“Dragging the Streets (first heart tone)”—Grouper
My friend Eric once told me a quote he’d read—something like ‘if the world could write, it would write like Tolstoy’—which got me thinking that if the world could play music, it would play music like Grouper’s. On those rare occasions when lost or broken headphones have forced me to listen to the universe I was born into, as opposed to the iPod-universe of heightened emotions and perpetual motion that doesn’t really exist, I’ve noticed the sounds that Grouper’s music eerily articulates and amplifies: Moaning trains, churning factories, wind and crickets and the odd ambient hum of streetlights and old refrigerators. You could say Grouper plays industrial lullabies. It’s what makes listening to her on a certain kind of street at a certain time of night so disconcerting—you sometimes can’t tell where the music ends and your surroundings begin.
