Twenty-two minutes of skeletal piano and layered vocal harmonies. A brief, fever-dreamed collection of songs that feel like small texts hanging in empty, cold space.
It's like a 20-minute exhale in a cold, empty house.
A fragile, skeletal stillness that feels both intimate and immense.
Recorded in Wyoming in 2017, Grid of Points represents a continuation of the piano-led minimalism Liz Harris explored on 2014's Ruins, but with a sharper, more abbreviated focus. The album is famously short, totaling only 22 minutes, because the recording sessions were abruptly halted when Harris contracted a high fever. Rather than returning to finish the tracks, she released them as they were, believing the interruption was part of the work's inherent meaning. Sonically, the album strips away the heavy tape hiss and guitar feedback of her 'Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill' era in favor of clean piano and multi-tracked vocal harmonies. The inclusion of environmental sounds, specifically the train on the closing track, links the internal emotional state of the music to the vast, lonely landscape of the American West. It is a pivotal entry in the Grouper catalog for its starkness and its embrace of the 'missing' or 'incomplete' as an aesthetic choice.
Put this on for
Cold air hitting your face through a cracked window in FebruaryEmpty parking lot under orange sodium lamps at 4amBreath visible in the air while the heater struggles to startDust motes dancing in a single shaft of morning lightThat specific silence after a long-distance call ends abruptlyWatching a train disappear into the horizon from a distanceSitting on the floor of an unfurnished room on moving day
Moments worth waiting for
The way the vocal harmonies suddenly bloom like a choir in the middle of Parking Lot before receding into silence.
The distant, mournful sound of a real train whistle that closes out Coal Train, grounding the abstract music in a physical landscape.
The abrupt, unfinished feeling of the final tracks that mirrors the artist's sudden illness during the recording process.
Sounds like
2018s production with a 2010s soul
Sits beside
Ruins - Grouper, The Disintegration Loops - William Basinski, Ravedeath, 1972 - Tim Hecker, For Emma, Forever Ago - Bon Iver
Lyrical territory
existential, death_mortality, nature
03Deviation
Grid of Points · vs · Grouper
Artist
This Album
Existential
Lyrics · ↓ −12% less than usual
On this album, existential sits about 12% less prominent than across the rest of the artist's catalogue.
