Mick Harris

Mick Harris — born in Birmingham, England, in 1967 — was Napalm Death's drummer in the phase when the band invented grindcore, and the musician who gave a name to one of the most consequential techniques in extreme metal. It was he who coined the term blast beat and turned it into the rhythmic base of an entire genre: kick, snare and cymbal striking in alternation at the maximum speed the body allows, without groove and without resolution, producing a continuous mass rather than a pulse. On Scum (1987) and From Enslavement to Obliteration (1988) this is taken to the limit — tracks of twenty seconds, without structure, without chorus, without anything resembling a song. "You Suffer", from the first album, lasts a little over a second and appears in Guinness as the shortest song ever recorded. It is a joke and a statement of principles at once. What he did afterwards is more surprising still. He left the band in 1991 and abandoned metal completely, devoting himself to electronic, ambient and experimental music. He founded Scorn and Lull, projects of dark dub and slow soundscapes — the exact opposite of what had made him known. He has been active in that territory for over three decades, without returning to the genre he helped create.