The last time I had the opportunity to write about a Grouper album was around the time Liz Harris had released The Man Who Died in His Boat, a collection of songs loosely inspired by an abandoned boat Harris stumbled upon as a child on Agate Beach, Oregon. Relatively recent to that writing I had visited Agate Beach and observed a massive, 165-ton dock that had washed ashore, a remnant of the destruction following the 2011 tsunami in Japan.
The Oregon coast is littered with things like this. I’ve found bottles of foreign soda, plastic doll parts scattered down sand spits, lost merchandise floated across hundreds of miles of ocean and strewn over fogged beaches. Agate Beach is a beautiful three hour drive from where Liz Harris currently resides in Astoria, Oregon. And while Ruins, her tenth album, wasn’t recorded even in the same hemisphere as Oregon, it still bares the emotional marks of coastal residency.
Ruins was recorded in coastal Portugal, a brisk walking length from the Atlantic Ocean. You can almost hear it in the space between sounds here, a hissing white noise emerging from somewhere in the darkness outside. Songs are simple: a piano, a voice, one take with the storming southwestern Europe sky. Ruins, then, is a literal reference to the dilapidated structures dotting her hike to the beach, but also a metaphorical reference to intangible ruins. Lyrically it bemoans a shattered relationship (“Can’t you see us fading? / Soon there won’t be anyone there”), instrumentally it removes nearly all processing and mystery that previously cloaked Grouper records in hazy fuzz. Where once stood a monolithic structure of reverb and effects now lies sand shifting in the winds. Nothing beside remains.
Much can be said about the personal triumph of how clear and poignant the lyrics are on Ruins—because they are. But there’s something subtextually urgent about this record, beyond its heartbreaking emotional intimacy. There are possibly less than half a dozen overdubs on the entire album (excluding the 11-minute drone closer), and while maybe a stylistic choice, Harris herself has described the record as somewhat incidental: “I just asked for a piano to be there. The songs just emotionally showed up… It was completely unplanned.”
So Ruins becomes an emotional diary of sorts, a piece of music solely influenced by and constructed around devastation. Diaries themselves can be paradoxical things. They exist as a force to combat decaying memories, allowing you to contemplate and document feelings as they happen. On the flip side, memories can be painful to recall so vividly. The songs on Ruins were recorded in 2011, their three-year delay a symptom of healing and allowing the pain to wither slightly. That they are seeing release at the tail end of 2014 may speak to the gestational period of grief (see also: Ontario Gothic).
The ever-slowing melody of “Labyrinth” mimics an actual maze, the familiar pattern lengthening with each approaching corner until a shrill beep from an appliance across the room jolts you out of your hypnosis. The Satie-esque piano on “Holding” sluggishly marches through a devastating memory: “In the morning when the sadness comes / The tears fall down in patterns on the window.” That the song ends by being overtaken by the sound of a thunderstorm is no coincidence; even here nature eventually consumes our structures.
“Lighthouse” fights its way through a chorus of croaking frogs to wallow an achingly gorgeous melody, as does the breathy falsetto of “Call Across Rooms” where she hopes “Maybe we’ll figure it out / and then I can give you my letters.” The final song, “Made of Air,” dates back to a 2004 home recording and stretches 11 minutes long, a pulsing onslaught of feedback and repetitious Wurlitzer. The noise quivers and threatens to fade away on multiple occasions, like an oxygen-starved candle or lapping waves being dragged back to low tide. It’s somewhat Disintegration Loop-ish in it’s slow decay, but as a closer it sounds like the sunrise after an all-nighter: tense, hopeful, breathtaking.
In a way, the grand theme of Liz Harris’ work as Grouper has been addressing metaphorical themes of death, from Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill‘s literal interpretation to Alien Observer‘s abstract daydreaming to Dream Loss‘ literal dreaming. When I saw her speak a month ago prior to a screening of her Paul Clipson collaboration Hypnosis Display, she described a series of dreams where bold, flashing words would appear in her field of vision, like ominous billboards on a loop.
Shortly after I saw Hypnosis Display, I took a trip to the Oregon coast where I saw the wreck of the Peter Iredale, a 300-foot steel ship that ran ashore over 100 years ago. What’s left of it after a century of salt water erosion is a 20-foot tall segment of the bow, encrusted in barnacles, rust, and sand. You have to imagine in its sailing days it was a majestic, monumental vessel. But much like everything around us—structures and roads, even our memories—nature found a way to wear it down to bleached bones. The least I could do was snap a picture of the ruin before it collapsed, swallowed by the sea and forgotten entirely.
Ruins is out now via Kranky.