Liz Harris lives in Astoria, Oregon, near the Pacific Ocean, at the dead-end summit of a steep street. The view from her house encompasses, in the bottom half of one’s field of vision, coastland bisected by an almost formally straight vertical zip—her street—ending downhill at the Columbia River. Above that, in a stack of horizontal layers: water; the Washington coastline on the other side; sky.
Most of Astoria is a wooded slope leading down to a waterside. If you are not using the water or the woods, you are not really of this place. When she is not working on her seemingly opposite practices—her echoey, unverifiable, distance-haunted music and her exact, patterned visual art—Harris uses both as much as she can. She hikes and volunteers in Lewis and Clark National Park to maintain trails and restore native plants, and works to improve her sailing skills on a friend’s boat.
She relocated here in 2013, the latest in a series of northward moves up the coast over the last two decades, most recently from Portland. Thirty-seven now, she has lived solely from her creative work for about seven years: She makes ingrown and visionary Grouper records outside of traditional studios, designs her album covers, mails out her own limited vinyl editions, tours without a manager, and in the process has become a kind of exemplary DIY artist, at some personal and emotional expense. She is now trying to develop her life beyond the small but demanding machine she has created. In particular she would like to defeat the expectation, self-imposed and otherwise, that she travel around the world playing concerts, a routine that disrupts her sleep and health, and gets her no closer to understanding why she does what she does. In any case, she doesn’t feel the expectation locally. She has never performed in Astoria. She was asked only once, recently, by a local gallery, and played a DJ set instead.
Harris’ work is oceanic and of limited means. It involves acoustic or electric guitar, or, more recently, piano; her voice, thick with reverb or multi-tracked into choral harmonies, once roaming and now precise; and that’s it, other than environmental or field recordings, like the whoosh of a coal train panning from left to right that closes her newest album, Grid of Points, after the last chord of the song “Breathing.” (The train isn’t a passing sound effect, but essentially the song’s second movement.) She likes to work with what she calls “a small set of variables” and create a puzzle with them, working with only a loose idea of what it might become; this is because she finds that limitations open up more room in which she may place herself.
The Grouper project generally takes the form of songs, but it is also a mood, and maybe even a collective mood in a metaphorical room: a contemplative and cathartic space involving simple technology and difficult emotional processing. (“Sad” is a word often used positively about her music.) Her concerts, in particular, are bushy and nebulous and kind of psychedelic, as if the music is growing on its own. If you have seen Harris cross-legged on the floor, often below projections of experimental films by her friend Paul Clipson, singing while managing her guitar and pedals and tape recorders with great concentration, you have seen someone who would prefer not to perform. She would like to make records instead. She would also like to go sailing. She would not like to talk too much about music.
On my first full day in Astoria, a planned hike is impossible because rainstorms close the parks. Harris and I spend a cold afternoon sitting on the floor of the small studio space in town where she makes her ink-on-white-surface art—the room contains a stool, a drafting table, and not much else. Like many quiet people, Harris becomes easy and talkative and funny after the first few minutes and in the right circumstances, but she does have the air of someone most comfortable working alone. All of her music as Grouper has been made without anyone else present.
Harris is fine with being asked about her work, but she prefers to be precise about it. The more precise she is the more she settles on oppositions, or what she calls paradoxes. Speaking with her over two days, I come to understand her artistic consciousness as a family of paradoxes, in which control vs. non-intentionality, or a controlled non-intentionality, is at the top of the tree.
Plenty of artists talk about separating themselves from their work once they make it public. Harris takes that notion one step further. “I don’t think of my work as mine, almost at all,” she tells me. This isn’t too surprising. Something she had written in an interview in 2013 with Dummy magazine had really stuck with me. “I often picture releasing an album,” she suggested then, “as trying to secretly sink a heavy object in a lake—find a quiet corner, gently slip it under the surface, watch the ripples for a moment, and steal away.”
Right. The artistic persona is a kind of mortgaged borrowing against the artist’s personhood. If you make your work through the framework of religion, like some musicians Harris admires—Alice Coltrane, the Clark Sisters, the Estonian choral composer Cyrillus Kreek—perhaps you can ascribe to your work an authorship or a co-authorship that lies outside of yourself. If you don’t, you’ll have a persona to lug around, unless you are, let’s say, the most anonymous, self-erasing kind of ambient musician, or feel strongly that your records are really meant to be sunk into a lake.
