Mick Harris's long-running project: the deep-bass dub-industrial and illbient music made by the drummer who popularised the blast beat in Napalm Death, then turned away from speed toward weight, space and crushing low-end.
Scorn is the deep-bass project, and the Bureau files it at Tier I as the fullest expression of one of the most consequential turns in this archive's field: a grindcore drummer abandoning speed for weight and space. It was formed in Birmingham in 1991 by Mick Harris and Nic Bullen, both just out of Napalm Death, and after Bullen left in 1995 Harris carried it on alone across more than a dozen records.
The turn is the point. Harris (born in Birmingham in 1967) had been Napalm Death's drummer from 1985 to 1991, the player generally credited with popularising the blast beat and with helping name grindcore itself. Scorn is where that drummer stopped going fast. The early Earache-era records still carried industrial-metal heaviness, but once Harris was alone the music became minimalist beats laid over very deep bass, structured more like dub and trip-hop slowed to a crawl than like anything from the metal world he came from.
He has been open about where the turn came from: Brian Eno's ambient work, Public Image Ltd, Jah Wobble's bass. Scorn channels what Harris calls a good aggression into imaginary spaces and crushing low-end rather than velocity, and the catalogue moved with it, from Earache into Ohm Resistance, Hymen, Ad Noiseam and the post-industrial and illbient electronic networks.
Scorn lies at the centre of a larger Harris project web. Lull, founded in 1990 with little more than a sampler, a reverb pedal and a 4-track, is his dark-ambient work and a front-runner of the 1990s isolationist movement alongside Thomas Köner, released on Sentrax and Release Entertainment. Fret, Quoit and The Weakener are further aliases, and Painkiller, with John Zorn and Bill Laswell, was his last drum project before he set the kit aside.
The Bureau files Scorn at Artists · Tier I as the deep-bass project: the work in which Mick Harris turned the physical extremity of grindcore inward, into bass-weight, repetition and darkness, and became, across Scorn and Lull, a defining figure of dub-industrial and isolationist electronics. The path from Napalm Death to here is one of the clearest bridges between the metal underground and the electronic dark this archive documents.