Grouper
Ruins

Grouper is Liz Harris, an artist I discovered a year ago, in the evening, while glancing at the recent listens of Marissa Nadler (a singer-songwriter with a production that varies in quality and variety).

Ruins is her latest album (dated 2014), with an ambient base and vocal inserts veiled with mystery and dramatic tension. Shadows are omnipresent in her lyrics: shadows of loves not lived, not recognized, desolation.

Solitude is experienced as a safe haven, a condition where one can lull themselves touched by a pale and soft light. This light along with the shadows is described with care and finesse.

Ruins refers to artifacts of the past, to fossils therefore, to the vagueness given by time that transfigures, wears away, and finally destroys.

The album opens with: “Made of Metal” which relies on a gradual chime, background faunal noises, and then a handle that lowers and a door that opens. And thus begins the enchantment or the monolithic torture for the detractors. This is because the boundaries between one track and another are very fluid, blurred. One certainly cannot speak of drastic changes in atmosphere from one track to another, and if you’re looking for dramatic exits, catchy refrains, or immediately engaging motifs, this work is not for you.

One of the best moments of the album is the second track “Clearing”, remarkable for its lyrics and the whispered singing that gets lost among a thousand whirlwinds, almost fused with the music, which sometimes seems to vanish and then reemerge with clarity.

The outlined scenario leaves no room for any consolatory solution. Yet I would say that this is comforting music, a checkered blanket placed over the shoulders, or on the head to muffle the noises, obscure reality for a moment.

The piano is dominant in these tracks, for those who already know Grouper’s works, this is a significant detail, a pleasant surprise as far as I'm concerned because it breaks with the icy and scarcely human sounds we had been accustomed to.

“Lighthouse”, the fifth track, is painful in its progression, with no notes placed at random, it is a slowed-down dive aiming at depth: the light is still visible as one gently descends.

“Holding”, the penultimate track, is once again a moment of rare beauty and lightness where we find grace, delicacy, a marked sense of harmony, and peace condensed.

The closure takes its time, in the sense that there is a silence interval before it peeks out, like a cloud, or the fog that gradually envelops everything. The landscape becomes rarefied, the outlines of objects and natural elements can no longer be distinguished.

It seems as though presences can be sensed in this whirlwind, imprints of what was, the remnants of some lost civilization, or more modestly the ashes of some living being that spread in the air, which the light makes shine before they vanish.