Lisa Harres - Time As A Frame
The trope of life flashing before your eyes is commonplace among stories of near-death experiences. I’ve often wondered what might appear on that fragmented showreel when my time eventually comes. The mind, as far as I can tell, works in mysterious ways. Moments we expect to hold onto often dissolve, while other seemingly trivial experiences burn themselves onto the retina of the mind’s eye with an unshakable permanence.
It was from these collages of experience that Lisa Harres moulded the foundations of their debut album, Time As A Frame. An evocation of bliss, it punctuates baroque ballads with beautifully measured injections of piano and woodwind to create something that feels uniquely poignant.
“Most of the songs stem from very specific little scenes. Personal scenes, things that have happened to me or that I’ve imagined or dreamt,” Lisa explains, during a short break in their busy university schedule. “These images are very clear in my head. Maybe they aren’t so clear in the writing or have gone through some steps of translation, but I still have the source images with me.”
Lisa’s desire to enshrine experience isn’t just confined to songwriting, it bleeds into all aspects of their life. “There’s an urge in me to document,” they say. “I keep every little note, little things I find on the street. I take notes of conversations I hear on the train. I have this urge in me to keep hold of all these bits of life.” Currently studying film directing, this instinct will inevitably come to shape how they portray their art on the screen, but for now, music remains the most immediate outlet. “It really feels like the most direct and intense thing.”
Photo Credit: Lisa Harres - Finn Ronsdorf
Across the twelve tracks that make up Time As A Frame, Harres brings the listener into their personal orbit through refracted, almost psychedelic imagery and a succession of beautiful, minimal compositions. Despite the completeness of the project, it was never the original intention to make a record.
The process began inadvertently after Lisa met composer Ralph Heidel and the pair began recording together at Funkhaus in Berlin. Over time, the tracks they made began to take shape, not just as a record of Lisa’s songwriting, but as a document of their evolving friendship.
“I was very clear about how minimal I wanted the songs to be recorded,” Lisa recalls, as they began putting to tape the pieces they had been “joyfully collecting” over the past ten years. Simple sketches initially built around guitar and piano.
These skeletal pieces were gradually fleshed out with saxophone, flute, and clarinet arrangements, adding a depth and richness without disturbing the album’s core. Many of the tracks went through “lots of different phases,” Lisa says, a result of the project’s extended recording timeline. “We were really able to take our time, which was really nice. Some of the songs really needed that.”
As the project progressed, it mirrored the trajectory of Lisa and Ralph’s friendship, a slow, careful unfolding of trust and creative exchange. The album became, in a sense, a portrait of that process. “It’s such a special time when you make something out of thin air and it becomes something. To have this kind of time together is so lovely,” they reflect. “For me, this will always be a document of this friendship and the whole recording process. It cannot really be separated from that.”
Photo Credit: Lisa Harres - Finn Ronsdorf
It’s true that all records are, in some way, interpretations of an artist’s lived experience. Yet, Time As A Frame does something more elusive, it invites you to step inside, experiencing fragments of Lisa’s memories as if they were your own. Rather than demand understanding, the songs offer something quieter, space to sit and observe something fleeting and unspoken.
In the pronounced vulnerability of the record there is something almost provocative. To wear your heart on your sleeve like this is an unmistakable display of bravery, the kind few artists can muster.
But Lisa sees it differently. “Of course I am making myself vulnerable,” they say, “but I feel like when you’re totally vulnerable, you become invincible.” On Time As A Frame, that vulnerability never once feels performative, instead, it’s a quiet constant, woven into the songwriting, the sparse arrangements, and the spaces between the notes. This quiet power is central to the album’s appeal, the anchor that holds together its minimal, almost naked compositions and Lisa’s heartfelt lyricism.
Nowhere is this more evident than on ‘Melted Being’, one of the album’s most affecting tracks. Opening with gently pulsating wind instruments that cradle Lisa’s soft vocalisations, it slowly builds into something luminous and expansive and contains some of the record’s most vivid imagery:
“Melting into peachy skies
Dripping, dropping, liquefying,
I indulge in
Formlessness and spectral colours,
Conflation of all matter
Now there’s only
Overflowing melted being
Mixed with all the waves and feelings”
The effect of which feels like a kind of dissolution, a gentle surrender to memory and to sensation. Another moment where the boundary between artist and listener seems to fall away completely.
If it is true that our lives play back to us in a final flickering montage, I hope it’s not just the loud, obvious moments that make the cut. I hope it includes the quiet ones too, the half-dreamed images, the transient joys, the fragments we never thought would matter. Time As A Frame feels like a love letter to those moments. In capturing the intimate and the in-between, Lisa Harres has made something with human appeal that will endure long after the end credits roll for all of us.
Time As A Frame by Lisa Harres is out now.
