After Its Own Death/Walking In A Spiral Towards The House

Since debuting as Grouper back in 2005, Liz Harris has delivered a swathe of experimentalist albums that explore almost every aspect of ambient and drone music. Here she launches a new project, Nivhek, via an expansive double-album of sparse, atmospheric compositions that tend towards the epic. Really, it’s two albums in one. The first slab of wax is entitled “After Its Own Death” and boasts a two-part, non-stop suite of tracks built around echoing choral vocals, dark electronics and blissful bells. It’s alternately melancholic, blissful and grippingly intense. In contrast, “Walking In A Spiral Towards The House”, the piece stretched across both sides of the second record, is breathtakingly beautiful – a meandering, soft focus trip through chiming, reverb-laden motifs and gentle music box melodies