The Fat Angel Sings

No other album in 2014 sounded quite like Grouper’s “Ruins”. Liz Harris, from Portland, Oregon. is the musician behind Grouper’s murky world of sound, recorded the album with a four-track tape deck and a single microphone at a house in Portugal, where she was doing an artists’ residency. Each day she walked through the ruins of several old estates, sifting through a lot of what she calls “emotional garbage” and anger. “Ruins” captures this period of soul searching — a delicately woven mix of Harris’ wispy voice, a lone piano and a menagerie of incidental sounds that sneak into the recordings: Distant bullfrogs, crickets, the wind, the creak of a wood floor. It’s a profoundly moving collection of songs that feel almost cavernous, like the dark and empty hole that must reside somewhere in Grouper’s heart.