The catch of the day: Grouper
I was listening to the magnetic new Grouper album, “Shade,” in the living room on a recent morning when I noticed the music was doing at least three magic tricks at once.
The first trick belongs to all recorded sound. Here were these tiny wiggles in the air, invisible and replayable, conjuring the presence of someone — in this case, songwriter Liz Harris — who obviously wasn’t there. That’s how it goes whether you’re listening to “A Love Supreme” or a Liberty Mutual jingle, but it’s still cool to think about.
The second trick was more specific to the fleecy ballads that Harris records as Grouper, which sometimes conceal themselves in so much reverb and white noise that the music starts fudging your sense of distance. Certain Grouper songs can sound like they’re coming from down the block, or through the wall, or both — sometimes in a way that invites you to think about where you are and what you’re doing there. When I tried to get a better handle on all of that by putting my head down on the floor next to the stereo speaker, it only made Harris’s voice sound farther away.
As for the third trick, it unfolded like some kind of metaphysical-spatiotemporal prank. Harris was singing a typically enchanting new song, “Unclean Mind,” and I was getting especially interested in its odd tintinnabulations — faint clusters of clinks and pings that appeared at weird intervals over the steady strums of her acoustic guitar. I scrolled back to the beginning of the song so I could listen more closely, only now, the staccato ringding was materializing in different places. What?
This little mystery knocked me out of my personal space-time for an entire three seconds before I had the sense to twist the stereo’s volume knob toward silence. The pings didn’t fade. Ah, OK. I walked out onto the porch and found my wife dusting the wind chimes.
When I was done laughing, I remembered reading about how Harris chose the name Grouper as a description of how she approached her work: not as a songwriter, exactly, but as someone who groups different sounds together. Clearly, a musician that self-aware understands that once her music seeps into the world, the world does some grouping, too — and that we’ll probably experience her songs alongside the slosh of the dishwasher, or the rumble of the bus, or the tweedle of birdsong, or whatever wherever.
Would my little wind chime interlude have gone down the same way had I been listening to a song by Playboi Carti, or Discharge, or Lana Del Rey, or Al Green for the first time? Probably not. There’s an artful vagueness to Harris’s music that makes it feel almost hospitable to interferences. Her songs don’t sound like they’re trying to stand out in the world so much as join it.