Through the Pastoral, Darkly

American composer David Behrman once observed, “The world is filled
with busy, noisy music—and noise in
general—and I’d
rather contribute to the quieter end of the spectrum.” Portland
guitarist/vocalist Grouper (aka Liz Harris) would concur with that
dronecentric avant-gardist.

Sometimes it’s the most quiet, ethereal music that hits you with the
heaviest impact. Sometimes the Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning”
will slay you harder than “Sister Ray” and the Beatles’ “Good Night”
will move you more than “Helter Skelter.” Sometimes a whisper affects
you more severely than a scream. Grouper has proven herself to be one
of the most sublime practitioners of transforming quietude into
profoundly meaningful listening experiences.

Growing up in Northern California, Harris was exposed to the
teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff, an Armenian mystic who advocated
subsuming the ego in altruistic communal living. There she gained an
appreciation for nature; now she’s a solo artist in Portland’s thriving
underground-music scene, but Gurdjieff’s tenets seem to rein in
Harris’s desire to foster a cult of personality.

Judging from her releases’ artwork and some of her song and album
titles, Grouper could conceivably be slotted into the freak-folk
movement. And Harris probably knows and likes some of the artists who
get lumped into that subgenre. But her music is too unearthly to be
properly classified as folk, no matter how freaky—unless we
expand folk to mean the soundtrack of dreams, the aural equivalent of
spores, the wordless plaints of wraiths.

Grouper’s debut album, Way Their Crept (2005, Free Porcupine
Society; reissued by Type), features Harris’s oneiric coo wispily
drifting amid much-delayed guitar vapor, often rippling in concentric
circles of gentle reverb. This music hovers and shimmers in midair,
haunting and taunting you with its sheerest-of-sheer textural beauty.
The songs aren’t really the type you hum, though you can probably
approximate their contours if you really concentrate. Rather, these
largely amorphous hymns conjure feelings of drifting anomie, as well as
a kind of enveloping comfort, as if you’re hearing your mother sing a
lullaby to you while you hang suspended in amniotic tranquility.

Some listeners will dismiss Way Their Crept as dull, perhaps
not even worthy of being called “music.” Of course, compositions
without beats and discernible lyrics will always face an uphill
challenge with most people. But to those blessed with long attention
spans and a predilection for music that eschews the tyranny of meter
and verse/
chorus/verse, artists like Grouper offer a free-floating
balm for tense, grim times.

Grouper’s next two full-lengths, Wide (2006, Free Porcupine
Society) and Cover the Windows and the Walls (2007, Root
Strata), continue the dreamy drift of Way Their Crept, with
Harris creating the illusion of multiplying her voice infinitely into
the
receding horizon. She strums a guitar here, but the chords are
mostly faint, muted to a subliminal thrum or similarly delayed into
gauzy dispersion. Much like Bristol, England, shoegaze band Flying
Saucer Attack and the most weightless moments on My Bloody Valentine’s
Loveless, Harris achieves the paradox of creating light, airy
sounds that exert an undeniable gravity.

These releases exude a hazy, rural brand of psychedelia, but it’s
more of an oxygen/nature high than it is a senses-altering psilocybin
trip. Folks may not freak to them, but they’ll emerge from their
presence feeling changed—and maybe even cleansed.

Grouper’s Dragging a Dead Deer up a Hill (2008, Type; cue
“bambient” pun) can be construed as her breakthrough work,

inasmuch as an 8.2 Pitchfork review and placement on that popular
website’s Top 50
Albums of 2008 can dramatically elevate one’s
profile.
Beyond that, though, Harris has added clarity to her
production, so that you can decipher about 23 percent of her lyrics
instead of past works’ zero. Also, her acoustic guitar actually sounds
like what most expect of said instrument. In fact, “Heavy Water/I’d
Rather Be Sleeping” boasts a melody that will likely please some
non-mainstream-radio decision makers.

On Dragging a Dead Deer up a Hill, Grouper miniaturizes
Cocteau Twins’ mellow melodic grandeur to bedroom-sized proportions,
and she comes off as a more traditional balladeer. By lifting the veil
of effects she’d liberally used before, Harris reveals herself to
possess a gorgeous, diaphanous voice—although obviously not as
acrobatic as Liz Fraser’s—and a deft way with melancholy
tunesmithing.

It’s apparent that, just a few albums into her career, Grouper is on
her way to joining such masters of beatless bliss as William Basinski,
Brian Eno (Discreet Music, On Land), and fellow Portland
artists Eluvium and Valet (Honey Owens). Even intimacy-loving
introverts need figureheads, and Grouper is poised to become a key
artist in this loose coalition of back-to-nature (and the womb)
troubadours.