“Sometimes being in a familiar version of an unfamiliar environment makes for an interesting window,” says Liz Harris, the Oregon-based singer-songwriter known as Grouper, of spending time in Portugal to record her newest album, “Ruins” (out Friday from Kranky). She likens the experience to looking at a certain kind of optical illusion book from the 1960s, which involves placing a transparent printed sheet over page designs to create new perspectives on familiar patterns. “Processing emotions and experience can be like this, too.”
In creating the album, Harris used only a piano, her voice and unfettered emotion to generate tracks that feel more like atmospheres than songs. It might seem overzealous to say that “Ruins” is Harris’s most personal work to date — the eerie intimacy of her music has been a primary selling point for as long as she has been recording — but it’s true. From the backdrop of a Portuguese rainstorm on “Holifernes” to the casual quiet of her double vocals on “Holding” — which appears here — each track sounds, in the best possible way, like it was never meant to be heard outside of the room in which it was recorded.
“What is different on ‘Ruins’ has to do with a kind of dampening. It’s subdued. I’m playing with quiet space a lot more,” says Harris, who has recorded nine previous albums. Now, she says, “I hear a new sense of responsibility — for being present in my own life, as both a caretaker and participant.”
