Violet Replacement (2012)

1. Rolling Gate
2. Sleep

Pitchfork's Mark Richardson discussed the signifiers that run throughout Liz Harris' work as Grouper in his review of her twin 2011 albums, Dream Loss and Alien Observer. He pointed to the floaty, celestial presence of her vocals, that ghost in and out of her music but never quite settle in place. On Violet Replacement, a two-track CD-R released by Harris to support a Grouper tour of the same name, she's boxed her vocal work into a corner, with only light fragments of her voice occasionally hovering above the semidarkness. Instead, she leans hard on an array of tape loops, Wurlitzer loops, and field recordings, all mixed live through a series of dictaphones and tape players. Violet Replacement provides a large sweep of space for Harris to stretch out in, to see how far out she can push her central aesthetic before the brittle harmony she amasses gradually cracks and blisters into a form of disunity.

The two tracks here, "Rolling Gate" and "Sleep", fall just a couple of minutes shy of the hour-and-a-half mark. At times it feels like Harris is delicately stacking up a house of cards, with each element gently added on top of the other with great care and precision. As such, it closely aligns this work with her other output under this name, where it feels like every detail has been agonized over, only slotting into Grouper world after undergoing a great process of attrition. On this release, everything just happens at a more lethargic pace than usual. It's like waiting around for a star to burn out, or watching an entire film reveal itself in slow motion. The surprisingly agitated crescendo each track reaches is analogous to the work of artist Jonathan Schipper, who recently wreaked slo-mo havoc upon a car by having it crash into a wall at 7mm per hour over a month-long period.

Schipper says his piece displays "a dramatic inevitability that reflects our own mortality," and Violet Replacement lands in a similar place. When Harris allows the world she so painstakingly built up to ignite and burn apart in front of our eyes, it makes it easy to get lost in feelings of self-doubt, destruction, fatality. That power of suggestion Harris possesses is her biggest strength, whether she's working over 52-minute pieces such as "Sleep" or through the more refined songs on her 2008 album Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill. There's nothing overtly defined; instead, Harris offers a series of nebulous textures, sometimes heavily layered, at other times bearing a few faint traces of sound. From there it's like being immersed in a dense bank of fog rolling in off the coastline, where only you can make sense of the world that's been temporarily thrown up around you.

Much of the suggestion presented in Violet Replacement comes from Harris's supreme patience as a player. She's got an intuitive grasp on how to let her loops buckle and coil, phasing elements in and out with a keen eye for pacing and execution. These tracks are long, but never meandering. It always feels like there's a place they're heading, a loose destination in mind. At times it's reminiscent of Popol Vuh's "Affenstunde", where repetitive elements are strung out over a boundless timeline, and key shifts are made to gently prod the listener out of any one particular headspace. Violet Replacement may not be a space to return to often, mainly due to the sheer scale of the project. But it's a logical stretch for Harris, a place akin to the contrasting mix of sharp focus and heady improvisation that marked the production of Terrence Malick's outstanding Days of Heaven. [pitchfork.com]

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