to the shining void and listening to the color of dreams left little doubt that this was a celebration of the mind expanding qualities of LSD. It also stands as good advice for listening to the music of Grouper.
It could be argued that the floaty, druggy feel of Liz Harris’ music is a distant (and weirder) relation of the Fab Four’s’experimental noodling although the intensity of her sound is unlikely to trouble the pop charts.
It might be (and has been) classed as a species of Ambient Music, but it is far removed than the sophorific ‘mood music’ that trades under that genre.
Neither can it be classed as pure noise – there are too many melodies buried deep somewhere beneath the layers of feedback, distortion and delay.
Where you place it is of course largely academic.
What is plain is that with each release she creates a deep listening experience of incredible celestial sounds.
Who needs drugs when you can enjoy this natural high?

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Thanks to Scott McMillan of mapsadaisical for kindly granting me permission to use his great photo of Liz Harris which was taken during a show at Whitechapel Gallery, London on 9th November 2007.