Ballroom hosted musician Liz Harris, aka Grouper, for a recording residency at Ballroom Marfa. During her stay, she made field recordings and recorded tracks at Marfa Recording Company, which appear on this limited-edition 7-inch (only 500 pressed). Side A is titled “Water People” and Side B is “Moving Machine.” The 7-inch was pressed in white vinyl and the cover was designed by Liz Harris.  

“Water People” radiates out of your speakers with it’s subtle yet entrancing power, but the most stunning part is how such a compelling and powerful song can be done up so minimally.” — The Styrofoam Drone 

Grouper, the recording and performing project of Liz Harris, makes music with a combination of field recordings, vintage keyboards and effects-laden guitars. On albums like 2008’s critically lauded Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill, her ghostly vocals drift like wisps of smoke through fractured moonbeams; lines of guitar emerge like discarded nets from the surf, tumbling back into a rolling sea of soft noise shortly after they appear.

Harris grew up in Northern California on a commune operating under the philosophy of G.I. Gurdjieff, a Greek-Armenian spiritual teacher who claimed a secret understanding of ancient religious texts. The reverberations of Gurdjieff’s thinking on humanity’s place in the universe, and his ideas about the sleeping state in which most people pass their time, are easy to hear in Harris’ dreamlike music.