Mick Harris – Collapse

this is subterranean, suffocating ambient drones at their best. Must listen for any interested in this genre.

5 demonic, dark, brooding monsters lurking in the darkness....beware!!!
Superb album but not for the faint hearted.

On the SCORN "Evanescence" tour, JIM PLOTKIN would leave guitar loops hanging in the air after soundchecks, and clearly, at some point, MICK HARRIS, then around his second LULL outing, saw how his dark dystopian sound would combine well with these drifting loops. And sometime later they collaborated to create this Midnight In The Necropolis collection of driftworks. It's kinda difficult to tell where JIM's loops end and MICK's noise manipulations begin. But then that's not really the point to this album. You might say that, as with the HARRIS / LASWELL collab which appeared a little time later, this is an extension of the LULL project with the artist supplying MICK with the source material to blacken and corrupt. The loops and effects which go to make up these soundscapes are ed not only by guitar, but by human voice, indiscernably drowning in electronic vortex; what sounds like location recordings made in some railway station in the cold, lonely early hours.
As with the other dark ambient - or as THE WIRE called it "Isolationist" - music which has appeared from the stygian depths of MICK's Birmingham laboratory, this sound ranges from vibrant walls of swirling, churning noise to low, subtle, almost shy tones which fade in and out of the Eternal Night. It's nowhere near as subtle as many of the LULL pieces - the title track, for instance, has a central phasing spine which is blatantly lo-tech, and sounds not unlike ANOTHER HEADACHE sped up a tad.

Originally reviewed for Soft Watch.

A collection of immensely massive and haunting soundspheres, where the sparse textures swirl and blend with the heavy drones. Dark ambient in its purest form.