Live Review: Grouper, Bonnie Mercer

There’s a low-key vibe hanging over Melbourne Recital Centre this evening, with the line-up expected to deliver sets best described as 'chill'. 

Bonnie Mercer starts the evening by bathing us in simmering guitar feedback and distortion that generates a desolate vibe. With a lot of guitar pedals at her fingertips, she works atmospheric drones across her set, which feels like a 30-minute improvisation. Mercer unashamedly trades in noise. Moving beyond fingerpicking or strumming, she works her instrument in experimental ways to craft a strange new sound that offers a visceral listening experience. After drifting through Mercer’s bleak soundscapes the set starts to evolve, virtually exploding into a wild, catastrophic din. There is a scary intensity to Mercer’s music and as it crescendos it feels like she should be smashing up her guitar and setting it on fire before departing the stage. Mercer’s approach is more restrained, and she reins in an out-of-control mix of intense noise and fades it down to nothing.

Many years ago when Grouper, aka Liz Harris, toured Australia, she looped tapes on a myriad of cassette decks to craft a glitchy, lo-fi ambience that had a fun, almost pop vibe about it. This time around, Harris deals a much more solemn but deeper listening experience that verges on meditative. Playing piano and guitar with a myriad of effects applied, Harris crafts a vivid, reverb-drenched electro-acoustic mix. It pushes out dreamily hypnotic ambiences, transporting listeners across the spectral, otherworldly places of Harris’ imagining. At once experimental, abstract and strangely psychedelic, Harris’ musings have such a level of accessibility that her music fluidly washes over the audience almost like lustrous dream-pop. Much of the set relies on Harris’ constant juggling of loops. Particularly bewitching are the evocative owl hoots that signal a move into darker nocturnal vibes. The set comes to an end after an hour of what feels like a long, fluid jam. The lights fade to darkness and when they go back up we see that Harris, who clearly prefers to maintain an aloof and mysterious presence, has already taken her leave. The end of the set feels like awakening from a dream, doubly so for the dude who punctuated Harris’ music with a few loud snores.