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Way Their Crept Second Skin Zombie World Sang Their Way Black Out Adorned Close Cloak Second Wind Zombie Skin Where It Goes Tags experimental experimental pop horror United States. Rewire Festival. Barbican Centre. Athens Conservatoire. Scenes From The South Island. Jake Bialos go to album. Jon Vassa go to album. Harris and I spend a cold afternoon sitting on the floor of the small studio space in town where she makes her ink-on-white-surface art—the room contains a stool, a drafting table, and not much else.
Like many quiet people, Harris becomes easy and talkative and funny after the first few minutes and in the right circumstances, but she does have the air of someone most comfortable working alone. All of her music as Grouper has been made without anyone else present. Harris is fine with being asked about her work, but she prefers to be precise about it.
The more precise she is the more she settles on oppositions, or what she calls paradoxes. Speaking with her over two days, I come to understand her artistic consciousness as a family of paradoxes, in which control vs. Plenty of artists talk about separating themselves from their work once they make it public. Harris takes that notion one step further. Something she had written in an interview in with Dummy magazine had really stuck with me. If you make your work through the framework of religion, like some musicians Harris admires—Alice Coltrane, the Clark Sisters, the Estonian choral composer Cyrillus Kreek—perhaps you can ascribe to your work an authorship or a co-authorship that lies outside of yourself.
I press her on this a little bit. Accordingly, the subject of her audience never comes up on its own. In some ways she preferred her life back when she had a day job as a social worker: She could tell people she was a social worker.
I like talking about other stuff besides music. Astoria is of primary importance to the history of westward expansion in the United States.
It is a working-class town with tall trees and Victorian houses and terraced gardens and a six-mile river walk along the old railroad line. The house featured in The Goonies sits a few blocks from it. There have been hundreds of shipwrecks where the Columbia meets the Pacific. Two great fires, in and , decimated large areas of the city, whose pavement had been built over wooden pilings and planks. More recently, its logging, fishing, and canning industries have been in slow decline.
Artists have lived in Astoria—other than Harris, they include the landscape photographer Robert Adams and the folk musician Michael Hurley —and there may be more coming. The town is well into the delicate shift toward an economy of tourists, retirees, second homes, and microbreweries. I excuse myself and go back to my room to work.
Later I apologize for being antisocial. Before, if we hadn't been told, we wouldn't necessarily have even known that the main element of Grouper's sound was in fact vocals. They were that indistinct and that drenched in FX. But here, it actually sounds like a singer, singing songs, but just barely, it's almost like listening to some super lonesome stripped down folk, recorded onto a wax cylinder, and then broadcast through a huge speaker mounted at the very bottom of an elaborate cave system, the songs careening back and forth and picking up more and more reverb and echo with every bounce, until they become this blissed out beautiful blur.
Thick buzzing single guitar notes spread out into wavery fields of murky muted twang, which wrap themselves serpent like around the equally disembodied vocals.
Imagine a field recording of ghosts performing ancient folk songs, a whispery thrum, so barely audible, that it's nearly impossible to capture, but once it is, and the sound is turned up enough to be audible to the human ear, it becomes this gorgeously distorted smear of sound.
What else can we say about Liz Harris and her Grouper project?
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