Fret

Fret serves as Mick Harris's outlet for producing some of the most unyieldingly severe and abrasive techno, aligned closely with the output of other Birmingham-based artists such as Regis and Surgeon. His initial foray under this name came via a lone EP in 1995, after which the alias lay dormant until its revival two decades afterward through the 2017 album Over Depth.

Harris maintains ties to numerous endeavors, among them the pioneering grindcore act Napalm Death, the boundary-pushing industrial hip-hop outfit Scorn, the dark ambient project Lull pursued under his own name, and the free jazz/metal group Pain Killer. During 1995 he issued an untitled 12" featuring experimental techno material credited to Fret, marking the sole release on Resonance, itself a subsidiary of the established Birmingham techno imprint Downwards. Following that record Harris redirected his techno work to the Monrella pseudonym, issuing multiple 12"s via ZET, the label established by Karl O'Connor, also known as Regis. No further Fret activity surfaced until Downwards incorporated an untitled, previously unreleased 1995 track into its 2013 compilation Halha. Objekt later featured the Fret cut "Stuck" within Kern, Vol. 3, the 2016 mix he compiled for Tresor. The subsequent year brought Harris's debut full-length Over Depth on the German imprint Karlrecords, presenting some of the densest and most intricate rhythmic explorations he had undertaken since concluding Scorn's run in 2011. That album preceded the similarly ferocious Silent Neighbour EP, which surfaced on L.I.E.S. in 2018. In 2019 an EP arrived containing reworked versions of his 2017 piece "Salford Priors."