Lull

Birmingham-rooted musician Mick Harris has long maintained close ties to post-industrial dub figures including Bill Laswell, Techno Animal, James Plotkin, Robert Musso, and Anton Fier, embodying a pronounced contrast in artistic extremes. Having served as drummer for the death metal band Napalm Death during its prominent late-'80s and early-'90s period, Harris shifted toward spare ambient and dub explorations near the close of that affiliation. Through Earache he issued recordings under the Scorn moniker devoted to ambient dub, while Sentrax carried his Lull output, alongside scattered additional endeavors that collectively unsettled the assumptions and holdings of listeners long kept at a remove. Scorn and Lull, together with John Zorn's Painkiller project in experimental jazz-dubcore, have constituted his central continuing outlets up to now, though isolated joint efforts with James Plotkin, Nicholas Bullen, Bill Laswell, and Martyn Bates occur regularly. Scorn originated in 1991 when Harris partnered with bassist Nick Bullen to blend ambient, industrial, dub, rock, and hip-hop ingredients. After the project reduced to Harris alone following Evanescence, it produced several increasingly noted albums, among them the remix collection Ellipsis containing reinterpretations by Coil, Autechre, Laswell, and Germ. Under the Lull alias his independent pieces emphasize bleaker, more isolationist ambient textures, a selection of which appeared domestically via Laswell's former Subharmonic label; a subsequent move to Relapse delivered the 1996 album Continue and the 1998 release Moments.