In mid-September, I watched as Liz Harris soundchecked to 1,500 empty seats at midtown Manhattan’s historic Town Hall theatre. Soon each plush red chair would be filled for the second of two sold-out nights, but this ornate seclusion felt oddly perfect. It is fair to infer that most of her concertgoers generally listen to the uncanny experimental music she makes as Grouper alone, just as she creates it.
Harris started Grouper in 2005 in the DIY noise warehouses of Oakland, California. At 46, she now lives farther north, in coastal Astoria, Oregon, where she creates densely tessellated visual art and spare, lucid albums that have made her a titan of modern ambient music. Painfully beautiful and often inscrutable, hers is a sonic language all its own, creating thickets of sound using little more than guitar or piano, voice and space; her angelic and alien songs have influenced artists as disparate as Phoebe Bridgers and Mk.gee, and been sampled by Lil B and 100 Gecs.
It is intensely solitary work, often characterised as sad but full of profound relief. Harris reflects on its origins in the abstract drone of her 2005 debut Way Their Crept. She is uneasy being the face of her music and generally keeps herself at arm’s length from the industry.
When Harris and I meet at her Williamsburg hotel prior to the show, she’s wearing a T-shirt that says “Birth Ends in Death”, merch from her friend and occasional collaborator, the ambient musician Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. In addition to these milestone Grouper shows – coming five years after her last album, Shade – we’re speaking in light of the second record by Helen, the dream-pop trio in which she sings and plays guitar alongside drummer Jed Bindeman, who runs Portland shop Little Axe Records, and bassist Scott Simmons, also of lo-fi band the Lavender Flu. Their new album, Linda’s Head, like their 2015 debut The Original Faces, evokes scrappy Flying Nun indie-pop remade in their own stark Pacific Northwest image.
But there’s a striking clarity and weight to the new one. If Grouper is the sound of a woman singing to herself, on Linda’s Head, she sings out. Helen’s appeal, for Harris, is in part its collectivity.
I’m not just in the corner crying,” she says with a hearty laugh. Helen has a “bright energy”, she says, but, as with Grouper, a darkness gently haunts the music and Harris’s beguiling layered harmonies. The band’s name references Washington’s Mount St Helen, the site of a deadly volcanic eruption shortly before Harris was born in 1980, and it also alludes to a childhood spectre.
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