Scorn

The ambient suites Pashupatinath and Parish Of Tama on Execution Ground (Subharmonic, 1995) approach a more danceable and trancey Miles Davis.

Rituals (Toy's Factory, 1995) is an even more improvised and slightly more cacophonous album recorded with Keiji Haino.

Mick Harris, the drummer of Napalm Death, was one of the great geniuses of British music in the 1980s, unfortunately ignored by both critics and the public. His albums with Scorn as well as his collaborations with other luminaries of modern rock made him a guiding light and one of the main forges of innovation.

Harris resurrected the original Napalm Death lineup for his Scorn project: Harris also alternates on samples and sequencer, Justin Broadrick plays guitar, and Nick Bullen handles vocals.

Vae Solis (Earache, 1992) is a monumental work that has almost nothing in common with Napalm Death’s grindcore. The sound is heavy and dark, but anything but frantic. Harris actually favors sickly cadences that are not slow enough to be called funereal, yet not fast enough to be called grindcore. One can rather sense the influence of Public Image Ltd and Killing Joke in a sonic landscape darkened and made apocalyptic by the bass’s “dub” reverberations, taking Jah Wobble’s lesson to its extreme consequences.
In tracks like Spasm, brutal, gloomy, and deep riffs reign supreme, seemingly drilling into the psyche with the power of an auger. Thought Of Escape lives almost entirely on grim, layered rumbles, piled up until they form a massive wall; within those rumbles, within those alien frequencies, guitar, drums, and vocals move within a narrow space in a kind of Brownian motion. Hit changes rhythm halfway through, shifting from a Killing Joke–style catalepsy to a driving, Ministry-like saraband (ending with a tail of galactic distortions).
The peak of anarchy is probably reached in Lick Forever Dog, with its wild sampling and tempestuous, irregular (“metallurgical”) rhythm, in a madly claustrophobic atmosphere — the industrial version of a psychedelic blues. The most propulsive track, however, is Walls Of My Heart, driven by hammering drum machines and scarred by machine-gun bursts of guitar, despite the incoherent chanting of the vocals.
Overall, the album is an imposing dramaturgical apparatus placed at the service of bulldozer-like tracks that vigorously resume the program left unfinished by the hallucinations of P.I.L.'s Second Edition, giving in only once to the lure of the dancefloor, in On Ice (which, moreover, has raga inflections). An ambitious work — more so than anything recorded by Napalm Death or Godflesh — Vae Solis represents an important synthesis of the extreme currents of British music, from punk rock to industrial, from grindcore to gothic.

The group softens the dark tones of that first album on the follow-up, Colossus (Earache, 1993). In return, Harris begins experimenting with samples and loops. Endless, as well as the songs that are variations on that theme (the more melodic Nothing Hunger, the more ethereal White Irises Blind), once again recall Public Image, thanks to the hypnotic rumble of the foregrounded bass and the nervous-breakdown tone; but long suites of noises and subliminal voices like Crimson Seed, and whirlpools of Helios Creed–style distortion like Scorpionic, open the doors to industrial music, cyberpunk atmospheres, and soundtracks for android films such as Blackout (mechanical cadences, robotic voices, intermittent beeps).
The heavy beat and blasts of distortion, practically constant from beginning to end, give these visions an apocalyptic quality. Exceptions are the gurgles and electronic resonances of The Sky Is Loaded, a sonic documentary of the firmaments bordering on Steve Roach’s new age, and the oppressive, dark, glacial rumble of Little Angel, bordering on the “concrete” symphonies of Gordon Mumma. The production is always intense and chaotic, disorienting the listener with the sheer number of sonic events that follow one another or overlap to form that dense background radiation. The sonic and emotional impact is more controlled and subdued, but no less unsettling.

Harris also began a parallel career under the pseudonym Lull. The first release was a work of demanding electronic experimentation: Dreamt About Dreaming (Sentrax Prod, 1992).

The four long and gloomy Murder Ballads (Musica Maxima Magnetica, 1994) — later followed by two more volumes and eventually collected on Murder Ballads (Invisible, 1998) — are the product of a collaboration between Harris and Martyn Bates. In these grand technological odes, they present a singular fusion of British gothic and ambient music.

The two ambient suites on Somnific Flux (Subharmonic, 1995), Capacious and Distal Sonority, are instead the result of a session with master bassist Bill Laswell.

Bullen, meanwhile, was active in Ruth Collins’s Umbilical Limbo. He also released Bass Terror (Sub Rosa, 199#) with Bill Laswell, which features his ambient suites Again And Again and Nocturnal Crawl.

Scorn's third album, Evanescence (Earache, 1994), completed their downward trajectory toward the disintegration of the rock song. The passion of Harris and Bullen unfolds under the sign of the most obsessive hip hop and dub. The template is that of Silver Rain Fell — that massive, almost superhuman pulse that crushes their mutterings. Now ethereal as in Dreamspace, now refined as in Exodus, the formula remains the same. In the end, the best track is Days Passed, the one that looks back to Public Image and forgets the rest. “This is their version of ambient music,” proclaims the cover; but perhaps it is quite simply their attempt to stay afloat.

Ellipsis is the remix album.

