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Liz Harris – the one-woman, do-it-all singer/songwriter/musician who essentially IS Grouper – is the sound of someone disappearing before your very eyes; an ache with no underlying injury; a whisper from an unseen voice. Such is the ephemeral ghostliness of her music, an intensely private form of expression captured within a very public context. If you took My Bloody Valentine’s layered collage of sounds and applied Low’s 4AD ambient acoustic surface to them (vs. Kevin Shields’ concussive, punishing feedback waves), you might be approaching the outer rings of Grouper’s orbit. "On dreams I'm moving through heavy water/ The love is enormous, it's lifting me up/ I'd rather be sleeping." Druggy, sexy, arty, pretty, but never pretentious. The sound of the waking dream.
Mar 20, 2024

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Vocalist Patty Waters straddles approaches that are something like a lounge jazz and a vocal avant-gardism, singing to stripped down instrumentals playing familiar then dissonant intervals, often ones that feel just slightly off of what you expect—the effect is something like holding an old photograph in your hand and noticing the material distortions. What sounds sentimental in a Nat King Cole or King Moody croon, becomes haunting or grin under Patty Water’s command. I especially get that effect from this album, College Days, in which her voice warmly vibrates at the center, with the instruments falling into the background. It’s perfect rainy day music from her, but this album also has a lot of her screaming and using her voice in a remarkable way, it definitely draws comparison to someone like Meredith Monk, where breathe voice and tone become their own force. This track Wild is the Wind is the noisiest and reminds me of Arthur Russell at some points. Reccomend if you like: Joan La Barbera, Bjork, Shelley Hirsch, Fiona Apple, Meredith Monk.
Jan 9, 2024
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Jonnine Standish, one half of the long-running Australian moody, atmospheric post-punk band HTRK, also makes solo stuff that I’ll let her bio describe: “Skeletal rhythms slink and echo through dimly lit streets framed by fragments of guitar, bass, breath, keys, scrapes, and haze.” HTRK inspired a lot of bands I’ve featured lately, like aso, Astrid Sonne and Acopia
Mar 6, 2025

Top Recs from @coreydubrowa

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Hey tyler hopefully this doesn’t violate some PI.FYI golden rule But after nearly two years of writing, editing and arguing, my book about the EP is coming out in May and can be preordered here: https://hozacrecords.com/product/aifl/ The book is about the origins, history and cultural impact of the EP since these little objects first started coming out in the 50s. Over 50 of my music biz friends then helped me shape the list and review the top 200 ever released, according to us (ha). For those of you who are into this kind of geekery/snobbery, I can’t wait to hear what you think. A labor of love, as all books are! ❀
Mar 27, 2024
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I will fail to explain just how much this band meant to me in the 90s. So I will borrow from AV Club who did a fine job of distilling it: “Unwound is the best band of the ’90s. Not just because of how prolific, consistent, and uncompromising it was, but because of how perfectly Unwound nested in a unique space between some of the most vital forms of music that decade: punk, post-rock, indie rock, post-hardcore, slow-core, and experimental noise. That jumble of subgenres doesn’t say much; in fact, it falls far short of what Unwound truly synthesized and stood for. Unwound stood for Unwound. But in a decade where most bands were either stridently earnest or stridently ironic, Unwound wasn’t stridently anything. It was only itself. In one sense Unwound was the quietest band of the ’90s, skulking around like a nerdy terror cell. In another sense it was the loudest, sculpting raw noise into contorted visions of inner turmoil and frustration.” R.I.P. Vern Rumsey. This is their finest song, from their finest album. I really can’t say enough about the sheer bloody minded genius of this group. đŸ–€
Mar 23, 2024