Grouper: The Man Who Died In His Boat

Thoughts on each song: 

1. 6

Voice and synth, electronic and human, collapsing -- the binary between technology and human imploded. A parabola of sound, like it come in waves. Simultaneous angelic hums and the deafening blare of boat honks. 

2. Vital

It resembles language but you have no clue what she is saying. "There are the things" is the only thing I can make out. She starts to say "I" but it drifts off into a loose tendril of sound. The sound echoes and progressively joins together. Sometimes she starts singing and it sounds like the sound emerges in unison, and other times, the sound builds on top of one another, like voices progressively joining to sing a song. 

The wind's howl at the end -- a question posed.

3. Cloud in places

This song is very special to me. 

The language is unintelligible again. The falsetto is both in opposition and in sameness to the guitar's high E string. 

This high pitch then falls into the pits and slowly emerges back out. 

"Though me". 

Tensions arise from the guitar, and then the voice carries them together, arriving at intermediate conclusions, then the swoop, the descent, and re-emergence from it. A return home. Even angels on earth fall into pits. 

There is a simultaneous dissonance and coherence -- it's the marker of my favorite music, music that feels l like it erupts from the geyser in us, music that feels like it is both, at the same time, dissonant and together in a radical contradiction that somehow exists at the same time. 

4. Being in her shadow

The synths at the beginning like blinking stars, softly ascending and descending in their luminosity. A voice begins at the higher end of the octave and takes the steps down to the base note, letting us fall into and arrive at the ocean's edge, a wind drifting into place like a sideburn guided and curled over and behind the ear. 

Sit at the top of the hill, stare around for a bit, look down and see the greyed sand before you have to come back down to sea level. 

5. Cover the Long Way

This song is very special to me. 

The falsetto takes those steps down a little bit, but we look into the water and are hit with the dazzling array of a thousand lights, coming into and out of our vision. This is the sublime -- the painting of the man standing at the edge, staring out into the ocean, just attempting to take in what it is that he is seeing

The voice and the guitar take turns leading, a unison that recognizes the self in the other. This is what I think love sounds like: the mingling between Grouper's falsetto and the guitar's grumble, a recognition of self in the other and the other's recognition of the other in the self.

Lacan has said the subconscious is structured through language -- maybe there are things that just can't ever be explained through language

6. Differences

We escape the coherent falsetto and guitar and return to the dissonant, the repetition, the sameness and difference existing in each frame. It sounds incoherent, but it slowly comes together; you can find the pulsewidth finding a home in this cacophony. The guitar's twang, a sound that feels different from everything on the album so far, fits into the mosaic. Reminding us of the ever-repeating sameness constitutive of difference. The voice descends and reascends back to the apex, the sounds assembled beneath it. 

It's music that recognizes Dasein -- being and world are never separate; the "rise above" and orchestrating mentality, the facade of control and guidance, fails to cohere. The sound feels like it is devoid of pedagogy, like it only seeks to explore feeling, rather than teach us something -- the art vs the document. 

7. Vanishing point

The eerie and the uncomfortable. These repetitive intensities trading places with each other, dovetailing one another. A difficult question is posed, the song proceeds to find an answer to it through fissures. Maybe the answer is boring and obvious, right in front of us.

8. The Man Who Died in His Boat

There's a thing I read somewhere that talks about traveling through boats, how boat travel has some phenomenological character to it, connecting to German Enlightenment thinking and Heidegger. I can't think of it, but that feels like part of what is at the heart of this song. 

Living life on a promise -- staking everything on a chance that it works out for generations past and future. Claculating the odds -- if only... what's the point, its over now anyway. Embarking on something doomed to fail, and doing it over and over again. Like putting your soul and effort and heart into a meatloaf people pretend to enjoy, still feeling happy about the look on their faces, oblivious to their inner world but only aware of your own inner world, and yours says, "look at my creation, I've poured my heart into it, and I am happy."

Dying in a boat at sea, no one knows what happened and has to live in the dissonance of "I don't know, but I hope". We don't know what anyone is going through. 

9. Towers 

This feels like a synthesis of the dissonance and anglicism found in earlier songs. 

"Towers" perhaps refers to the lighthouse; its fluorescent bulb is trying to find what is missing. 

Can you locate what is gone, buried beneath rubble? The lost object? 

I hope it emerges nonetheless. 

10. STS

a Red-Bull-ed heartbeat. 

A voice emerges from beneath and fades into static. you can't tell whether it is a voice or an instrument, but maybe the "either/or" logic to that judgment is wrong--the song insists on viewing the two in "both/and" terms, the voice constitutively an instrument and an instrument constitutively a voice. 

The human voice reaches down into the basement, drops the pail into the well, in a descent that takes courage, and emerges with various viscosities. 

The heartbeat stops and we are left with the winds from the tide. Is it out there? Is there still a chance it can be found? 

11. Living Room

A very important song to me. 

"I'm looking for the place where the spirit meets the skin. Can't figure out why that place feels so hard to be in" 

"Acting like everything's in its place"