Lisa Harres’ debut strikes the right balance between skeletal piano-led ballads and baroque embellishments. It’s spellbinding with elusive beauty and staggering depth.
The Berlin-based, multidisciplinary artist Lisa Harres brings their poetic sensibility to their debut album, Time As a Frame. Some albums are purely records, others are worlds—Time As a Frame is firmly in the second camp. Across nine songs and three interludes, Harres sets oblique imagery to sparse, classical-inspired arrangements, bolstered by orchestral flourishes—the result: a spellbinding record of elusive beauty and staggering depth.
Time As a Frame contains an otherworldly aesthetic which, at its most ethereal and insubstantial, evokes PJ Harvey‘s White Chalk—though without the ghosts, the devils, and damnation. Yes, Harres is far too innocent to be having the devil wandering into their soul like Harvey, who has no qualms with receiving muses in all forms. However, Harres is not ingenuous, and Time As a Frame is not without its melancholy.
What you will hear on Time As a Frame is an artist with a unique vision who never loses sight of their aim: to document the human condition. That is either done directly or abstractly. Either way, Time As a Frame is imbued with a generosity of spirit—a humility that grounds the weightless compositions. Put differently, the stately piano and sophisticated woodwind arrangements—flute, saxophone, and clarinet—are neither grandiose nor overwrought. However sublime the album gets (and does), Harres never loses themselves in the grandeur.
Listening to this album in March, when it was released, was a revelatory experience: I became stupefied and inarticulate—terrified by my reaction. Surely, I couldn’t have been moved to such a degree by a relatively obscure artist? A lack of discernment on my part, right? I could not bring myself to hear Time As a Frame again until last week, which was when I concluded that my judgment remains unchanged: an astonishing piece of work.
The opener, “Pairs”, begins with a shimmering flute before the arrival of Lisa Harres’ emotive vocals, underpinned by sporadic piano notes and the aforementioned flute. The track gathers momentum as Harres recites a litany of unrelated words and, in the chorus, reaches great heights with whirling and haunting falsettos. This ambiance establishes the tone and scope of Time As a Frame.
“Friends with Oranges”, meanwhile, is an acoustic guitar-led folk number that, lyrically, is the least interesting song on the record, unless you like over-sentimentalization. Conversely, “Melted Being (feat. Ralph Heidel)” finds Harres at their best: abstract and elliptical. Furthermore, Time As a Frame’s themes—form and formlessness, time and timelessness, tangibility and intangibility—are established; in short, the album expresses the morphic nature of being.
There is an intense, if not spiritual, longing on the record. Moreover, Harres is fixated upon granular details while endowing them with a poetic significance. For instance, “Green Bedsheet Gown” finds the narrator alone in a room—the third track set in a room after “Friends with Oranges” and “The Shape”—feeling listless and making observations, from sight to sound. Starting with the sound of rain pattering, “Green Bedsheet Gown” has an eerie, almost gothic, quality, echoing PJ Harvey’s aforementioned album, White Chalk.
There are slower tracks on Time As a Frame, such as the dirge-like “Mein Herz”, complete with a sonorous organ, as well as finding Harres singing in German, their native tongue. The penultimate track, “Musik für die Kinder”, is a highlight, with its church-like organ and children’s choir; by the end, we are solely left with Harres’ celestial voice, the light in the dark. It is a baroque masterpiece that, through the deployment of children’s voices, suggests an eternal hope, a chance at redemption for humanity through a future generation. Whilst many records are pessimistic and bleak, Time As a Frame offers hope through beauty.
Despite its ambition and ornateness, the album is unassuming and humble. In other words, it strikes the right balance between skeletal piano-led ballads and baroque embellishments; indeed, the record could have failed easily in the wrong hands. But most artists are not as talented as Harres, whose vision leads them, not the other way round. Needless to say, with Time As a Frame, Lisa Harres has achieved the seemingly impossible: expressed the ineffable.