Grouper confirms rare European shows including Glasgow and two London nights

Grouper has confirmed a series of European shows for October and November, and the UK leg is small enough that it will be gone quickly. Liz Harris, who has recorded as Grouper for two decades, plays Glasgow's Mackintosh Queen's Cross on 12 November and follows it with two nights at Cafe OTO in London on 18 and 19 November.

The wider run includes a slot at Le Guess Who? Festival in Utrecht, the Dutch event that has built its programme around exactly the kind of work Harris makes. The venues on the UK side are equally pointed: a Charles Rennie Mackintosh church in Glasgow and a Dalston room that has spent fifteen years programming experimental music.

The bookings are notable mostly because there are so few of them. Harris tours rarely and gives interviews less often than that, and the enigmatic profile has held even as her audience has grown considerably.

That growth has come through streaming rather than press. Her hushed, minimalist recordings, built from layered voice, guitar and tape hiss, have been picked up by a younger audience on platforms where the quietest end of the catalogue tends to travel furthest. The result is an artist with substantial streaming numbers and almost no public presence.

Playing rooms of a few hundred capacity keeps that balance intact. A Cafe OTO show and a church in Glasgow are the right scale for music that depends on the audience being quiet, and both sell out on reputation without any promotional cycle attached.

Harris has also been active outside the Grouper name, having put her band Helen back together with a new album earlier this year. That project sits at the louder end of her work, which makes the contrast with these indie and ambient solo dates sharper. The full routing is on the tour guide.