Bleep

Grouper's first new album in four years arrives via US ambient institution Kranky. Grid Of Points lets us wonder once again through the landscapes of Liz Harris' mind, and as such like per previous recordings it's a perfect collection of softly spun lullabies woven into a patchwork cloak of emotive silences and silently skeletal piano keys.

Recorded at residencies she undertook in Portugal and Wyoming in the years since she gifted us with 2014's Ruins (at the time easily her strongest body of work since Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill, yet once again sure to be eclipsed here) Grid Of Points is even by Grouper's high standards an incredibly ethereal record, one that finds its voice by seemingly abandoning ideas and transcripts of speech in favour of texture. This creates moments when her voice and piano playing become like two translucent, intertwining ghosts, set to endlessly haunt your memories of listening, long after the record has finished.

With track titles such as 'Parking Lot', 'Driving' and 'Breathing', Grouper captures the space between those seemingly everyday mundane actions that you most likely experience with a glazed expression and autopilot turned on. Yet it is within in these worlds that Grouper's music is most powerful. As such, we could imagine Grid Of Points being perceived as a spiritual partner to Brian Eno's ambient estuary Thursday Afternoon or a perfect soundtrack accompaniment to reading Werner Herzog's searching tales of travel, Of Walking In Ice.

Grid Of Points is the musical equivalent of rediscovering a handwritten note from someone close to you who may have lost touch with you many years ago - intimately familiar yet achingly far away.