Grouper (aka Liz Harris) has always succeeded in using guitar and vocals to create a characteristic atmosphere, something murky and morose, layer upon layer of gentle and lonely drone.
Her latest album, Ruins (the first since last year’s The Man Who Died in His Boat), takes the same aesthetic but explores it in a whole new way. On the majority of the songs Harris uses just an upright piano and her voice to create an album of quiet emotional intensity. This gives the album an almost classical feel, like the soundtrack to a tragedy whose characters are lonely and doomed to eternal sorrow. Harris is wonderfully patient (first track ‘Made of Metal’ is almost two minutes of a murmured pulse, a prologue to the rest of the album) and this gives Ruins a wonderful sense of space. The stretches of quiet between the notes feel less like an omission but rather the gaps where the rest of the world gets in (a feeling which is enhanced by the fact that the album was not recorded in a soundproofed studio – more on which in a moment).
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The album was recorded in 2011, during a period Harris spent in Aljezur in south-west Portugal, and the sense of this place has left an indelible mark on the music. When not holed up writing and recording, Harris was hiking several miles to the nearest beach, passing through tiny villages and the ruins of old estates. She says that she intended the album to exist as a document of that walk, and what it became to mean both literally and metaphorically. As she puts it, “Failed structures. Living in the remains of love.” This sense of place is reinforced with the inclusion of the incidental sounds captured during recording, snippets of croaking wildlife and beeping microwaves and the spattering rain and rattling wind of a Portuguese storm anchor the music in a time and place. In practice this creates an album of staggering intimacy, as if the songs themselves never actually left the room they were recorded in but seeped into the thick stuccoed walls, only leaching out at midnight when conditions are right or the stars align in some unknown configuration.
The only deviation from this is the final track, ‘Made of Air’, which wasn’t recorded with the others but all the way back in 2004 in the home of Harris’s mother. The song sees a departure sonically as well as temporally, with a return to the familiar shimmering hum of earlier Grouper releases. The title is particularly apt, the song atmospheric in the most literal sense, 11+ minutes of cool and airy instrumentation, like the most serene of dreams.
Ruins an unquestionably sad album, but one which can be soothing if you let it. It’s hushed music that you should play loud, that will fill the room with something almost tangible.
You can buy Ruins right now via Kranky and all good record shops.