Ruins
With their eerie textures, spare pianos, and whispered vocals, Liz Harris\' songs send shivers up your spine, even as they emanate a certain warmth, like a ghost story told by a close friend. Recorded at an artist retreat in Portugal, *Ruins* is her most accessible release, with spectral odes like \"Call Across Rooms\" and \"Lighthouse\" eschewing the looping techniques of previous work for spare arrangements of piano and voice. \"Labyrinth\" pulls you in with circular piano lines, while Harris\' vocals in \"Holding\" drift by like clouds as samples of a thunderstorm populate the background.
Ruins was made in Aljezur, Portugal in 2011 on a residency set up by Galeria Zé dos Bois. I recorded everything there except the last song, which I did at mother's house in 2004. Iʼm still surprised by what I wound up with. It was the first time Iʼd sat still for a few years; processed a lot of political anger and emotional garbage. Recorded pretty simply, with a portable 4-track ,Sony stereo mic and an upright piano. When I wasnʼt recording songs I was hiking several miles to the beach. The path wound through the ruins of several old estates and a small village. The album is a document. A nod to that daily walk. Failed structures. Living in the remains of love. I left the songs the way they came (microwave beep from when power went out after a storm); I hope that the album bears some resemblance to the place that I was in.
Ruins is Grouper's "unplugged" record, essentially, as much as that might sound odd for a musician who has always put acoustic guitar and piano and voice at the core of her work. Here she foreswears the looping pedals and the innumerable layers of fuzz, and what we're left with is achingly beautiful.
Liz Harris’ songs often sound like artefacts from another time, but this is the first time she's shown an interest in examining the ruins of her own past.
These eight tracks feature little but voice, piano and tape hiss; and if it weren’t for the quality of her songwriting, ‘Ruins’ would risk being defined by how doggedly lo-fi it is: crickets hum in the background; a microphone beeps loudly when the power cuts out.
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Liz Harris wrote and recorded the majority of her latest Grouper album using a bare-bones setup of a piano, mic and portable four-track during a gallery residency on the southwest coast of Portugal.
Album review: Grouper - Ruins. A stripped-bare set that unfolds with elegiac elegance…
Review of the new Grouper album 'Ruins', by Doug Bleggi for Northern Transmissions, out today on Kranky Records, the lead single is "Holding"
Liz Harris, AKA Grouper, is a rather hip advocate of this recording strategy, boasting ten grounded, emotionally gripping studio albums that take full advantage of basic instrumentation, instinctive composition and atmospheric sound.