Once, when I was dragging a dead deer up a hill

There are times when a person simply wants do disengage from the outside world, push the off button and let everything be on hold for a while. Those are the times that let you breathe and be with just yourself no matter how painful that can be sometimes. Often, there are whole other parallel worlds to be discovered when in disengaged mode, worlds that you can only catch a glimpse off, because the "real" world can't be on hold for too long if you want to be a healthy person. At best, you can balance living in that real world with lurking at your parallel one from a comfortable corner.

There are also triggers. Those triggers launch you in your "other" universe with ease, and for me, their collective word is music. Not every music, of course, but the rare artists that are able to transform their "other" worlds into tones and somewhere along the way the incarnation of their worlds collided and coincided with mine. It's because of that that some of my beloved bands aren't my most played bands, because, hey, I wanna be a healthy person.

One of those bands, or rather, a one-woman project, is Grouper. That one woman's name is Liz Harris and up until last year, I had no idea she even existed. And then my trusty partner in life presented me with Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, Grouper's (no less than) fifth release that came out in 2008 and that is entirely consisted out of dreamy, surreal Liz's vocals, ambient arrangements and acoustic guitars all packaged into one big trigger.

From the first minute the album starts, that's it, I'm gone, whisked away, or rather, gently positioned to exchange lurking at my parallel world to observing it fully.

It's like these aren't even songs, they're like entities floating somewhere in time, dutifully circling around the planet filling the space with inexplicable presence. The fact that contributes to this entity-like song arrangements is that you can hardly understand what she's singing about, there are no words fully articulated here, just murmurs sang in her meditative voice, and I swear, if someone will ever need an incarnation of a modern sprite's voice, it's right here, already recorded and distributed.

And the music, those acoustic guitars where the pick barely touches the strings, it's almost transparent. Songs that are guitar-less, have the same, barely-touching-the-keys, keyboards in the background, while in the foreground there is one key, one note, bending and stretching until forever, imitating her voice, or her voice imitating it, until you don't know which is which anymore. 

So, as I already harassed some people here with this Reverb Dead Dear, it is now my intention to harass the entire community with it. That is all...