I press her on this a little bit. “I know that the fact I’m making it makes me inseparable from it,” she explains. “But I want to be separated from it also. And it’s the nature of what’s in it: This music is about something so interior or raw. And then that makes you shyer about sharing it even though you’re making the choice to share it.”
Accordingly, the subject of her audience never comes up on its own. “I think I pretty genuinely forget they’re there most of the time,” she says. “It’s nice if people like it. I’m not making it so people like it, though.”
In some ways she preferred her life back when she had a day job as a social worker: She could tell people she was a social worker. “I really struggled with telling people I did music,” she admits. “I still struggle with the right word to use. I don’t think of myself as a proper musician. I’m not well-versed in anything I play, and ‘composer’ sounds really heady. I like talking about other stuff besides music.”
Astoria is of primary importance to the history of westward expansion in the United States. It was the first settlement of Euro-Americans west of the Rockies, secured as a fur-trading outpost by the entrepreneur John Jacob Astor right after Lewis and Clark’s expeditions—“to seize the mouth of the Columbia,” according to the plaque at the historic site of Fort Astoria. It is a working-class town with tall trees and Victorian houses and terraced gardens and a six-mile river walk along the old railroad line. (The house featured in The Goonies sits a few blocks from it.) It is also a wildcatters’ terminus that has experienced a fair amount of trauma beyond what the plaque’s passive-voice, manifest-destiny constructions skates over.
There have been hundreds of shipwrecks where the Columbia meets the Pacific. Two great fires, in 1883 and 1922, decimated large areas of the city, whose pavement had been built over wooden pilings and planks. More recently, its logging, fishing, and canning industries have been in slow decline. Some fishing business remains, embattled by sea lions, who gather by the hundred at the town’s docking areas, damaging power and water lines, and eating the salmon. Artists have lived in Astoria—other than Harris, they include the landscape photographer Robert Adams and the folk musician Michael Hurley—and there may be more coming. The town is well into the delicate shift toward an economy of tourists, retirees, second homes, and microbreweries.
I see Harris later on that rainy day at a restaurant where I’d been served a very good martini and magnificent local oysters by a bartender with neck tattoos. Harris had told me she’d be there at some point after rehearsing, and she is greeted by name at the bar. After having witnessed her talk with ease and lightness to local friends in town and, by contrast, express so much struggle about her work to me, I can’t bring myself to interfere with her Saturday night. I excuse myself and go back to my room to work. Later I apologize for being antisocial. She explains that she would have been happy to talk, and wasn’t bothered. “Antisocial is legit anyhow in my book,” she writes in a friendly email.
Grid of Points is 22 minutes long. “I call it an album,” Harris explains. Kranky, her label, at first worried that listeners would feel short-changed: Among distributors, that is considered short for an album. She would not consider adding more tracks to it. “I said, ‘That’s not how this works,’” she remembers. “‘This is the complete idea. It just happens to be 22 minutes.’”
The album is a set of songs recorded in the winter of 2014 during a music residency at the Ucross Foundation, in Northern Wyoming, where she was basically confined to a room with a piano during a cold snap: One day the temperature fell to 18 below zero. During her time there she developed a fever, stopped working, and packed it in. “This music is about representing something that cut off too early,” she tells me.
A press release for the record quotes Harris saying that the songs are inspired by “the idea that something is missing or cold.” Not unusual: death, sleep, water, family, and weather are common themes in her work. Her 2013 record, The Man Who Died in His Boat, takes its title from a shipwrecked boat Harris and her father once saw on the beach in Bolinas, California; Harris wrote an anecdote about it in a prepared statement for that record. But to me she adds that her father’s father was a serviceman who died on the USS Dorchester, torpedoed by a German submarine in 1943.
A few new songs have something to do with death, but not exclusively. The song “Driving,” she explains, was inspired by an image of tree-tunnels over a road, and people driving to a funeral, and some other things too. “There’s some reference to my own relationship to family,” she says, “trying to find a way through it, without thinking it has to be excavated or turned into something positive.”
