Liz Harris is just barely audible in her own music. Her voice, when she sings, is usually so low that the words sit just below comprehension, teasing that part of the mind that wants to find meaning in the things it struggles to discern. You are forever just about to comprehend a Grouper song. You don’t.
This uneasy little purgatorial space—between understanding and mystery, between anxious hum and beatific drone—is where Grouper’s music lives. It’s where a lot of us live, and Harris’ ability to speak to this place might explain why her music commands such consistent reverence. Rarely does ambient music, by definition lacking sharp form or borders, generate such a specific clutch of recognizable human feelings; rarely does it feel like one person’s breath in our ear. Harris’ music, as diffuse as it is, feels like traveling around inside of a mind.
Last week, she released a project consisting of two long, exploratory works, each broken into two pieces. Working under the name “Nivhek,” she collaborated with visual artist Marcel Weber on an audiovisual installation, one that corresponded with a residency in Portugal and the Russian Arctic. The work, taken by itself, has some of the serene, harsh quality of the landscape itself. The first piece, “After its own death,” is darker and thicker-sounding than anything on either 2018’s Grid of Points or 2014’s Ruins. It is immediately one of the most potent pieces she’s released in a decade. Over the course of its runtime, it expands and contracts and changes shape a number of times, gathering mass with foreboding blobs of tape and Mellotron and then dissolving into solitary bells and gongs, glimmering into thick silence. The atmosphere is severe, a landscape of vast emptiness that nonetheless throbs with alien, unforgiving life.
The second half of the piece feels downright sepulchral, due in no small part to the sound of heavily slammed doors echoing down hallways behind Harris’ murmured vocals. She places other small, field-recorded noises in the corners of the mix—a man’s faraway voice, some shuffling footsteps. A startling surge of distortion from a malfunctioning effects pedal blurts out of the silence, and it might be the loudest sound ever to appear on a Grouper record. The vibe is wet, sucking mud, freezing toes, a faint mildew smell in the air. The overlay of tape hiss gives it a dismal, gray feel, like a damp chill that has penetrated our clothes.
The second composition, “Walking in a spiral towards the house,” picks up where the ringing bells of the first piece began. A circular little theme on mallet percussion, bells and gongs traces and then doubles itself, wandering around prescribed circles. Lou Harrison, a minimalist composer and West Coast mystic, wrote many pieces for gamelan and gamelan-inspired ensembles throughout his decades-long career, and there are hints of some of his works—the “Concerto for Piano with Javanese Gamelan,” for example—at play in Harris’ haunted “walking in a spiral.” The piece is spare and uncluttered to the point of stasis; listening to it, I felt sometimes as if I were watching a single-celled organism trying and failing to replicate itself. The mood is there, a certain mystery and awe, but it dissipates as the bells chime on and the piece gathers no further momentum and takes no forked paths.
That said, one-half of After its own death/Walking in a spiral is her most beguiling work in years. Making hard distinctions between Grouper records feels a bit like ranking and classifying heavy sighs, but there are skin-prickling passages moments that surge out of her work—minor epiphanies that prick the surface of life, startling and haunting you back into yourself. It is not easy to harness or command, and if we have to wander with Harris through some uncertain patches to chance upon these private revelations, all the better.
