Mick Harris
There is a grouping of ex-rock terrorists who, while largely ignored by the media and left out of musical fashions, have remained perhaps England's finest and longest-running creators of truly astonishing electronic music. Robert Hampson (Loop), Kevin Martin (God), Justin Broadrick (Godflesh) and Mick Harris (Napalm Death) have all gone on to produce some of the most forward-thinking, consistent and fuck-with-your-head music of the last 10 years. And like Hampson's Main and Chasm projects, or Martin and Broadrick's Techno Animal, Mick Harris under the names Scorn, Hednod, Lull and Quoit, has been creating a soundtrack to the nervous, isolated emotions that modern life seems to propagate.
Starting off as Scorn with the grind/dub fusion of Vae Solis, Mick, along with bassist and vocalist Nick Bullen (also an original member of Napalm Death), went on to create Colussus, an impossibly eerie masterpiece of dream-like music that defied categorisation. Their third album Evanescence sparkled, fusing hip hop rhythms with gliding synths and samples to create a disorientating mix of funked-out solipsistic grooves. Nick Bullen left soon after and Mick decided to drive the original impetus for Scorn into new domain. After setting up his Birmingham based studio he locked himself into a routine of beats and bass exploration: "Evanescence is a great record. I enjoyed it to a point but had enough of going to studios by the end of recording, and the ways of other engineers, thinking it's self-indulgent crap. I can't put up with that, so it was time to get it going for ourselves. Evanescence has a polished sound to it, with nice chords on the guitar, so it all pieced together but I had to move on and wanted to work more with concentrating on the beat and bass line... and it's still that way now, I still like the cyclic beats and bass." You can't really help but think of drums when you think of Mick. He made his name in noizecore circles playing in Napalm Death and with John Zorn and Bill Laswell as Painkiller. So it's little surprise that it still all begins with the beats: "I always start with the beat, always. My beats are either broken-up re-sampled breaks or single hits played into a beat – then broken up some more. I've taken stuff from my kit and other kits and hits from all other sources."
Working alone as Scorn, Mick has fused the captivating, dark nature of isolationist music with a raw, gothic bottom-end heavy elaboration of hip hop. Whilst still giving it all for Napalm Death he was drawing inspiration from Brian Eno’s Apollo and later the booming atmospherics of Thomas Koner's Nunatak Gongamur: "Nunatak reminded me of Eno's darker works. I liked the idea of the low, low frequencies; how they touched you. You could say it was a new form of extreme when I heard it." The fusion of heavy-environment ambience with breaks has defined the new dark-sound that permeates across jungle, hip hop, techno and more recently garage. Mick checks Danny Breaks, Dillinja and the new scary-skool rap of Company Flow and Dialated Peoples; and they're similar pioneers in the exploration of true deep 'n' dark funky shit.
With such consistency in his solo work, it could be easy to overlook Mick's collaboration work. Fairly notoriously as Painkiller and more recently with Tony Child (Surgeon), amongst others, the former whirlwind skin-basher has helped to make some of the best music that can only be described as ‘People Jamming Who Know What They're Doing’. Still, he takes a down-to-earth view of the process. "It's all been fun and mind-battering at the same time but you learn each time, don't you? I'm just more careful about it all now-a-days, too many head-aches make you say ‘well...’ Some good stuff came out of it, Not all of it though." The recent experiments conducted with fellow Birminghamer Surgeon have already caused shockwaves, as the techno overlord detailed in the last issue of Overload. My only real contact with anyone 'round here is Tony. Once a week we get together to listen to some stuff, have a chat and have a music session. Good lad is Tony. I don't see anyone else really – studio and home."
Mick has a bit of a reputation for locking himself away in his lab, something that helps sustain the emotions and imagery that his music presents. He agrees that his music is personal. Industry considerations don't play a part in his ideas: "I'm not thinking about a certain way of writing so stuff can fit in a DJ's bag, that doesn't come into it at all. I'm not trying to make tunes that can be played out in any way what so ever. I make the music to please myself. I have fun making the stuff, for sure and it's good to be told that someone has enjoyed something but I'm not making this thinking of anything other than me really. OK, collaborations are different..."
It's perhaps an unfortunate stereotype of artists like Robert Hampson, Thomas Koner and Mick that because they keep a low-profile, spending the majority of their working time in the studio and rarely engage in the whole self-promotional side of music, they are essentially living the ‘isolationist’ genre tagged to some of their music. Still you'd think that with the global reach of his music and the names he's worked with he has a huge range of contacts? "I’ve had some great remarks from people from all over. Some really nice stuff said, met some cool people through it over the years, so the communication is there, I don't hide away all the time."
