Grouper
Shade
Kranky
/
2021
CD
16.99
KRANK233CD
LP
25.99
KRANK233LP
Incl. VAT plus shipping / Orders from outside the EU are exempt from VAT
Tracklist
1Followed the ocean 2:55
2Unclean mind 3:51
3Ode to the blue 2:54
4Pale Interior 3:52
5Disordered minds 4:35
6The way her hair falls 2:36
7Promise 2:50
8Basement mix 5:18
9Kelso (Blue sky)6:16

The 12th full-length by Pacific Northwest artist Liz Harris aka Grouper is a collection of songs spanning fifteen years. She characterizes Shade as an album about respite, and the coast, poetically and literally. How one frames themselves in a landscape, how in turn it frames themselves; memories and experiences carried forward mapping a connection to place - “an ode to blue / what lives in shade.”

Songs touch on loss, flaws, hiding places, love. Deep connections to the Bay Area, and the North Coast, with its unique moods of solitude, beauty, and isolation - a place described and transformed by the chaos and power of river-mouth, wild maritime storms, columns of mist that rise up unexpectedly on the road at night. Portions were recorded on Mount Tamalpais during a self-made residency years back, other pieces made longer ago in Portland, while the rest were tracked during more recent sessions in Astoria.

Throughout, Harris threads a hidden radiant language of voice, disquiet, and guitar, framed by open space and the sense of being far away - “Echoing a lighthouse, burying the faults of being human / Into things that we project upon the sky at night.”