In 1996 the label Drunken Fish released the monumental 3xLP compilation Harmony of the Spheres. Featuring performances by Charalambides, Flying Saucer Attack, Bardo Pond, and Loren Mazzacane Connors, this lavishly packaged set proved to be a landmark, bringing several different underground streams into confluence. Inspired by ancient Pythagorean principles, each of the artists on Harmony of the Spheres strived to transform the base materials of folk, country blues, ambient, and psych-rock into vehicles for innovative, wholly unique personal expression.
It's never easy to conclusively measure an album's influence-- particularly a boutique collection with a limited initial pressing. But at the very least, it can be said that Harmony of the Spheres has since proven to be uncommonly prescient, as the music contained on its six sides anticipated the direction of many subsequent branches of avant-rock, shadowy folk, and glo-fi. And the album's echoes are certainly in easy evidence on this split album by Portland's Grouper (aka singer-songwriter Liz Harris) and the prolific New Zealand guitarist Roy Montgomery, himself a Harmony of the Spheres alum.
In fact, the echoes are literal on Montgomery's side, as he here presents a lovely live version of his majestic piece "Fantasia on a Theme by Sandy Bull", which first appeared on Harmony of the Spheres. But Grouper's songs seem to be direct spiritual descendents as well. Constructed using elemental strands of voice, submerged instruments, and field recordings, Harris' work here is never less than captivating, and a decade and a half later it seems in its own way a perfect distillation of Harmony of the Sphere's music and guiding principles.
On the original version of "Fantasia on a Theme by Sandy Bull", Montgomery took melodic cues from Bull's album E Pluribus Unum, gradually layering his gently strummed chords with multi-tracked effects and overtones to build dense and formidable sheets of sound. For this solo recording, the piece has been necessarily stripped-down, and the loss of the overdubbed layers of dissonance and texture do somewhat diminish its overall effect. Still, Montgomery is a skillful player with a distinctive, immediately recognizable sound, and in the crowded field of solo guitarists, that can sometimes be half the battle. Though it is not quite as transcendent as the original version, it can be a hypnotic pleasure to hear Montgomery cycle through this track's revolving, raga-like melodic ideas.
Grouper's half of the split is even more rewarding, and the music Harris presents here is among her most focused and spellbinding to date. Though divided into four tracks, her side seems composed to be heard as one continuous whole, as her vocals and source recordings bleed from one track into the next. As with such peers as Charalambides' Christina Carter or Fursaxa's Tara Burke, there is a timeless quality to Harris' vocals on "Hollow Press" or "Hold the Way". Her simple melodies and scales can occasionally recall the medieval vocal music of Hildegard Von Bingen, which, combined with her obscured or non-existent lyrics, can give her work a delicate liturgical character.
Her primary backing instrument of choice here seems to be a processed Rhodes or Wurlitzer keyboard, and its warm, distorted texture blends invisibly into grainy tape effects to give the whole performance a welcome degree of hazy dissonance. It is especially lovely to hear the way these songs seem to emerge out of the static and then return again to darkness, as though they are being broadcast from an orbiting satellite that is only briefly in range of Earth, with Grouper's music already moving on to seek harmonies on another heavenly plane.