Not long after she wrote that copy about “missing or cold” and sent it in to the label, she received word that her friend Paul Clipson, the filmmaker with whom she often collaborated—including on the full-length, virtuosically original 2014 film Hypnosis Display*—*had died. Since then she has been concerned that people will think the record was made with specific reference to Clipson. It was not.
The idea of a Grouper album as a salable chunk of where Liz Harris is at these days—a hook for a journalistic profile—should be a bit suspect. It’s not just that her songs aren’t standard narratives, or that she is doing what she calls “sharing/not sharing,” and her friend, the New Zealand musician Roy Montgomery, calls “voluntary and involuntary testament”; it is also that her recording and her releasing are not remotely on the same schedule.
She mentions to me that she has about 200 songs that are not yet recorded, to which she feels some responsibility; she expresses some worry about having a breakthrough, while getting familiar with a new instrument (lately she has been experimenting with a lap-steel guitar), whereby she might write many more. “It’s about a really intuitive sense of when something’s ready,” she explains. “I often feel, more and more so, that things just have to sit for a long time while I think about them and what I’m gonna do with them.”
But the idea of a Grouper album as a new story in a linear narrative is also suspect because at this point she’s involved in an integrated practice which is not confined to music; as the frame expands, older ideas will get mixed in. And also because she is not doing this for us, after all.
I ask Harris whether she finds anything satisfying at all about performing. She laughs. “When it goes well I feel good afterwards, and I feel like I’ve gotten through some challenge. There’s the endurance,” she says. And later: “I definitely am doing it in a big way because it’s something I wouldn’t do normally. That’s kind of wired into me, to do the opposite thing from which feels comfortable.”
This paradox comes, she offers without hesitation, from the pedagogy and ethics of the Gurdjieffian intentional community where she spent her childhood, in Northern California’s Sonoma Mountains. The farrago of East-West thought associated with the Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff is also called Fourth Way; the practice he inspired is called the Work; and the commune itself, at least the one Harris grew up in, is called the Group. At times she lived with her parents and three siblings; at times she lived with another family in the Group. The families weren’t all on the same land—some were dotted elsewhere in the area. “But it was a closed community,” she explains, “in the fact that I didn’t know nobody outside of it, or any way outside of the messages I was hearing from them.”
Insiders of the Group with some critical distance on it, she explains—kids or former members—call its devout participants “groupers.” There were regular lectures for the adults, and an experimental school for the children. Much of the community dynamics revolved around Anne Haas, one of the Sonoma group’s founders and its instructional paragon. Harris’ middle name is Anne—as, she says, is the case with all the girls she grew up with.
One of the precepts of the Work involves doing the opposite of what is natural or comfortable to you, and so for instance Harris, a shy kid, was made to play a leading role in a “bent version” of a Christmas play as a Miwok Mother Mary, with singing parts.
She describes the culture there as one of “hidden messages,” paranoia, and suspicion. “Because,” she explains, “your teacher isn’t a teacher. Your teacher’s saying, ‘I’m not your teacher, I’m just speaking to you about those things’; they are intentionally putting you into situations, but they’ll say, ‘You take from it what you want.’ There are all these levels of saying that something is what it isn’t.” She learned how to be quiet, she says, either to reassure people or hold them at bay.
Her parents separated when she was 3. At 11, she left the Group to live with her father in Bolinas, 50 miles south, and started public school. On the first day, she remembers, girls surrounded her on the schoolyard and asked her what kind of music she listened to. She panicked: She didn’t listen to pop music or watch MTV in the Group. “But I had older brothers and sisters, so I was racking my brain for names. I said, ‘Megadeth, Public Enemy, and Metallica.’ The girls said, ‘We like Debbie Gibson!” in unison. I was like, Shit. Who’s Debbie Gibson?”
She got through it. She listened to Nirvana and Slowdive and SWV, hung out with weird kids, learned to study, won academic awards, and attended UC Berkeley for chemistry and environmental science, but turned out a visual arts major. She moved to L.A. briefly. She describes her art practice during that time as “wild and kind of trash-filled—literal garbage painted bright colors and taped onto the wall, scraps of paper.” She stopped that because it stressed her out. “I wanted something contained that was purely about calming me and being enjoyable.” Hence, patterns, which she especially likes because they are not perfect, but you have to get up close to them to see the imperfections.
