Culture

The Hypnotic Spell of Grouper’s “Shade”


The primary conceit of ambient music is to be indistinct: to blend in or be tuned out; to eschew form and melody, and evaporate into the ether as seemingly endless wisps of tone; to suck the listener in like an autostereogram or go entirely unnoticed as a tune. For most of her career, the singer-songwriter and producer Liz Harris has disrupted that notion with songs that are both impenetrable and unavoidable, uncanny and appealing. The music she makes, sometimes under the name Nivhek but mostly as Grouper, is immersive and hypnotic—a rumbling undercurrent that surges toward your ears.

Born and raised in Northern California, Harris grew up in a commune called the Group, where she learned the Fourth Way philosophy associated with the mystic George Gurdjieff, who believed that most humans live in a state of “waking sleep.” She has described her childhood self as a bit of an outsider who sought to “melt into the background,” and found solace in the outdoors. (At eleven, she left the Group to live with her father, in Bolinas, where she was introduced to pop music.) She has filled her songs with references to bodies of water, the woods, the beach. Some of her best-known albums—“Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill,” from 2008, and “The Man Who Died in His Boat,” from 2013—take their titles from Harris’s experiences in the elements.

Her early recordings featured gloomy, immense songs. In more recent ones, Harris has expanded the scope of her ambient sound to include brushes of folk, the suspension of drone music, and the euphony and tunefulness of pop. She is a methodical and reclusive artist who only uses a few instruments, for which she has little formal training, and she mostly writes and records her songs in solitude. Her vaporous new album as Grouper, “Shade,” is among her most lucid works—it’s lyrics-focussed and transparent, even at its least audible. Gathering acoustic songs from the last fifteen years, and evoking the climate of Harris’s home in Portland, Oregon, the project jells into a threadbare collection of faint love songs, woven carefully and delicately around her voice.

As Grouper records go, “Shade” is probably the most fully formed and user-friendly, closer to pop than experimental on the spectrum of Harris’s engulfing transmissions. The songs are mostly around three or four minutes long, and, though they aren’t quite organized, they each have shape. When taken together, they seem spiritually connected by a need for relief from alienation. Within the soft thrum of “Pale Interior” and “The Way Her Hair Falls,” there is a hushed search for optimism, and there aren’t many songs in the Grouper discography quite like “Disordered Minds”: the track is placidly rhythmic, slowly building to the distortion of a chanted exorcism. On “Promise,” the music is nearly quieter than the fizz and crackle of background noise, but Harris’s singing has a rare primacy, as she divulges what she finds comforting about a lover. “You got the prettiest eyes / That’s not what I like about you / You got the prettiest hair / That’s not what I like about you either / I know you take good care of me / And I like that,” she murmurs, before pledging to reciprocate.

Harris recently cited the Cocteau Twins singer Elizabeth Fraser when talking about her own approach to songwriting, and her belief that words can communicate feelings even when they are barely perceptible to the listener. Much of Harris’s early music supports that theory—while also portraying an anonymous artist looking to divorce herself from her art’s meaning, or a shy artist retreating deeper into her own music—but “Shade” presents her lyrics, and her voice, as purposeful. Harris has admitted to not really thinking about the listener’s ability to understand her, but throughout this album there is an obvious desire to be perceived, if not heard. Even if you can’t make out what she sings on “Followed the Ocean,” the song’s submerged delivery reflects her monologue: rushing water becoming nearly baptismal. The album’s closer, “Kelso (Blue Sky),” is one of the few narrative Grouper songs, and, as a guitar riff unwinds, Harris pulls apart nearly every syllable she sings. “Alone on the road at night / Calling the white fog rising up / To consume me,” she says. “Guess I’m halfway home / Can’t wait to be there / Can’t wait to be alone / I’m nearly to the coast.”

Grouper songs often embody the feeling of being alone on the coast, but the songs on “Shade” are reaching out, many seemingly trying to psychically communicate with someone—though perhaps not us. That resolution gives the spartan nature of these tracks an added closeness: they feel private, just out of earshot, but also like something being shared. The fog that normally hangs over her albums has lifted here, only to reveal new mysteries, for, as Harris’s voice becomes more clear, her dispatches become more cryptic. This is ambient music that refuses to simply wash over the listener; it’s a riptide dragging you under.


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