Harris was left completely on his own for the next Scorn album, the instrumental Gyral (Earache, 1995). Its sound — a chill-out-room version of Evanescence — is even more spectral than before. Harris amused himself by making his fans lose their (stylistic) sense of direction. The anemic looping of stale beats and warped drones in Six Hours One Week is contrasted by the sinister industrial dub fantasia of Far In Out, a ghostly house of mirrors. The horror atmosphere continues in Forever Turning, amid sparse dislocated beats and ominous rattling. Suspense is also the main ingredient of the nine-minute Trondheim - Gavle, coupled with tribal drums and strident hissing. The nine-minute cosmic watercolor Time Went Slow boasts a slightly more intricate beat and slightly more sinister drones, and especially a cricket-like undercurrent of tickings that eventually becomes a cosmic radiation. At the other end of the stylistic spectrum, the eight-minute Stairway is a dissonant piano sonata that intersects a sharp flying metallic object, borderline musique concrete. The nine-minute Hush (perhaps the standout) hints at a jazzy beat that never coalesces amid disorienting electronic pulsations and psychedelic drones. Black Box is redundant.

Painstakingly produced, Logghi Barogghi (Earache, 1996) explored the edges of hip-hop and dub, but mostly with simplistic ideas. The exceptions are the agitated cacophony of Out Of and the psychedelic dissonance of Do the Geek.

Zander (Invisible, 1997) is the real continuation of Gyral, although with much less imagination. The cartoonish sci-fi noises of Well Sorted don't amount to much, and the Afro-satanic atmosphere of Strand feels contrived, but the cadaverous hip-hop of Flick and the unnerving industrial loop of 416 are cute ideas, and the squealing drum'n'bass madness of Not Answering is almost genius. The album is mostly fluff.

Lounge (Possible, 1997), credited to Quoit — another Mick Harris alias — is a drum’n’bass experiment.

Harris’s most ambitious and enduring works, however, were now released under the moniker Lull. The four glacial and static compositions of Cold Summer (Sentrax, 1995), totaling 80 minutes, and the monumental suite Continue (Release, 1996), 62 minutes of post-psychedelic mists that build upon and expand the suites of Somnific Flux (Subharmonic, 1995), represent two of the peaks of ambient music. The EP Closed In (Manifold, 1997) contains two tracks: the title track and Way Through Staring.

Collected (Manifold, 2005) gathers Lull tracks that had appeared only on compilations.

Moments (Release, 1998) follows the process of gradual accumulation used in Continue, but fragments it into 99 tracks with a total duration of 67 minutes. The difference from Continue lies in how the piece can be experienced: instead of listening to the music in the sequence recorded by the artist, the listener can press the “random” button on the CD player and hear it in any order. The music on this album is as intelligent as its premise...

A temporary peak in his explorations is also represented by his collaboration with guitarist Eraldo Bernocchi of Sigillum S, which yielded Equations Of Eternity (WordSound, 1996) with Bill Laswell; Overload Lady (Sub Rosa, 1996), marked by a suggestive ambient drum’n’bass; the double album Whine (KK, 1997), collecting unreleased pieces of various kinds; Veve (WordSound, 1998), again with Bill Laswell; and above all Total Station (Sub Rosa, 1998).

Never satisfied, Harris also ventured into ambient noise with Collapse (Asphodel, 1996), a collaboration with James Plotkin, and made an incursion into dub under the pseudonym The Weakener with What Do You Know About It (WordSound, 1998).

A master of the “heavy drone” — the technique (developed alongside Godflesh) of using the bass sound, suitably amplified and distorted, as the “ether” of his sonic universe — Mick Harris is by now one of the most brilliant and unrestrained strategists of British rock, a worthy heir to the ethos and music of Johnny Rotten in the post-industrial age. His occasional inconsistency of style is offset by a lucid vision of the future of music.

Greetings From Birmingham (Hymen, 2000), the first Scorn album in three years, was heavily influenced by Laswell. Harris became an evangelist of the most austere dub minimalism with this collection of deep, dense, hallucinated, slow-motion grooves. The sophisticated and subliminal Can But Try weds an anemic beat, a thin secondary breakbeat, assorted noir-ish cacophony and an obsessive sub-bass pattern. Heavy beats, however, reign in the rest of the album, notably in Still On, perturbed by alien electronic signals. Mechanical hip-hop loops enhance the horror dance of Told You Can Tell and the visceral bombast of Closedown. That said, the more abstract pieces are also the more effective, notably the psychedelic implosion of Soon Come and the disorienting maelstrom of That Don't. Several compositions have a self-mocking quality (possibly inspired by Dada or by Surrealism) that defies the austere ambition of this instrumental dance-music.

At the same time, Harris continued his eclectic collaborations: Dys (HUshush, 2001) pairs him with Belgium's electronic musician Ambre, and Bad Roads Young Drivers is a long-distance collaboration with Mark Spybey.

Scorn's Plan B (Hymen, 2002) is a surprisingly mellow album, but it may also "chill out" the passion of his staunchest fans.

Quoit returned with Plug 8 Thrust Coil (Burning Shed, 2002) and Properties (Quatermass, 2003).

List of Takers (Vivo, 2005) is a live Scorn album.

Scorn's Stealth (2007) continued the chill-out bass-heavy post-dub program of Greetings From Birmingham and Plan B.

Lull's Like A Slow River (Glacial Movements, 2008), the first proper Lull album in almost a decade, and the EP Circadian Rhythm Disturbance (Laughing Bride Media, 2010), a 20-minute collaboration with Beta Cloud, indulged in glacial slow-motion ambient music.

Shortcut to Connect (1998) was a collaboration with Neil Harvey. Mesmeric Enabling Device (1999) was a collaboration with Nigel Ayers and John Everall. Bad Roads - Young Drivers (2000) was a collaboration with Mark Spybey. Dys (2001) was a collaboration with Ambre.