Liz Harris' music as Grouper is often intensely private, a feeling she's amplified tenfold on this debut collaboration with Australian musician (and Room40 label head) Lawrence English. Released on the Peak Oil label, the package includes only a handful of track titles and a note hinting it was recorded between 2010-12. Those titles are ultimately meaningless; Slow Walkers' music runs together with barely any separation, feeling more like a continuous journey than a series of separate narratives. It's instrumental, drone-based work, leaning heavily on repetition and the kind of eerie ambience for which Harris is known. Had this record been released earlier in her career then questions may have been raised about how she and English could reach such a troubled, lonely, barren place. But by now it's clear that this is the spot where Harris operates most effectively.
Part of Grouper's power is in the way the music feels like it's made in a vacuum, shorn of contemporary reference points or settings. Slow Walkers aren't exactly out there tweeting up a storm, but this record has been alluded to as "meditations for the zombie as cultural phenomena" in the description below a video for the track "Wake". What that means or how it applies here is suitably foggy, and the fact that the clip was uploaded to the Room40 Vimeo account over a year ago suggests it may no longer be appropriate. If Slow Walkers are thinking about death as a process, then they're imagining it as a long, drawn out, painful undertaking. There's a strong sense of journey here, similar to the depth felt in the Haxan Cloak's excellent afterlife meditation, Excavation. Except with Slow Walkers everything is much less chiseled, with Harris and English foregoing definition for suggestion, choosing to imagine feelings instead of laying out a tangible roadmap.
At times this feels of a piece with the rolling tundras of Harris' Violet Replacement work, which similarly juxtaposed anxiety with something far more relaxing. What Slow Walkers do is similar, setting up an unsettling atmosphere and then letting beautiful drones arc and dissolve across its gloomy surface. This project has been talked up as a multi-media undertaking, with video installations and audio-visual concert performances, but it's hard to picture how that would work when the music itself is so visually suggestive. The second side opens with a positively holy feel, its wispy ambience bringing to mind an abandoned, wind-whipped cathedral. It's impressive how Harris and English can work in tandem to build tension and then just let it float away, turning trepidation into bliss. By the close of the second side, deep into "Wake", there's a lightness present, a sense of calm settling in, a feeling that this isn't such a bad place to be after all.
Slow Walkers may be hiding from the world to a certain extent-- the nature of this album helps frame it as a tentative step instead of a full-blown leap. It's not clear if that will develop further, although there's enough here to suggest potential not yet fully realized. This isn't on a par with Grouper's The Man Who Died In His Boat from earlier this year, but Slow Walkers is definitely a secret that's a little too good to be kept in the province of a select band of Harris devotees. Appropriately, it begins with a crackle of radio static, lending it a lost-transmission feel that only a few people are privy to hearing, either alive or, perhaps, undead. If this is a record about death, then it's primarily about the process of letting go, of watching someone transform from present to past tense, fading from the physical world to become a bundle of memories for people to carry around.
