As much as it can also be a grind, going on tour is also a highlight for musicians. There’s something liberating about shucking responsibility for a couple of weeks to get on the road and play for a different audience every night. Portland solo artist Grouper, aka Liz Harris, however, just doesn’t get the appeal of driving for hours in a van from one club to the next. She’d rather stay at home.

“I’m not really that big on touring,” she admits from her Oregon home. “I find it stressful. In general, I find it disruptive to my regular routine. Maybe I’m just a homebody. ”

It makes sense that the introverted Harris sometimes shies away from performing. Grouper was initially conceived as a bedroom recording project. Early four-track demos wove the vocalist’s angelic whispering together with dream-like Wurlitzer lines and washes of white noise, not unlike ’80s proto-shoegazers This Mortal Coil and the Cocteau Twins. As Harris became more comfortable with the idea of playing her songs live, she decided against lugging around vintage equipment to gigs, swapping her delicate keyboards for a guitar and some tape loops.

“I’ve already gone through a couple of these old Wurlitzer keyboards,” she says of the switch. “They’ll rattle around and get broken when you move them. I had to figure out a different instrument pretty quickly.”

Though Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, her latest release, doesn’t abandon the instrument entirely, the disc is built around guitar. “Invisible” glides by on a simple six-string pattern, letting Harris’s ethereal, doubled-up vocals float to the front of the mix for the first time in her career. The singer consciously dialed back a lot of the sound manipulation from past efforts to focus on her developing pipes.

“I like a challenge,” she remarks. “I’m not a natural-born singer, but I’m a lot more comfortable with my vocals than I used to be.”

A ghostly mixture of clattering guitar and eerily calm cooing, the dark centrepiece “I’m Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill” is arguably the album’s most unsettling track. The tune finds Harris unearthing childhood memories of finding a dead deer in a forest with a friend.

“We used to run around and explore the woods where I grew up,” Harris explains. “We were on this steep ravine and saw a deer carcass at the bottom. She [the friend] was really bossy and told me to go get it for her. I went down and tried to drag this carcass up the hill for her. I got it almost all the way to the top and then she looked at me and said, ”˜I don’t want it anymore.’ ”

Though hardly as unpleasant as hauling a carcass out of a ravine, waiting nearly a year for Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill to come out got the impatient Harris bummed about the album’s title.

“I feel like it turned into a curse,” she says of its name. “Everything with the album took so long. The whole record became this carcass to carry. I’m not that sick of it, but I feel like it’s something I did a long time ago. I used to write a song and record it that day.”

Grouper plays Hoko’s on Saturday (August 2).