I ask Harris whether she finds anything satisfying at all about performing. She laughs. “When it goes well I feel good afterwards, and I feel like I’ve gotten through some challenge. There’s the endurance,” she says. And later: “I definitely am doing it in a big way because it’s something I wouldn’t do normally. That’s kind of wired into me, to do the opposite thing from which feels comfortable.”

This paradox comes, she offers without hesitation, from the pedagogy and ethics of the Gurdjieffian intentional community where she spent her childhood, in Northern California’s Sonoma Mountains. The farrago of East-West thought associated with the Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff is also called Fourth Way; the practice he inspired is called the Work; and the commune itself, at least the one Harris grew up in, is called the Group. At times she lived with her parents and three siblings; at times she lived with another family in the Group. The families weren’t all on the same land—some were dotted elsewhere in the area. “But it was a closed community,” she explains, “in the fact that I didn’t know nobody outside of it, or any way outside of the messages I was hearing from them.”

Insiders of the Group with some critical distance on it, she explains—kids or former members—call its devout participants “groupers.” There were regular lectures for the adults, and an experimental school for the children. Much of the community dynamics revolved around Anne Haas, one of the Sonoma group’s founders and its instructional paragon. Harris’ middle name is Anne—as, she says, is the case with all the girls she grew up with.

One of the precepts of the Work involves doing the opposite of what is natural or comfortable to you, and so for instance Harris, a shy kid, was made to play a leading role in a “bent version” of a Christmas play as a Miwok Mother Mary, with singing parts.

She describes the culture there as one of “hidden messages,” paranoia, and suspicion. “Because,” she explains, “your teacher isn’t a teacher. Your teacher’s saying, ‘I’m not your teacher, I’m just speaking to you about those things’; they are intentionally putting you into situations, but they’ll say, ‘You take from it what you want.’ There are all these levels of saying that something is what it isn’t.” She learned how to be quiet, she says, either to reassure people or hold them at bay.

Her parents separated when she was 3. At 11, she left the Group to live with her father in Bolinas, 50 miles south, and started public school. On the first day, she remembers, girls surrounded her on the schoolyard and asked her what kind of music she listened to. She panicked: She didn’t listen to pop music or watch MTV in the Group. “But I had older brothers and sisters, so I was racking my brain for names. I said, ‘Megadeth, Public Enemy, and Metallica.’ The girls said, ‘We like Debbie Gibson!” in unison. I was like, Shit. Who’s Debbie Gibson?”

She got through it. She listened to Nirvana and Slowdive and SWV, hung out with weird kids, learned to study, won academic awards, and attended UC Berkeley for chemistry and environmental science, but turned out a visual arts major. She moved to L.A. briefly. She describes her art practice during that time as “wild and kind of trash-filled—literal garbage painted bright colors and taped onto the wall, scraps of paper.” She stopped that because it stressed her out. “I wanted something contained that was purely about calming me and being enjoyable.” Hence, patterns, which she especially likes because they are not perfect, but you have to get up close to them to see the imperfections.

When she started Grouper, Harris never intended performing to be a major part of her life; when she was asked to perform, it simply didn’t occur to her to say no. In 2009, Animal Collective invited her on tour with them, just as they were finding a considerable audience with the record Merriweather Post Pavilion. That tour led to much greater visibility for her, and a booking agent. Ever since, she has performed even when she hasn’t wanted to in order to satisfy her own sense of accomplishment over difficulty. Now she’s beginning to question that decision for basic reasons of balance, and is still working through the after-effects of her early life.

“I like to do exactly what I want to do, but without anyone looking,” she says. This could be a way of getting around appearing “prideful”—an attribute which could be punishable within the Group. But even there, in her early life, she was confronted with a paradox. She puts it this way: “Don’t be prideful. But here: stand on the stage and do something.”