Mick Harris

Mick Harris (actually Michael John Harris, born 1967 in Birmingham ) is a British musician and producer. He achieved fame mid-1980s as the drummer for the British grindcore band Napalm Death and is considered one of the founders of the blast beat. Since the 1990s, Harris devoted various Industrial and Electronica projects, the most famous is Scorn. He returned in late 2011 the music business back.

Musical career

Mick Harris was born in Birmingham in 1967 and grew up there. Since the early 1980s he belonged to the local hardcore punk scene when he was offered an acquaintance in March 1984 to play in a yet-unnamed psychobilly band drums. Harris, who had never played an instrument, accepted the offer and suggested as a name Martian Brain Squeeze. After two demos and some live performances, the band broke up again. Harris was the drummer for the punk band anorexia, in which he remained until 1985.

In the Birmingham Music Club Mermaid Harris Justin K. Broadrick and Nik Bullen met Napalm Death and tightened the end of 1985 drummer of the band. His style was characterized by extremely fast play, the so-called blast beats. Furthermore, the invention of the genre designation Grindcore, he is credited. In 1987 he founded together with Napalm Death guitarist Mitch Harris the grindcore project Defecation with which he recorded the album Purity Dilution published in 1989. He was also active as a drummer with Extreme Noise Terror and Doom. Mid-1991, Harris left Napalm Death because it had a different idea of the musical development of the band than the other band members.

Together with bulls and Broadrick, who had left before Harris Napalm Death, he founded the Industrial music project Scorn. Already in the 1980s, Harris had been interested in electronic music, dub and New Wave influenced he was by post-punk bands such as The Birthday Party and Public Image Ltd.. , But also by industrial bands like Einstürzende Neubauten and New Wave bands like Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil. After the first album Vae Solis (1992 ) Justin Broadrick left the band after Gyral (1995 ) Nik Bullen. From this point on, Harris was limited solely to the use of electronics, traditional instruments like guitar, bass and drums all disappeared from his music. As a drummer, he was active in the 1990s in Painkiller, a project by John Zorn and Bill Laswell, what he saw as acting out his personal musical freedoms. Another project involved Equations of Eternity with Laswell and the Italian experimental musician Eraldo Bernocchi.

Also in 1991 called Harris the project Lull in life, in which he focuses on ambient sounds without beats. With his Quoit drum -and- bass project Harris took between 1997 and 2003 on three albums. The late 1990s, he founded his own record label Possible Records. Besides his own musical activities, Harris has worked for other musicians in the field of electronic and experimental music as a DJ and remixer, so for Franziska Baumann, Oliver Ho, DJ Spooky and Toshinori Kondō. In 1998, he mixed their own version of Walter Ruttmann's Weekend for Bayerischer Rundfunk and was thus one of the winners of the radio play radio play prize of the month.

He returned in late 2011 the music business finally the back because he could not earn enough money for his living with his music.

Private

Mick Harris lives with his partner and two children in a council house in Birmingham and works at a college in his hometown.

Discography (selection)

Because of the large number of split releases, singles, EPs and compilations are listed here only regular studio albums.

• Somnific Flux (1995 )

• Purity Dilution (1989)

• The Peel Sessions '87- '90 (1987 )

• Equations of Eternity (1996 )

• Dreamt About Dreaming ( 1992)
• Journey Through Underworlds (1993 )
• Cold Summer (1994 )
• Continue ( 1996)
• Moments (1998)
• Like a Slow River ( 2008)

• Scum (1987)
• From Enslavement to Obliteration (1988 )
• The Peel Sessions (1989 )
• Harmony Corruption (1990 )

• Guts of a Virgin (1991 )
• Buried Secrets (1992 )
• Execution Ground ( 1994)

• Lounge ( 1996)
• Properties ( 2001)

• See Scorn # Discography

Remixes ( selection)

• Well Te Scurda of Almamegretta (1996 )
• Weekend by Walter Ruttmann (1998)
• Where All The Frozen Things Went by Franziska Baumann ( 2003)