Beulah Land

Grouper-WIDE


Liz Harris's Grouper project sort of cropped up out of nowhere. Her haunting debut, Way Their Crept, stunned a lot of people with its blunt, at times, overwhelming sincerity. She's certainly not the first person to have the "lo-fi" thing work to their advantage, by a long shot. But there's an earnestness about her music that suggests when she recorded Way Their Crept the thought hadn't even crossed her mind. Way Their Crept is an effortless series of half-asleep solo meanderings from the sparsest of arrangements Guitar, voice, and keyboard all saturated in an ancient and "uninhibited" tape delay. Her two subsequent recordings, WIDE, and Cover the Walls and Windows, each show a steady progression to fuller and more song-oriented sound.

A friend of mine and her painfully attractive boyfriend requested I post some more Grouper after hearing Cover the Walls and Windows, which I had posted in May. WIDE is best described as the middle ground between her initial, more improvisational work and her recent dabblings in more structured song-writing.

Check out "Shadow Rise, Drowned". Charming.

Today was a good day for Grouper, actually. It's the first overcast day since we've been here. It was welcomed with open arms, as after over two weeks of brutal Spanish sun, I was starting to feel like a refugee. or a mole-person. something like that. Let's just say it's been very, very bright and hot. I woke up just fine, however, my stomach did not. By the time it did, it was hungry and pissed and I was already half way up the hills on my way to Park Guell (the beautiful, but touristy park that Guadi designed). By the time I made it home at 6 I thought I was going to pass out in the elevator. Fortunately, I didn't. And since then I've been eating oranges and olives and loving life. That's all.









Ike Reiko-Kokotsu No Sekai

Also, something else. Here's what I can only assume is a concept album about a Japanese girl with a partial labotomy who loses her shirt, for some reason, and the erotic hilarity that ensues.. I can't for the life of me figure out why else anyone should have to fake such a "tasteful"-sounding orgasm for that long. Fortunately, The booklet from the re-issue (that's RE-ISSUE!!) had this light to shed on the situation: ""Concupiscence, pink violence, and forlorn sleaziness - the ecstatic world of Ike Reiko"... oh.. ok... hmm. well done.