Grouper

Liz Harris, the Portland musician who most often records under the name Grouper, rarely talks to the press. But in 2011, during a candid interview with The Wire, she admitted that, while growing up in a familial religious sect in the countryside, she was shy. So she forced herself to perform, overcoming her fears by confronting them from the stage and with her art. That pattern now continues with Grouper, Harris’ prolific and mesmerizing solo project. She makes constant bedfellows of impenetrable mystery and undeniable grace, of distant despair and complete surrender, of damaged recordings and trance states. Harris’ titles tend to evoke the morose or dejected: Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill and Ruins, “You Never Came” and “The Man Who Died in His Boat.” But whether Harris is murmuring through static and into a piano line, as on 2014’s Ruins, or slipping through a strummed electric or acoustic guitar haze, as on Deer, there’s a sense of cyclical decay and renewal. Grouper’s best work holds you close to its dark thoughts (and live, Harris stares down at her instruments, lights off, head bowed) in a cocoon of beautiful signing and consolidated tones. Then it let’s you go, somehow renewed by the senescent quiet.