Still, best not to interfere too much with the man's time, eh? So, last question and especially for the noise-headz: Ever get the urge to just pound your drums at 300mph now-a-days? "It's fun. It was fun. Come on, Napalm Death back its day was a fucking mental doss. I'm telling you... full-on blast, we had a great time. It just came to the end for me, end of story."
Starting off as Scorn with the grind/dub fusion of Vae Solis, Mick, along with bassist and vocalist Nick Bullen (also an original member of Napalm Death), went on to create Colussus, an impossibly eerie masterpiece of dream-like music that defied categorisation. Their third album Evanescence sparkled, fusing hip hop rhythms with gliding synths and samples to create a disorientating mix of funked-out solipsistic grooves. Nick Bullen left soon after and Mick decided to drive the original impetus for Scorn into new domain. After setting up his Birmingham based studio he locked himself into a routine of beats and bass exploration: "Evanescence is a great record. I enjoyed it to a point but had enough of going to studios by the end of recording, and the ways of other engineers, thinking it's self-indulgent crap. I can't put up with that, so it was time to get it going for ourselves. Evanescence has a polished sound to it, with nice chords on the guitar, so it all pieced together but I had to move on and wanted to work more with concentrating on the beat and bass line... and it's still that way now, I still like the cyclic beats and bass." You can't really help but think of drums when you think of Mick. He made his name in noizecore circles playing in Napalm Death and with John Zorn and Bill Laswell as Painkiller. So it's little surprise that it still all begins with the beats: "I always start with the beat, always. My beats are either broken-up re-sampled breaks or single hits played into a beat – then broken up some more. I've taken stuff from my kit and other kits and hits from all other sources."
Working alone as Scorn, Mick has fused the captivating, dark nature of isolationist music with a raw, gothic bottom-end heavy elaboration of hip hop. Whilst still giving it all for Napalm Death he was drawing inspiration from Brian Eno’s Apollo and later the booming atmospherics of Thomas Koner's Nunatak Gongamur: "Nunatak reminded me of Eno's darker works. I liked the idea of the low, low frequencies; how they touched you. You could say it was a new form of extreme when I heard it." The fusion of heavy-environment ambience with breaks has defined the new dark-sound that permeates across jungle, hip hop, techno and more recently garage. Mick checks Danny Breaks, Dillinja and the new scary-skool rap of Company Flow and Dialated Peoples; and they're similar pioneers in the exploration of true deep 'n' dark funky shit.
With such consistency in his solo work, it could be easy to overlook Mick's collaboration work. Fairly notoriously as Painkiller and more recently with Tony Child (Surgeon), amongst others, the former whirlwind skin-basher has helped to make some of the best music that can only be described as ‘People Jamming Who Know What They're Doing’. Still, he takes a down-to-earth view of the process. "It's all been fun and mind-battering at the same time but you learn each time, don't you? I'm just more careful about it all now-a-days, too many head-aches make you say ‘well...’ Some good stuff came out of it, Not all of it though." The recent experiments conducted with fellow Birminghamer Surgeon have already caused shockwaves, as the techno overlord detailed in the last issue of Overload. My only real contact with anyone 'round here is Tony. Once a week we get together to listen to some stuff, have a chat and have a music session. Good lad is Tony. I don't see anyone else really – studio and home."
Mick has a bit of a reputation for locking himself away in his lab, something that helps sustain the emotions and imagery that his music presents. He agrees that his music is personal. Industry considerations don't play a part in his ideas: "I'm not thinking about a certain way of writing so stuff can fit in a DJ's bag, that doesn't come into it at all. I'm not trying to make tunes that can be played out in any way what so ever. I make the music to please myself. I have fun making the stuff, for sure and it's good to be told that someone has enjoyed something but I'm not making this thinking of anything other than me really. OK, collaborations are different..."
It's perhaps an unfortunate stereotype of artists like Robert Hampson, Thomas Koner and Mick that because they keep a low-profile, spending the majority of their working time in the studio and rarely engage in the whole self-promotional side of music, they are essentially living the ‘isolationist’ genre tagged to some of their music. Still you'd think that with the global reach of his music and the names he's worked with he has a huge range of contacts? "I’ve had some great remarks from people from all over. Some really nice stuff said, met some cool people through it over the years, so the communication is there, I don't hide away all the time."
Still, best not to interfere too much with the man's time, eh? So, last question and especially for the noise-headz: Ever get the urge to just pound your drums at 300mph now-a-days? "It's fun. It was fun. Come on, Napalm Death back its day was a fucking mental doss. I'm telling you... full-on blast, we had a great time. It just came to the end for me, end of story."
