On the music of Grouper and memory.
I find it very difficult to remember any of the time I have spent with the music of Liz Harris, who records mostly as Grouper. That may have something to do with the fact that the periods of my life in which I have spent the most time listening to it are those which I have tried my hardest to forget. A few fragments remain: a night walk, in spring, processing the sudden, unresolved ending of the closest relationship I have ever had; a series of evenings spent listening to her early records in the cavernous basement on a wooded hill in which I lived alone for a while, the bare echoes of her voice mixing with their own reflections as they broke against the walls; an afternoon when I laid down, exhausted, atop a set of sunny steps and listened to her album Dragging a Dead Deer Up A Hill in full in a failed attempt to escape myself in sleep.
In each fragment I find myself sleepless and alone. It cannot be a coincidence that those words are also apt descriptors for Harris’ recording process, and probably the two most consistent thematic throughlines of her music. She has spoken at length in interviews about her solitary tendencies, which she says run as far back as early childhood, and her experiences with the insomnia and sleep deprivation which have, in part, enabled her to record as prolifically as she has. She spent many years working as a social worker by day and recording at home late into the night and early morning, and, especially on her earlier recordings, you can tell: hers is the most distinctly nocturnal music I have ever heard.
No doubt this is why Grouper appears on so many of those playlists of ‘music to sleep to’. On a surface level, the droning harmonies, slow tempos, heavy use of reverb and delay, and the ever-present hiss of the cassette tapes onto which she records check all the boxes of this kind of algorithm fodder; and yet: I have never once been able to fall asleep to her music. I feel that it is too true–too personal a record of her inner life and circumstances, too much a manifestation of real loneliness and real sleeplessness and real feeling, and too utterly lacking in pretense–for me to ignore. And her voice. The repeating sway of her melodies and the unstrained, natural quality of her singing make it tempting to call her songs lullabies, but one typically thinks of lullabies as being sung to someone else, and I get the sense that she is singing only to herself. On many of her records her vocals are literally whispered; on others, they are mixed down so quietly or are so heavily blanketed in reverb as to be completely unintelligible. I don’t believe that Harris’ obfuscation of her lyrics means that they are insignificant–in fact I think that to her they are very significant, and that perhaps this is why they are sometimes obscured–and so even when I know that I won’t be able to make them out I can’t help but to try, and so her songs keep me awake. Hers is music to be sleepless to.
Sleeplessness is a strange thing. In it, we are too tired to form new memories and yet too awake to be unaware, as we are in dreams, of the passing of time. We are always losing the future as it becomes the present, but in sleeplessness we also fail to record the present–as we would when fully awake–and so we lose it too, which means that as we move into the future we have also lost a great deal of the past. We watch, in a state of passivity, as time drifts by, aware of what we are losing as we are losing it, unable to save or capture it. There is nothing to do but wait, either for sleep to take you or day to break. What remains is a quiet feeling of having lost something, something whose shape and weight is that of the empty space it has left behind. Spend enough time sleepless, or living in your memory, or depressed–all similar and related states–and this loss becomes a constant, haunting companion: a ghost, of sorts.
Perhaps Grouper’s songs are lullabies, but not for us: they are lullabies for the ghost; and, in a way, physical manifestations of it, ghosts themselves. About a record of hers entitled, fittingly, Dream Loss, she says that “Those songs were written during the beginning of [a] time… when I was thinking of tons of songs, but having trouble recording any of them. I felt really haunted by them, lost children.” Recording is her way of waiting for the day, of processing this dream loss and making something of it.
To record something is to save it-to snatch it back from the jaws of the past before it is swallowed forever-but at a cost. The act of recording an experience–whether through sound, music, photography, or film–is not the same as the act of experiencing it. There is, inevitably, a remove. It is a completely different thing to play music while you are being recorded, for instance as a member of a studio orchestra or a group of jazz musicians, than it is to make music by recording yourself, which is what Harris does. Her work is not about the capture, or preservation, of an experience or moment in time but the construction of one. It is about the construction of memory.
