Seven Artists Similar to Grouper
Seven artists similar to Grouper — from Ana Roxanne to IKEBANA — read not for the reverb but for the threshold where the word stops meaning and starts to become place, weight, interval and dust.
Seven voices that, like Liz Harris's, have stopped wanting to be understood — and in doing so have discovered what remains of a voice once you take its meaning away.
There is a moment, on almost every Grouper record, when you notice you are trying to make out the words and failing — and that you gave up wanting to a long while ago. Liz Harris's voice is right there, crystalline in its intention and illegible in its letter: she is singing something, certainly, but that something arrives already eroded, like writing left out to fade through one season too many. It is not a recording flaw. It is a choice, and a radical one: the refusal to deliver a meaning.
This is the place to begin, because it is the misunderstanding that makes almost every "artists similar to Grouper" list useless. People look for the likeness in the reverb, in the tape, in the drowned guitar — in the means. But the reverb is only the tool; the real thing is what the tool is there to achieve, and that is a voice carried to the exact threshold where it stops being message and becomes matter. Weight. Texture. Landscape. A voice that is without saying.
The West struggles to forgive this. A voice you can't make out is, for us, an error to be corrected: you redo the mix, you tend to the diction, you demand clarity. But there are other traditions where not-meaning is no fault — it is the point. The mantra doesn't want to be understood, it wants to be repeated; liturgical chant holds meaning suspended inside the sound; there are forms of listening, in the East, that treat the voice the way one treats a sacred gaze — a presence that precedes the word, not a vehicle that carries it. Grouper, with no programme and no announcement, brings back to the West this forgotten thing: that the void at the centre of a voice is not an absence of meaning, but meaning caught an instant before it cools into a word.
The seven names that follow all stand on that threshold. But each from a different side — and the map they draw, lined up together, is the real reason to write about them at once.
Ana Roxanne — Because of a Flower (Kranky, 2020)
We start at home, because Ana Roxanne is family: Grouper's own label, Kranky, and a voice that lives on the same ridge between the intimate and the sacred. But where Harris erodes, Roxanne suspends — her voice does not fade, it holds still in the air like a note sustained in a room of stone. It is the devotional version of the threshold: the word dissolving not into noise but into recollection, like a prayer said so quietly it becomes breath. If you are looking for the point where Grouper's voice grazes ritual, Roxanne is the sister who lives inside that ritual entirely.
Cate Kennan — Shadows (Kranky, 2026)
The newest record on this list — out in June, again on Kranky — and perhaps the most literally Grouper-like in its subject. Shadows comes out of Kennan's return to the rustic neighbourhood northwest of Los Angeles where she grew up: a place time had quietly shifted, familiar and unrecognisable at once. Ten miniatures of keys, strings, reverb and voice, poised between lullaby and small-hours torch song, "rose-coloured but remote" in her own words. It is the threshold applied not to the voice but to the place: singing somewhere that still exists but no longer recognises you. The dust, here, is the kind that settles over the places we leave.
Lucy Gooch — Desert Window (2025)
On the other side of the threshold is someone who doesn't erode at all, but multiplies: Lucy Gooch builds choral architectures with her voice, naves of sound, a liturgical ambient where the single signifier loses itself not in mud but in the echo of itself. It is the void by saturation, not by subtraction — the word dissolved because repeated and layered until it becomes vault, ceiling, space. She stands to Grouper as a cathedral stands to a room: the same faith in sound-as-presence, the opposite scale.
Ekin Fil — Maps (Helen Scarsdale Agency, 2018)
This is the best-documented link of the whole list, and not by critical affinity but by biography: Ekin Fil opened for Grouper in Europe, and it was Liz Harris who introduced her to the people who would later release her. From Istanbul — or rather from a silent island in the Sea of Marmara where she spent a winter with "too much silence around, no choice but to concentrate" — Fil writes songs of organ, piano and heavily reverbed guitar where the voice is a whisper that narrates "more by emotive decree than by verse". Maps is about distance and dislocation: the voice as the map of a place one has come unstuck from. It is the name that, in this Western list, opens the door toward the East — and not by chance a door that gives onto the Bosphorus, onto the point where Europe stops being Europe.
IKEBANA — When You Arrive There (Flau, 2013)
And beyond that door is Japan. IKEBANA is a duo from Kyoto and Tokyo, maki and en, and their only record is a 2013 gem to be exhumed rather than a novelty to chase. One of the two comes from shoegaze; the other is a tape experimentalist who has given up digital equipment and the Internet altogether — the same material choice as Liz Harris, tape not as retro affectation but as an ethics of the medium, a way of being in the world. Deeply reverbed voice and minimal guitar drifting "between dream and reality". But it is the name that says everything: ikebana, the art of arranging flowers, which looks not at the bloom but at the stem, the leaf, the empty space between the elements — the composition of the void, not of the full. It is the exact Eastern formulation of what Grouper does with the voice: composing the intervals, not the notes. The space between one word and the next as raw material. ("Alone" is the track to enter through.)
Dagmar Zuniga — In Filth Your Mystery Is Kingdom / Far Smile Peasant in Yellow Music (AD 93, 2026)
Dagmar Zuniga stands on the bridge, halfway between the song and its dissolution: ghost folk cut onto a four-track Tascam, vocals turned inside out, pieces that return twice and are never identical. Here the threshold turns properly spectral — not the voice fading, but the voice coming back from where it shouldn't, badly recorded on purpose, like a transmission you pick up by mistake. It is the hauntological side of the Grouper family: not the erosion of time, but time folding back and handing you something slightly wrong.
Nivhek / Mirrorring — After its own death / Walking in a spiral towards the house (2018)
The seventh is not another person: it is Liz Harris herself, under other names. As Nivhek, and earlier as Mirrorring (the duo with Tiny Vipers), Harris gave herself pseudonyms to seek an erosion other than her own — to become a stranger to herself and find out what remains of the threshold when the one crossing it is someone else with your voice. It is the most vertiginous way to close the circle: even inside Grouper, Grouper splits in two. The voice that renounces meaning ends by renouncing the name as well.
Seven positions around the same void: ritual (Roxanne), place (Kennan), the cathedral (Gooch), distance (Fil), the interval (IKEBANA), the ghost (Zuniga), the doubling (Nivhek). None of these is "music similar to Grouper" in the poor sense an algorithm means it. They are seven ways of believing the same thing: that a voice can stop saying, and right there begin to mean for real.
A note in the margin: the two who don't sing
There are two names anyone searching for Grouper always runs into, and who nonetheless hardly ever sing: Tim Heckerand William Basinski. Putting them among the "similar" is right and misleading at once. They don't share with Liz Harris the voice, the song, the guitar — they share the matter: tape coming apart (Basinski's The Disintegration Loops is literally this, a loop powdering away as it plays), decay as form, music understood as something that rots while you listen to it. They are the relatives of Grouper's instrumental side — the side of A I A, of the drones, of Ruins pared to the bone — not of the song side. If you have come this far looking for the voice at the bottom of the water, these two take it away entirely and leave you only the water. It is worth drowning in all the same.
There is a third way, for anyone who would carry this side too toward the East: Chihei Hatakeyama, from Tokyo, on the same Kranky. His music is almost always instrumental — guitar, reverb, tape loops, no voice — and yet it is he himself, in an interview, who points the way: he names Basinski and Grouper as the artists in whom he hears a pre-linguisticquality, music caught in the state that precedes the word. It is the same threshold as this whole piece, spoken by someone who inhabits it without so much as opening his mouth.
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