The brainchild of writer and performer Liz Harris, 2007’s Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill finds infinite complexity within alarmingly familiar boundaries; a body of work so uncomfortably intimate it feels as if your own psychic anatomy has been placed under the microscope. At times a suffocatingly morose exploration of isolation, grief and loneliness, Harris’ masterwork epitomises the intangible echo-chamber of human grief, and wilfully accepts the eclipsing depths of these sufferances. In Grouper’s world, the light at the end of the tunnel is nearly inconceivable.

For Harris, creativity and composition seem to validate a form of self-imposed exile, an equally desirable and dreadful experience. Having grown up unconventionally in northern California as part of a Fourth Way commune which encouraged self-reflection, solitude, and awareness of one’s place in the universe, her community, simply known as “The Group”, seems to have provided a structure to both subsume and rebel against. Adopting the moniker of Grouper in reference to the secret nicknames developed amongst her childhood peers, her music has become awash with the distortion of imposed parental boundaries, yet draws heavily on quintessential Fourth Way themes, including the oddly Lynchian notion that the un-enlightened live in a constant “waking-sleep”.

- Owen Jones, classicalbumsundays.com