When she started Grouper, Harris never intended performing to be a major part of her life; when she was asked to perform, it simply didn’t occur to her to say no. In 2009, Animal Collective invited her on tour with them, just as they were finding a considerable audience with the record Merriweather Post Pavilion. That tour led to much greater visibility for her, and a booking agent. Ever since, she has performed even when she hasn’t wanted to in order to satisfy her own sense of accomplishment over difficulty. Now she’s beginning to question that decision for basic reasons of balance, and is still working through the after-effects of her early life.
“I like to do exactly what I want to do, but without anyone looking,” she says. This could be a way of getting around appearing “prideful”—an attribute which could be punishable within the Group. But even there, in her early life, she was confronted with a paradox. She puts it this way: “Don’t be prideful. But here: stand on the stage and do something.”
She gave her first performance in 2005. It was at the warehouse where she lived: LoBot, named after the surrounding Lower Bottoms neighborhood of West Oakland. She performed under the name KRUEGER, as in Freddy. (She had a terror and fascination with the Nightmare on Elm Street movies as a child and later, in college, forced herself to watch them as a kind of trauma therapy.) She did the whole set from the back room of LoBot’s performance space, such that everyone there had thought they were listening to a DJ. She had already been recording music on four-track machines by herself by then. Some of those recordings later showed up in her records, including the last song on her 2014 album Ruins.
She later called herself Grouper, she explains, because she wanted “a reference that was all mine and completely personal, and also the opposite, at once. You’re a grouper: You’re grouping sounds together.” (It has nothing to do with the fish of that name, even though Harris’ music sounds as if it is underwater.)
Grouper records once were murky and crypto-symphonic, eerie and intense but relatively gentle within the spectrum of the Bay Area noise and experimental music scene of the early aughts. First was a self-titled record released as a CD-R; soon came an album, Way Their Crept, in 2005. At the time, she was working in recreational day programs with developmentally different adults and burrowing into her four-track and her Wurlitzer keyboard when she got home. “I was so unselfconscious about recording for the first three or four years,” she remembers. “It was just a deluge. It was all I wanted to do every night.” Musicians in her world—noise, drone, ambient—put out lots of records in the early aughts; it was customary to see heaps of CD-Rs on the merch tables at shows. But she never could have put out her work as fast as she was recording it.
Some of the songs on Way Their Crept were inspired by what she calls “Krueger-esque nightmares” or “demon dreams.” She feels, ultimately, that the music came out on its own. “It had to do with letting something out or trying to figure out how to be friends with some heavy feelings.”
Harris has no musical training other than piano instruction from her father, who also made her mixtapes of classical music when she was young, including various pieces by Arvo Pärt, Janáček’s piano cycle “In the Mists,” and Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues. She never sang choral music. When I ask her about the harmonic sophistication—at least that’s what it sounds like to me—of the early vocal track “Way Their Crept,” with chords stacked on chords, she says she “just kind of did things as she went along.” (She also can’t remember which track was called “Way Their Crept.”)
Her materials are still largely the same. But since Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, in 2008, her records have become clearer, more ballad-like and celestial, with a stronger core of songwriting in them. All along they have been constitutionally melancholic. Harris writes lyrics carefully, but the reason you can’t hear them very well—I would say—is that the what of the music recedes before the why: a sense of purpose as pervasive as an atmosphere. And the why recedes before the how: the process. And the how recedes before the withdrawal of self, or the silence.
Harris is interested in sleep, the dream world, the subconscious mind and various kinds of absence. During a conversation at her home—with her small dog, Rosie, on her lap—she talks about her interest in representing the presence of something through silence. She follows up in an email with a few examples, and adds:
I like exploring discomfort, “mistakes,” what happens when they are left in, incorporated. Silence is a mistake, we’re supposed to cut out the negative space on an album, in a conversation. I think I’ve spent much of my life feeling like I was a mistake, needed to change myself in order to fit in, which of course would involve talking more or better. Still struggle with it. I suppose in the silence there is a lot of trying to come to terms with myself, examining a need for slowness and space. This music is a room that I take care of, I help decide what is accepted. Here distortion and mistakes, silence, deep sadness and misunderstanding, they all have a place. They all fit in to the pattern.