We are all recording, all the time, in our minds. Our brains are tracking all of the sensory input and mental processes we experience to the master tape of memory. But remembering is not a process over which we have a great deal of control. We forget, we misremember – precious things get lost, the mundane vanishes, and things we’d rather lose refuse to go away. While we can suppress traumatic memories, or take particular care to preserve joyous ones, ultimately we cannot, in memory, choose what is saved. In making a record, we can. Naturally, there is a temptation to record everything all of the time. Many people make valiant and doomed efforts to do this with their phone cameras. But the urge to make things permanent, real, and lasting can be all-consuming. Harris describes feeling a need to actually try to stop herself from recording: “to block it… purposely keep myself from playing. That’s the main issue I’ve had around creation. After years of recording every night I began to compartmentalize it, to keep it from overtaking my life.” Every minute spent creating a recording comes at the expense of a minute of the present, of life, that cannot be recovered. Given the amount of time that even such stark, minimal music as Grouper’s takes to make, the exchange rate is not favorable. Recording is robbing Peter to pay Paul, and the currency is time, the most precious thing of all.
Of several albums recorded in the late 2000s (both A I A records and The Man Who Died In His Boat) Harris says that she “honestly [doesn’t] remember making a lot of the songs.” In another interview, she states that she doesn’t usually remember how she feels when recording, or even the process itself, only “the moments before and after maybe“. Cover the Windows and the Walls, an album of hers from 2007, is, she says, “a complete mystery… I have no memory of making it.” When we take into account the circumstances of her music’s making, under the deleterious effects of insomnia, this is not surprising. Sleep is the way by which memories are imprinted and consolidated; its disruption damages and can erase that fragile strip of tape. Her music is the product of a choice-or perhaps a compulsion-to record rather than remember.
There is a term in audio engineering–masking–which can describe either the obfuscation of one sound by another, when they lie in a similar frequency range, or the obfuscation of sound by noise. Masking usually has a negative connotation – it is something to be avoided, an error. Grouper’s music is full of, even dependent upon it. The noisiness and distortion and the muddy, rippling reverb and delay of her recordings may have been, initially, a byproduct of circumstance, learning pains, and cheap equipment, but at some point she could have chosen to begin recording more ‘professionally’ – and she did not. “Distortion and mistakes, silence, deep sadness and misunderstanding, they all,” she says, “have a place” in her music. Not only does masking have a place in her music, I think-though I can only speculate-that it was for a long time the music’s intended function.
We all mask, to varying degrees and via differing means: art, consumption, drugs, sport, games, anything. I know I have spent years doing it, compulsively, constantly: masking personality, masking emotions, masking memories. But masking can only be a temporary and partial relief, because it is not a release. All of that buried material lies under the surface like heavy water. It pools, rotting the pillars of the self, and tends to well up unexpectedly. It is painful to relive unpleasant memories after you have spent so long trying to hide them from yourself, and more painful still to realize, on wracking your memory for happier ones, that there aren’t many. Not because you have never experienced happiness or joy but because pain has an easier time of breaking through the mask, and so the memories which tend to stick around are often the ones which hurt the most. We construct ourselves through past experience as filtered through memory, and a memory composed only of the bad is not the foundation for a good life.
Looking back at the years in which I have held Grouper’s music the closest, I see–I remember–very little. It seemed for a long time as though workaholism and isolation had erased many of my memories, though perhaps it was simply that the kind of memories which those conditions tend to produce aren’t worth saving. Years of my life had gone missing, slipping through my fingers like smoke. I can see now that, over the course of those years, many of the things that make a life worth living-feeling, touch, care, connection, closeness, friendship, love-had sort of just dropped out of my mine like baby teeth. A natural enough part of growing up, I suppose, but a cause for concern if nothing grows back in their place. These losses constitute the kind of wounds which, while they may not kill you, per se, ache, painfully. Grouper’s music filled the spaces of emotional absence, the places where feelings and memories should have been. While her music, like so much gauze packed into a wound, did not heal me, it affirmed that the wound was there, and helped put a stop to the bleeding while I set about figuring out how I could heal myself. For a long time, the comfort and value of her music to me was in its masking: the way each minute of her music could fill a minute of a life I didn’t know how to live and at times wasn’t sure I wanted at all. The comfort and value of it now is in seeing that her work has, over its twenty-year period of release, bent without fail towards peace.
