Mick Harris
Tuesday, December 20th, 2016
Hednod Sessions 2xCD
Hidden Art, 2005
There’s a poetic beauty in the fact that the inventor of the blastbeat — that blazing, ridiculously aggressive machine gun drum style that came to spur entire genres of extreme metal — later went on to create some of the most chill beats known to man. In addition to Harris’ essential heavy dub Scorn project, which pretty much was dubstep before dubstep became a one dimensional punchline of IDM culture, his solo work explores spacious, minimal expanses tied together with massive beats in an even more reductive way. This double CD release collects a series of 12″ singles he did for Canada’s Hed Nod label, offering an appropriately expansive runtime that allows a deep slide into the zone at nearly 2 and a half hours long. No matter where you stand on Harris’ work, from the inhumanly fast, dense blurs of sound in Napalm Death, to the wide open spaces propelled by relentless, sickened beats of Scorn and these solo recordings, you’ve got to give the guy props for being at the forefront of both the grindcore and dubstep genres.
Back in 1995 when about 85% of the music released on punk labels was Buzzcocks or Green Day-inspired pop-punk, Flipside magazine’s record label released a second helping of Babyland’s electrojunk punk, which promptly ended up in cutout bins by the dozens. It’s a damn shame too, because what Babyland brought to the turntable was co-opted in the later ’90s by a punk scene that shifted away from the safe confines of pop-punk to the wild possibilities of Screamers and Suicide-inspired synthpunk of the later nineties in bands like Subtonix, The Vanishing, Replikants, ADULT, Black Ice, Sixteens, The Lack, and the whole Digital Hardcore scene that came to light with the popularity of Atari Teenage Riot — not to mention the overall acceptance of synth elements in punk with early 2000s groups like xbxrx, Lost Sounds, Digital Leather, Phantom Limbs, etc.