Raum, the project of Grouper’s Liz Harris and experimental musician Jefre-Cantu Ledesma, have surprise released their first new album in nearly a decade. Daughter, which follows 2013’s The Event of Your Leaving, is out today via Yellowelectric and available to stream on Bandcamp. Listen to it below.
“Daughter is a record that took great patience to make,” a press release states, continuing:
It captures a strange time spent in the desert, later added to, edited and finally made sense of after we lost the friend we’d been there with. There are fragments of beginnings and a deep sense of loss.
A requiem, a lullaby, goodbye.
Most of the material was generated in Marfa at a residency we did with Paul Clipson in 2016. We both felt confident that someday the shape of our hours of recordings would reveal itself but at the time it felt impossible to revisit. A lot happened that week. The desert was an anxious landscape, and each of us were in our own fevered headspaces. Jefre was about to have a daughter. His last time to record and perform before becoming a father. Liz was having terrible stress and relationship issues.
Our rooms were in a haunted soldiers rec hall. Late at night we heard music playing softly in the room we were recording in. Blue static sparks shot across the room at night.
We met several times to work on finishing these recordings over the years, but a big piece of the record only made sense after sitting with the loss of Paul. The recordings took on a special resonance. They are a document of the last time the three of us were in the same physical place. His film projector sound is embedded there. The sound of our long walks in the desert scrub. Sounds of birds screaming in the mornings. Heat, calm, companionship, and grief; all moving very slowly— across years, across a remembered landscape.
Grouper’s most recent album, Shade, landed on our 50 Best Albums of 2021 list.
