Grouper's Holding
I've given myself the task of writing about one song a week for 2024 because, well, I think it'd be fun.
Grouper's Holding
Happy birthday, Liz.
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. (citation)
She's surprised. "Ruins" is one of those albums you can't forget. It is the perfect description of a feeling that you can't put into words. It is, thus, total. Ten years later (and I swear, I didn't realize the tenth-year anniversary was coming until I began writing), it still haunts my memories. As a note, there are not a few days I hesitate and think "Ruins" wins out 2014 over "To Be Kind".
The surprising quality of the album, listening to it after all these years, is its warmth. That defined Ian Curtis's, Joy Division's frontman's, music as well: for all the stiffness and fear, there is indeed a lust for life. I had thought "Ruins" was cold, but in reality it's humid, taken from the air of Portugal. As stiff as the title "Made of Metal" is, the reverberation of the drums, and the ambient track, evoke a rolling fog. Same can be said of Grouper's - Elizabeth Harris's - singing in "Clearing", throaty and phlegmy, and filled with regret, for she still feels things, strongly too. There is resignation, but there is no nihilism in an absolute sense. This is a true album about disappointment, and the immense sadness it causes.
The other magic ingredient in "Ruins" is Liz's lyricism. So goes "Call Across Rooms": "I have a present to give you, / when we finally figure it out... / But we still haven't figured it out, / and we still go in circles." Inevitability ("when we finally ...") and repetition ("we still go in circles") leads to the feeling of infinity; with these lyrics, along with the pondering piano, we feel the sense of an infinitely winding staircase. Altogether, the album is about searching, but there is no adventure in it; the gothic quality of "Ruins" is in search of its own mind.
All of these qualities are necessary. Liz's mastery in composition is evident. It's always about how the music makes you feel, and thus about what you leave out. "Labyrinth" in particular depicts really well that feeling of hopelessness the title conveys. Only the piano is needed. But, if recorded in a studio, if the recording was cleaned up, the music wouldn't have the same impact as it does; it would feel sterile, as modern classical compositions often do. (Compare to Okkyung Lee's "The Yellow Porcelain Bird", a composition I actually like quite a bit, though we're aware the composer wants to pay attention to how the instruments are juxtaposed and the salience of each instrument over anything else.) Further, the emphasis on the playing at the moment, rather than creating a recording for eternity, is as important. You can never tell whether a missed beat is intentional or not. With Grouper, you know it's half-intended and half-not; in short, there is a genius to it, a can't-put-your-finger on the how and why of the record except with the idiosyncrasy of the artist herself. These elements marry together splendidly, such that an auspicious incident, in this case the microwave beep, makes the music all the more irresistible and poignant. The temporality of the composition somehow gets frozen in amber. It becomes perfect in imperfection. No wonder "Ruins" is not classified as classical music and is instead given the wilder genre of "alternative".
The piano in "Holding" may make one think of Erik Satie's "Gymnopédie" series. "Holding" does indeed share the banality of Satie's famous composition - it contains that quality of meditating without any object in mind - but the tape hiss, the murk in the recording, the hesitation in the intro and the spiraling pattern evokes to the listener that the melancholy has finally erupted into full, uncontrolled sadness.
Liz murmurs:
I hear you calling and I want to go,
run straight into the valleys of your arms and disappear there...
But I know my love will fail you.
These are some of the greatest lines of the 2010s, in my book. I've never forgotten them. More than music, there's the poetic nature of that metaphor, "run straight into the valleys of your arms", comparing man to nature as Du Fu might have done centuries ago. The first line is rich with longing, self-loathing and deprecation, and the second is possibly familiar with those who suffer depression. That "disappear" bit, Thom Yorke stole. Then there's the intense drama of that last line, showing Liz's Cassandra-like abilities, seeing the tragedy unfold before it even happens.
She continues,
'Cause in the clearing when the sunlight comes,
exposing all the shadows in our intricate behavior,
I see a sort of fading.
Her voice welling:
We build our own unfolding.
The following verse:
It's in the morning when the sadness comes,
the tears fall down in patterns on the windows,
and our shape is undone.
You only wanted holding.
And I let my structure fail you.
These are the failed structures she alluded to in her press release, comparing the work of ages past and the ghosts left behind to the relationships we build and ultimately fail with others, reflecting on their destruction as the years recede into the distance. A great accomplishment here is that the metaphor operates on two levels, an emotional as well as a physical level. The third verse is explicit in showing the titular "holding" is related directly to emotional support. Thus, when we think on the image - of the singer holding onto another - it's ineluctably linked to images of suffering future and past, which extends further into the other metaphor of buildings and canyons, so we see the sadness Liz herself sees in the emptiness of these immense spaces. What's more important, though, is that she shows you this, with every note in the piano depicting the shadows and spaces between people, with every bit of silence some grey light peeking through the clouds. But the storm still goes on, and the sun doesn't really come out.
It's that "You only wanted holding" that really stuns. The song has astounding psychological depth. It's not just about Liz. That line, "You only wanted holding", reveals more than the object of the singer's song. Her own surprise and hindsight, that the object "only wanted holding", reveals there was a foundation behind the history, the behavior, that can be ascribed in a simple way. Further, she calls it "holding", a nexus of complex emotions that doesn't necessarily mean the need to be loved, but some primitive need to be held, and to put a whole list of feelings on being held. But all my prose doesn't mean anything, because you know what she means by putting yourself in the singer's shoes.
And in the water where a mirror opens up
to show the gravity of non-repeating patterns
when no one else can hold you,
come in, and then unfold you.
Oh, the lines I'm laying just to hold you.
This is no different than the mind games the protagonist of ABBA's "Mamma Mia" plays in order to be beside her flame.
And the final line of the song: "There's nothing left to hold to." The piano, which we had been mesmerized with for the last six minutes - goodness, has it really been that long? - finally pauses as the storm begins to thunder; we nearly see Liz's hand stop itself as she listens to the rain, only continuing to finish the melody. For the song's last minute we listen to the rain strike Liz's house and the thundering overhead, and we're free to come to the conclusion that with the rain comes some closure, as the winds cool the heat underneath one's skin and the earth nourishes itself with water, or that the rain merely cut off this train of thought, and the sadness will be picked up again on some later date. Or, that the rain expressed what Liz wanted to express better than words could, as we watch the rain like a curtain cut between her and the person she wanted to sing to.
You know... this album "Ruins" is much, much better than I recalled, on this re-listen. I thought my feelings on it were clear before I wrote about it - I was kinda concerned there wouldn't be much to write about - but as I mulled more and more on it, and on music in general, there was more and more to pull out and marvel at. It might just topple "To Be Kind", which I would need to listen to again. It helps that it's short - a tight 40 minutes - and I have grown an immense appreciation for the instrumental-only tracks, which taste has come upon from listening to much, much more music after 2014. After a decade later, I can't think of anything else like it, and, analyzing it alone, it just sticks out.
It's well worth noting we only know Liz's birthday from a post on her Instagram account. She said, "I squealed my way into the world on Ian Curtis’ birthday." I hope this, neither her secretiveness as well, is not self-deprecation on her part. How fitting that she relates herself to Curtis. Ian never finished the set of ideas he put forth with Joy Division in "Unknown Pleasures" and "Closer". Well, here it is, in "Ruins": the sadness and philosophical musings over existence and eternity given depth and character, seeing beyond the interior torture to move and live on.
