“There is extra haze in the air these days, much more that we are all walking through together. Presence began as an idea for a mellow zine and a way to connect w people I was missing. It became a resonant wide-angle portrait of some distinct creative minds, some real intimacies shared; eavesdropping on a conversation with friends, the notes from a performance rather than a photo of the performance/performer themselves.”
- Liz Harris
Features work by/on Marisa Anderson, Ben Ratliff, Mica Levi, Coby Sey, Adee Roberson, Emel Mathlouthi, Dicky Bahto, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, Steph Littlebird Fogel, and much more.
Nivhek — After its own death / Walking in a spiral towards the house (Yellow Electric)
Each new piece of music Liz Harris has created over the past few years is a kind of abstract field; listening becomes a search for the shifting edges of the space. These near landscapes have built to a towering collection of pieces released under the new alias Nivhek, a collaborative effort with several other musical and visual artists. Grid of Points, Harris's last album as Grouper, was almost antagonistically slight, but offered just enough sound clues to sketch out a small and barren world. Like that album, After its own death / Walking in a spiral toward the house reveals a dark terrain, using the same set of essential sound markers to map this vast area.
The album begins with the characteristic layering of voices that has served as a through line in almost all of Harris’s work. This time however a deep bass rumbles just beneath that familiar melisma. The contrast suggests a huge space, with the airy chords of voice like clouds over vacant, shelled earth. That the album was at least in part conceived during a residency in the Russian Artic is at least unsurprising. While Harris has recently favored piano as Grouper, Nivhek draws on a tense set of electronic sounds, with the vocals distorting to noise over a tense rhythm.
After the initial burst, the piece settles into its first stretch of respite. The release denotes titles for sections of each of the four sides, but throughout the music flows together mostly without rupture. The quietude provides a reprieve and ominous calm similar to ones sketched on guitar on early albums by Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Unlike those stretches, these gamelan-like bells never again build to catharsis, instead mutating slowly and as diffusely as dappled shadows of leaves in a breeze. Taken on its own, Walking in a spiral towards the house is composed entirely of that sound. That the album returns again to this faint work of bells is its own kind of small confrontation. Like coming down from a mind-altering substance, wanting the peaks of sound to return not only strains because their gone and not returning, but also distracts from the quieter workings that are still happening before you.
Considering each title as its own piece, After its own death is among the most dynamic and compelling work that Harris has created under any name. But the surreal vision in the first half is supplanted with a hypnotic lull in the second, as if manifesting such peaks has drained the bearers. Nonetheless what presents as tranquil does not soothe, as the memory of its more dynamic passages never recedes, like a contemplating a photo of a structure while standing in the exact spot where it has been razed.
