Grouper, alias of Portland, Oregon's Liz Harris, presents something of a confusion, edging towards paradox, for my familiar terms of critical reference. On first listen her work seems easily assimilable to the ambient/drone scene which has been receiving increased attention in recent years - sufficient attention, in fact, to allow us to categorise it as a scene in spite of the fact that it possesses relatively little geographic or stylistic continuity. This exemplary piece of circular logic well demonstrates the bizarre kind of self-positing nominalism which the echo-chamber of the blogosphere has managed to establish in response to an increasingly opaque musical ecosystem - an ecosystem which seems to have internalised the built-in obsolescence of technological acceleration on which it so ambivalently relies. Microscenes, microgenres, a mess of terminological inventiveness and inanity which serves to point up the relevance of the appeal made by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari some twenty years ago: 'We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present.' One of the fascinations of Grouper's work lies precisely in this — its power cannot be accounted for by the terms which are almost too ready-at-hand to capture it. It compels, demands not just attention but involvement, affective immersion beyond conscious attentiveness, and in doing so points us the poverty of everything one might all-too-easily say about it.
Writing about her work, then, proves more complex than a merely satisfactory combination of descriptive evocation and declarative evaluation, demanding more than such a mediocre success. Her latest record is exemplary in this regard: my immediate, unreflective choice as my favourite release of 2011, yet I cannot with any equivalent ease account for this decision. The two LPs which make up A I A are, on the one hand, unproblematically gorgeous, an eighty-minute drift without destination, wanderlust made sonorous, hooked on the minimal orientation of Harris' spectral voice, half-heard lyrics swamped by reverb, a message from the other side in undecipherable code. Its length contributes to this demand on the listener: looking for signposts, nothing will happen. Doesn't it all just sound the same? If its function were to cater to an attention-deficit, doubtless it would fail. But this wager on the listener's commitment in face of the increasing scarcity of time and focus is itself part of the work, and is perhaps one way to expand that nebulous sense of an ambient or drone scene into something approaching a coherent cultural form. Harris wants to swallow you whole, and any resistance would leave you altogether unable to make contact.
Big, chest-swelling judgements such as "I prefer this to everything else I've heard this year" seem to require more elaborate defences than more straightforward critical approvals do, at least insofar as one wants to present this judgement to an audience and have some persuasive force. Is an appeal from overwhelming prettiness going to cut it? Fear supervenes; it's not enough. Where is this record's novelty? And it is at this point that we can begin to discern more clearly one element of the problem touched on above: when a given artist can be so easily reduced to the rapidly-diminishing set of variables required to tell you that they “sound like” some other artists, and a record's quality can be easily parsed in terms of a binary liking or disliking, the premium placed upon a perceptible deviation from the norm becomes exaggerated in proportion to the diminution in patience for less obvious forms of invention. Variation is only prized so long as it operates within the parameters of a code that is increasingly whittling away its own economically-redundant combinations - that is, it's prized so long as I could tell you, in a straightforward and preferably easily-scannable terms, why you should care or not. Which is to say, why you should want to own it.
Maybe this sounds a little too close to the position of Theodor Adorno, whose infamous polemics against popular music were in part founded on the claim that a pop song wants you to recognise it, rather than like it, and that for pop music these two judgements are in fact interchangeable. A proximity, personally, I would be at pains to disavow. For me, the issue is more complex, or at least at a different level: not a question of the veracity of our evaluations ('am I right to like this?') but rather a question of the very terms in which we frame our musical experiences, and how those terms constrain or empower us. It is not a question of saving music from itself - needless to say, music continues to proliferate and mutate in all its domains, moving unpredictably towards new connections and conjunctions that are even now unimaginable. And this is the issue: it is not the transformations of music that seem deficient, but our ability to respond to it on its own terms, to follow it where it leads. Perhaps, rather than innovation, it is evolution we should be seeking. Where are we going? Where will this take us? The choice is not pop or its alternatives, or banality or the avant-garde. In some sense it ceases to be a matter of a choice at all.
These Grouper records, then, are not novel in any bold, readily appreciable sense. What they do instead is innovate in a manner much harder to account for - but I would like to attempt it in terms of precisely this rupturing of a critical framework, this difficulty making an account of it. Grouper pursues imperceptible lines of contact between the popular and the experimental which are not amenable to a decision between same-old or radically new - instead, her music actively explores new textural combinations and manipulations of feeling which are not overdetermined from outside but are content to use whatever means at their disposal to achieve their ends. A I A is an unmitigated success in this regard. It is unabashedly beautiful in a way that approaches uncannily close to familiarity using a sonic palette that is impossible to pin down even in its simplicity. Occasional guitar melodies are plucked from the storm, simple single-note progressions and arpeggios, almost verses, here nearly a chorus, fragments of song-forms decayed to the limits of recognition, a time-capsule music box nearly withered away. The title track to the Alien Observer LP is a mix of soundtrack and invocation, addressed to an invasion-to-come, and this tone is pursued relentlessly. 'She Loves Me That Way' stutters forward, echoing and cavernous, into 'Mary On The Wall's lilting folk drift. The LP closes with the layers stripped away to the lone guitar, more recognisable than ever but adrift in a silence threatening to finally close in.
Dream Loss is a looser, more open record; more distortion, scattered noises and disorientation taking you off course, upsetting the flow. A background of uncertainty, non-tonal noise vying for its due, hypnagogic sound objects missing from their place. A harsh fuzz vies with the harmonies of 'I Saw Away', trying to subdue them, and the eight-minute 'Soul Eraser' emerges from and returns to a cosmic stasis, the final echoes dying out in a losing battle against the entropy of their reverberations. The vocals throughout are instrumental sounds themselves, not conveying lyrics but rather the hum of someone lost, trying to reassure themselves in the dark. The record closes with 'A Lie', the multitracked voices falling out of tune with each other in one last attempt to communicate across the stretched-out and rapidly receding horizon of the song itself. The experience is curiously addictive, never quite fully unfolding itself, still harbouring something hard to place, difficult to express—a critical copout, perhaps, to say incommunicable, but then the possibility of saying something of worth about music has never been a given. If I have failed, on this occasion as on others, I can only plead an incapacity in the face of the music itself, which does not say anything, does not communicate. Instead it illuminates, as all Grouper's music has done, with increasing refinement and precision as she pursues the consequences of her own sound; a vector of feeling that you can only improperly trace after the fact, at a reflective distance.