The Man Who Died In His Boat is a collection of outtakes from 2008’s Dragging a Dead Deer up a Hill, which saw Grouper setting aside electronics for acoustic instruments and reverb. But none of that really matters, because knowing who Grouper is or hearing Dragging… aren’t prerequisites for enjoying this record.

You don’t need to know what her usual fair sounds like to appreciate the cavernous calm of these eleven ambient, meditative tracks. Acoustic guitars are reverberated to ambience and the vocals are slathered in echo to the point of noncoherence. But it hardly matters–this is music beyond words or chords, where vagueness and beauty coexist.