Ever since her album Ruins, which was recorded amid the physical ruins of a Portuguese ghost town and the emotional ruins of a long-term relationship–a record which she says “helped crack [her] open“–her music has become clearer and more intimate. The masking has largely been stripped away, the reverb shimmers rather than submerges, and on many songs you can even make out every word. She seems more content to let her voice, the wonder of its existence, be enough. Her music has always been accepting rather than self-pitying, and now it has an air of forgiveness and calm about it. Hidden, here and there, are even little pinpricks of joy. This relief appears to extend to and perhaps stem from her personal life: in more recent interviews she speaks at length of balance: sleeping more, touring and recording less, and keeping more of a separation between her music and her self. She is still haunted by unrecorded songs, but then don’t we all leave things undone? Dream loss, memory loss, the toll of time: they are all inevitable. It is good to be afraid of them – it means you have something to lose.
As my own life has begun to come back into focus, slowly, and the feelings and colors return, I find that listening to Grouper now dredges up vague recollections, memories of memories – scraps of feeling and experience which have clung to her songs and so survived, rescued by the music with which I had tried to replace them. As they surface, I am beginning to put myself back together again. I do not have the full picture and I never will, but I am treating each memory as its own small miracle. Perhaps they were never lost in the first place – just buried, masked under that heavy water, lost children, waiting to be found.
Her songs sound, and feel, different now. They are more and more moving. I can hear the simple, pure beauty in them drifting through and above the murk, and I appreciate it all the more for having been unable, for so long, to hear it – for knowing both sides now. Still, I find myself sticking to her later work. The older songs are somewhat uncomfortable to listen to, a bit too evocative of exactly what it feels like to be trapped under the surface. It doesn’t do to dwell.
One of my favorite songs of hers is called “I’m Clean Now” (from the 7” Paradise Valley). I’m not sure what those words mean to Harris, but for me they have always been a metaphor for memory. To be clean, I thought, was to be free from memory, from the past, from myself. To forget everything, to dissolve, to disappear completely. Short of traumatic amnesia, a coma, or death, this is of course impossible. I hear these words completely differently now. They no longer offer the possibility of escape, but rather the possibility of hope. Perhaps to be clean is to be done with masking, with hiding, with sleeplessness and sleepwalking. To see the self, clearly and without judgement, and so perhaps to be seen by others. Perhaps to be loved. To see the present, meaning to make memories again. To see the past, meaning to remember. One of my strongest memories from the bad years is waking well before sunrise and taking the bus out to Dún Laoghaire to swim in the Irish sea – in my boxers, in December. The water was so cold that, when it hit my chest, I struggled to breathe. I spent the rest of the day roaming the dirt paths which run along the coast on my own, damp and shivering and grinning. That kind of clean. In spite of all the awful experiences which preceded that morning and were soon to follow, pressing against it menacingly on either side, it remains perhaps the happiest of my entire life. Perhaps there will be another such morning. Perhaps to see the future, meaning to live, again – and in such a way that the day may come when I can say, in all honesty – I’m clean now.
Endnotes:
I took the title of this essay from T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922), specifically this passage from part five (“What the Thunder Said”), which happens to describe the actual sound of Grouper’s music better than anything I could ever come up with:
“A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.”
I find an eerie number of parallels with this mise en scène in her track “Hollow Press” from her 2007 collaborative record with Roy Montgomery.
Some songs which are relevant to this essay, for the curious: Youtube | Spotify
Some other non-profile/interview writings people have done on Grouper which I really appreciate and recommend:
Mr Magpie 
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