Grouper

Fact Magazine · FACT mix 379 - Grouper (Apr '13)

I'm working my way through the 40+ hours of FACT mixes I downloaded to a backup drive as well as the 850+ mixes on the FACT website.  

Many, if not most, of the mixes are dance-club ready EDM music, bangers and thumpers most suitable for the dance floor.  Some artists, particularly d.j.s and electronic music producers, simply provide representative examples of their live, club sets.  If you ever suddenly find yourself in Berlin hosting a rave (these things happen), most of the mixes would ably provide a suitable setlist for you. The FACT mixes got you covered.

But it's not all techno and EDM.  Some performers provide mixes to FACT that cover the music that inspires them, or the sources of their samples, or songs that they simply want to share for whatever reason.  You can learn a lot about the creative process of these performers by the songs they select for these mixes.  It may or may not be surprising that so-and-so has a deep knowledge of reggae, or that some other musician included a lot of mid-60s pop songs.  Some of the mixes cover very specific but little-known sub-genres of music, like Nsasi's mix of queer Ugandan house music.

Few mixes fall further from the definition of "dance music" than the one provided by Grouper (Liz Harris) back in April 2013.  For the longest time now, Grouper has been producing great, generally unclassifiable music somewhere between ambient, folk, doom metal, and pop.  It's hard to describe - you really need to listen for yourself to understand.  

One would expect some dreamy and quiet music from Grouper for her FACT mix, which she titled Image of True Death, but I for one didn't expect baroque chamber music, Celtic folk songs, and whatever the rest of the mix is.  Even the song she included by the post-rock, avant-noise band Swans is a folkish, vocal track. In fact, I couldn't identify much of the mix, even using my SoundHound track identifier and the comments on the SoundCloud app, and unlike most of the FACT mixes, a track list wasn't provided by the artist.  Here's the list as best as I can fathom:

• Ivor Cutler - The Best Thing (1975)
• Jandek - Nancy Sings (1982)
• Anne Briggs - Thorneymoor Woods (1971)
• ??? - ????
• Mignarda - The Willow Song (2007)
• Kronos Quartet - Lachrimae Antique (1997) 
• ??? - ????
• Delia Derbyshire - Mattachin
• (unidentified dialog)
• ??? - ????
• Swans - Blackmail (1997)
• Kathleen Ferrier & London Symphony Orchestra - Rodelinda, Act 1: Art Thou Troubled (1997) 
• ??? - ????
• ??? - ????
• ??? - ????