Grouper is the artist name of Elizabeth (Liz) Harris from Portland, Oregon.
Her debut album, Way Their Crept, was released on the Free Porcupine Society label in 2005. This was followed a year later by ‘Wide’ on the same label. In 2007 she put out a brilliant limited edition LP ‘Cover The Windows And Walls’ (on Root Strata) . Now her third ‘official’ full length on Type Records is about to hit the streets – charmingly entitled ‘Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill’ .
She has been involved in collaborative releases contributing a track to Xiu Xiu’s ‘Remixed & Covered’ and four tracks to a split release with Inca Ore, but it is her solitary work which is the most transfixing.
Grouper may seem a paradoxical name for a woman who in an interview with Rich Hopkins of Digitalis said: “I like doing things myself, and in my own way, I think because I tend to work slowly and sort of obsessively, which doesn’t always work well involving another person.”
The word “grouper” actually comes from the name of a type of fish found on warm and tropical seas. ‘Garoupa’, in the Russian dialect of the Enchained Forest region of Siberia, and not from the English word group.