The magic of 'Grouper'

Liz Harris, musical genius

I hadn’t heard anything like it before, and I didn’t know if I liked it or not.

A sort of broken music, crackling, swimming in and out of clarity, like the tape stock had been damaged when being copied to a digital format. Murky and mucky. You could hear misplayed chords and the sound of the hand sliding up the guitar neck. Stumbles and fluffs.

I listened enough times to hear pretty melodies emerge, but I’m not going to claim that I could pick them out on the first go. I was much more struck by the fragmented and distorted aspect of the music than by acknowledging the tune. It wasn’t, then, at all clear at a first listen that I’d get hooked, but I did, I really did.

I am working perhaps harder than I have ever done in my life, and all with language too; even for someone as wedded to the linguistic as myself, I’m testing my tolerance of the word. After these long talky days, I feel precious little desire to go out with people, particularly onto the hellish Brussels small-talk circuit, conducted in an international English which only a European commissioner could love; what I really want to do is sit silently in my room for a while and listen to music. To the extent that I have a complementary activity, it’s thinking about my life while sipping sugar-free coke.

Add to this the fact that last year my marriage collapsed. I find myself, as during other darker times, resorting to music again and again. It was in large part this phase that saw me having another go at ‘Grouper’ again. And then again and again. Soon, I was hooked; this delicate music was somehow composed at exactly the right level of intrusiveness, with room for me to drift in and out as I navigated my own streams of thought.

It was above all the track ‘Heavy Water/I'd Rather Be Sleeping’, linked above, which saw me fully connect. Beneath the fuzz and drift, I could tell how strong the song was as a song, including, ironically, lyrically; the words you couldn't hear revealed themselves upon reading as lovely. (A surprising amount of bands do this, like early REM, render elegant lyrics inaudible). There was a great, even determined melodiousness underneath layers of distortion, a beauty intentionally submerged, which has to be some kind of metaphor for life.

About Liz Harris, the artist behind ‘Grouper’, there doesn't seem all that much out there. She’s 44, so a young Gen Xer; she grew up on a George Gurdjieff commune in the Bay Area, where she described herself as socially avoidant. (Said commune, incidentally, gave ‘Grouper’ their name, referring to children and parents calling each other ‘Groupers’.) Nowadays she lives in the Pacific Northwest and her music sounds like it too. Like many musical artists, she comes over as rather restrained in conversation, indeed describing herself in an interview as ‘an idiot at finishing sentences’.

She doesn’t appear to have kids, for whatever reason, and she can’t really play guitar. She has tinnitus, if you want a meta-explanation for why her music sounds as it does. Surely she will do film soundtracks at some point.

Yet this low profile surely only facilitates the listener getting more absorbed in her sound world, which seems to speak for itself; the lack of biographical disclosure means we can enter more completely in the work. I suspect it’s all about the work with her, in a way common to many creative Americans. They do after all have an awful lot of cultural assumptions to take a stand against; to be provocative, one of the great ironies of the Home of Freedom™ is just how conformist most Americans are.

Her music is where the juice is. She debuted in 2005, and her early albums are ambient. She broke through in 2008 with the slightly folklorically-titled ‘Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill’, followed by 2013’s ‘The Man Who Died in His Own Boat’ and a pair of linked experimental records called ‘AIA Dream Loss’/‘AIA Alien Observer’.

She’s worked under other names too, such as Nivhek and Mirroring, in collaborations with visual artists and other musicians. Grouper appears to be the most song-based of her projects, and more recent albums, from 2014’s ‘Ruins’ (recorded in Portugal in 2011) to 2021’s ‘Shade’, mark a transition to a slightly more accessible (read: audible) form of music. It is fair to say Harris has developed her own idiom, a place where ambient and folk mix, where periods of distortion and fuzz gather into to songs of surprising beauty which then wash away again. It’s all quite tidal, really, this wash and wax and wane; the sound, as it were, of time and tide. Unsurprisingly, Harris acknowledges the importance of water in her worldview, specifically the ocean near San Francisco.

I always think we underestimate music in criticism, perhaps because it is hard to write about; Kant argued that music, in having no ideational content, was the lowest of the arts, tho he did not in fairness ever hear ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’. We view music more than other forms as something that does not have to be constantly attended to, as much an aspect of interior design as an art form in its own right; it would be precisely music’s lack of ideas which allowed it to perform this functional role.

Yet there was no other art form that helped me as much in my previous difficult year than music, and that meant ‘Grouper’ above all. It’s sad music, but I was fucking sad.

I’ve been in pain lately, and not always about major things; just a sort of gradually chastening or chiding by life. Failure at work. Belgian bureaucracy. Divorce disputes. A feeling that, working my arse off, my insides were even more exposed than normal. Wund, as the Germans say, tender, susceptible. Life dealing me three things a week which would have absolutely floored me in my 20s.

I suppose, in my own quiet way, I’ve become one of the broken people, and like many of those spiritually wrecked I’m stronger than ever at the same time, in the way weeds around rotten wood become hard to dislodge.

Perhaps this tricky period has allowed me to better understand why Harris would want to create music as deliberately ramshackle as this, to make something broken and battered, something which muddles on through while constantly slipping away. There is both optimism and resignation in her sound world, and there is always beauty. Is that where most of us end up? Might we even say there is something heroic about the performing of this giving up and battling on?

A blend of hope and dereliction strikes me as an honest response to the demands of existence. Beautiful structures where life once was or is in the best case sneaking back again. Beckettian, sure, but more committed to beauty than him and less funny. All perfect for midlife then.

It took me a while to warm up to it, but the ‘Grouper’ universe became, in its sadness and grainy splendour, exactly what I wanted to hear in tough times. At least until she comes back with an album of Bakara covers, as it were.