#grid of points

[authoroftheaccident]

An interview with artist and musician Liz Harris

What’s a habit you find yourself returning to when you make work? Do you fight against it or accept it as part of you?

Shutting others out. I struggle with that, and I accept it. I think a better/grayer balance is possible; I’ve worked towards that.

What does your curiosity look like? How do you explore things?

Best alone or unwatched at least, with lots of space and time, and then, no boundaries, at least when I was small, and sometimes today. I have to make hard walls in order to relay any of it. If I feel too seen or checked upon I freeze. I was teased too much I think, for spacing out, for not being a great word-user. I couldn’t explain to anyone what I was doing, talking to rocks and animals, feeling electricity coming off the ocean.

What are some of your favorite ways to communicate, besides words?

Words I only like when I have lots of time to form them or can use them more like paint or rocks, thrown around loosely.

I spent a lot of childhood talking to ghosts by inviting them to move my body a certain way or make me walk somewhere, use a pen I was holding to send me messages; working at made-up methods of telepathy. I needed friends. I think it’s ok to laugh at this, and I believe in what happened. Some of it was truly demonic. Mostly it was magical.

[x]

[4evafallen]

grouper - driving

[fresherbrine]

Grid of Points by Grouper

[tapehissorchid]

Grouper – Driving

[thebittersweetdistractor]

GROUPER - Driving

Next month, Liz Harris, the mysterious artist who records as Grouper, will release a new album called ‘Grid Of Points’. We’ve already heard the first single ‘Parking Lot’ and today she’s shared another gorgeous new song called ‘Driving’.

‘Grid Of Points’ is out 4/27 on Kranky.

[sxyx]

comfortable

[thebittersweetdistractor]

GROUPER - Parking Lot

Next month, Liz Harris, the mysterious artist who records as Grouper, will release a new album called ‘Grid Of Points’. The new song 'Parking Lot' is online now, and it's a beautifully sad piece of music inspired by a scene from the 1970 experimental film Zabriskie Point. Harris told NPR:

I heard a lot about the movie Zabriskie Point from Roy Montgomery and Paul Clipson years before I finally saw it. There is a climactic scene in the California desert — writhing bodies, frenzied dancing; anxiety and pleasure confused in a massive primordial orgy of symbolic transformation. Poetic depiction of the political and social turmoil of the sixties, a return to human nature, the raw chaotic power of innocence and the desire for change.

I was struck by how presciently the film captures an essence of the desert I had felt, the sharp contrast given objects by bright light, colors popping while also in retreat. Something psychological, and polar. Compression of experience. The heat an immediate reminder of our delicate mortality. In the desert it becomes small triumph simply to make it across a hot parking lot. In the brutality of its extremes we are reduced to puppets, silhouettes cast upon a screen, thrown upon a stage. Simple acts becoming heightened and more difficult, a series of amplified gestures.

‘Grid Of Points’ is out 4/27 on Kranky.

[mitjalovse]

The ambient music of the United States of America contains a vast compendium of all the possibilities of the idiom as we have seen. Still, I would dare to propose that a strong strand of the style in America remains connected with the modern classical like in the case of Grouper. The latter serves as a moniker for the sonic explorations of Liz Harris who also adds another prominent component of the contemporary version of the genre Eno 'established', i.e. dream pop. Thus, her compositions do resemble those of her peers, particularly those who release their works for the label she dwells in, Kranky, but she does put her own spin on the influences they share. You see, there is something quite austere about her pieces, the landscape she visits are stark.