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The 12th full-length by Pacific Northwest artist Liz Harris aka Grouper is a

collection of songs spanning 15 years. She characterizes Shade as an album

about respite, and the coast, poetically and literally. How we frame ourselves

in a landscape, how in turn it frames ourselves; memories and experiences

carried forward mapping our connection to place.

— An ode to blue / What lives in shade —

Songs touch on loss, flaws, hiding places, love. Deep connections to the Bay

Area, and the North Coast, with its unique moods of solitude, beauty, and

isolation—a place described and transformed by the chaos and power of

river-mouth, wild maritime storms, columns of mist that rise up unexpectedly

on the road at night. Portions were recorded on Mount Tamalpais during a

self-made residency years back, other pieces made longer ago in Portland,

while the rest were tracked during more recent sessions in Astoria.

Throughout, Harris threads a hidden radiant language of voice, disquiet, and

guitar, framed by open space and the sense of being far away.

Echoing a lighthouse, burying the faults of being human / Into things that we

project upon the sky at night.