Grouper

The Tube doors close. A thousand thoughts and personalities crammed into a carriage. Happiness anger stress and despair, no doubt, squeezed in stifled juxtaposition. Each soul immersed in their own predicament, paper, or reverie. The woman next to me peremptorily apologises for imperceptibly nudging my arm. Each man an island of  ignorance and indifference to each other. Bodies tossed temporarily together through necessity.

As the crowd settles, the one familiar feature of this landscape-my girlfriend's face-disappears. Now obscured by the multitudes she's a thousand miles away. In the midst of all these persons and their anonymous corporeality I am confronted by a startling fact. A thought like light bursting from an open door into a dark room. We are all alone. Alone despite our jobs, comforting rhythms of existence and co habitation. Alone despite our vast hurrying number.Alone despite our phones and technology. Alone despite our closeness. Alone inside our heads. Alone.

This existential crisis, however, provokes no internal wail of despond, just a serene acceptance. An acknowledgement that this is really obvious once we take away all our distractions. My phelgmatic attitude is perhaps aided through the choral tones of Grouper's 'Moon Is Sharp' circling round my head, lifting me away from the humdrum of public transport.

Grouper is the solo ambient project of Liz Harris. Transportive, ethereal, somnambulant, yes, it's easy to sound like a tit when describing her beautiful sounds. Yet there is something so wonderful about it that I find restraint impossible. In short, this is music that could make clearing landfill seem poetic. Let alone tube journeys.

On 2011's double album, A I A, -one half older recordings (Dream Loss) the other newer songs (Alien Observer)- Harris confirms herself as a leading figure in the ambient scene today. These two works orbit each other like twin sides of Harris' psyche which she invites us to sleepwalk into.

Double tracked vocals create a phantom choir of Harris' spiralling within an echoing cathedral of reverb and numbing dissonance. Harris buries her melodies, which are as delicate as dandelion seeds, beneath tape hiss. Treading just the right side betwixt prettiness and atonality, this is music for 2am. For stillness and solitude. Gentle cloistered reflection.

While she works with oft used tools: voice, keys, guitar and ample hiss, Harris' success is her singularity. Her unique blend of silence / noise, of aloofness and emotion. It is only through the insidious interplay of these elements that Grouper gains its force. The way her vocals mesh into each other, and how her vocals constantly struggle against being consumed by their murky accompaniments. Her music posses a painterly quality whereby each component part bleeds into each other and in doing so creating something vaster than its parts. Some stepping back to appreciate the whole is required. To extricate melody from discord, or lyrics from unintelligible fug. The track 'Alien Observer' is an illustration of this, of what a simple keyboard line and multi tracked vocals can do in Harris' hands. Meditative and spellbinding,befitting of someone who has produced music (literally) for people to go to sleep to in art installations based around 'the sleep cycle', the track has a grace.

Also, there is just enough of the avant garde here to separate her from the leaden singer songwriter genre. In the latter form lyrics are integral, yet here sound itself takes the fore, the music thus becomes a notch more abstract. Which makes sense in light of her impeccable art school credentials.

Music is about moments. The 'where were you when you heard this?'. It's the soundtrack for often banal and meaningless lives, imbuing memories with an often unwarranted profundity. Liz Harris' music is like this. While on the surface it feels like very little is happening, an immersion in its balm like drone reveals a detail much like the unknowable thoughts and worries written on the faces of those Tube passengers: concerns that seem absent or banal to a casual observer, yet mean the world to their hosts, literally. Just because these vicissitudes of emotion aren't obvious doesn't make them less real.

'The space between these albums,' Harris notes, 'is about the space between us.... (and our) layers of folding worlds.' It is lucky that we have Harris around to help close the distance. For she takes this solitude and transmutes it into beautiful music with which we can enrich our own hermetic bubbles.

File Next To: Juliana Barwick