Grouper - False Horizon (2016)

Grouper is the solo project of musician, artist and producer Liz Harris, who was born on 15 July 1980 in Northern California, and who grew up around the San Francisco Bay area, in a Fourth Way commune there which was inspired by the philosophy of George Gurdjieff. The community was known as "The Group", which would later serve as some inspiration for the moniker Grouper. After finishing at university with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, Harris briefly moved to Los Angeles, where she worked with Mayo Thompson at Patrick Painter. Her first album was an eponymous self-released full-length CD-R, followed later that year by 'Way Their Crept' on Free Porcupine Society Records. In 2008 she released 'Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill', which turned out to be her breakthrough album, with AllMusic reviewer Heather Phares praising it for showing more musical range than Harris' previous work, and for "letting more melody, more structured songs, and even a few phrases emerge from the ether", while Pitchfork gave it 8.2 stars, calling the work "an arresting album of pastoral psychedelic pop". Harris has continued to release albums since then which challenge the listener, including one consisting of two parts: 'A I A: Dream Loss' and 'A I A: Alien Observer', and a pair of longform tape collage pieces which originally took shape for commissioned performances in New York and Berkeley. Her 2014 release 'Ruins' is relatively stripped-down, with just piano, voice and field recordings, and while being only 22 minutes long, 2018's 'Grid Of Points' garnered generally positive reviews. On 27 July 27 2021, Harris announced a new Grouper album, 'Shade', and released its first single 'Unclean Mind', and to trace how she got to that point, from her self-released CD-R to her 12th official album on the respected Kranky label, here is a collection of her non-album singles and other rarities, recorded between 2007 and 2016, and spanning her career from her ambient instrumentals to her singer/songwriter phase.   

Track listing

01 Quiet Eyes
02 Everyone In Turn
03 Hold
04 Water People
05 Hollow Tone
06 I'm Clean Now
07 Sick
08 Cassiopeia
09 Headache
10 Moving Machine
11 False Horizon
12 Demona