From the very first second, it is clear that something special is happening. The way Grouper’s voice, threaded with a processed tremor, stretches into evenly rolling loops across an endless horizontal plane is immediately absorbing. Way Their Crept marks the first album by the US artist Liz Harris, released in 2005, and already establishes the definitive blueprint for her sound. Since then, she has been regarded as a key figure of the indistinct, the blurred and the fluid – an antithesis to many other lo-fi folk artists, because she disregards classical song structures and treats the studio itself as an instrument.
Of course, Harris’ discography also includes more conventional folk songs, such as »Ode To The Blue« from the 2021 album Shade. Yet her fundamental artistic signature remains crooked, full of detours and disorientation. Although only »Close Cloak« exceeds the eight-minute mark, every track on this reissue is capable of throwing one’s sense of space and time off balance.
Minimal oscillations, distant mantras, unfathomable psychedelia winding pantheistically through the woods. The minutes pass – no more than 41 – and yet one finds oneself fishing blindly in murky waters, where echoes of Americana, folk rock and ambient gently coagulate into an amalgam of transience. Whether Grouper’s lyrics already contain great poetry was not yet fully discernible on her debut. That a new artistic era is being ushered in here, however, is much harder to deny.
Way Their Crept
