CERTAIN BEYOND ALL REASONABLE DOUBT

LIVE BERLIN REC. 29/5/98

  1/  untitled                                   (Harris,Child)                69.30

          Recorded live at Atelier 4r. Berlin, exerpted from 45 minutes into a 2 hour performance
          Produced by Mick Harris and Anthony Child

Mick Harris and Anthony Child : all sounds.

          1998  -  Manifold (USA),  mancd28  (CD)

Note : This first edition was limited to 500 copies.

REVIEWS :

A collaboration between SURGEON and SCORN? Hey, it's not beyond imagining. Here MICK HARRIS is closer to his LULL project than to any of his more formed, structured works. What you have here is a dark passage through drifting soundscapes with slow, decrepit rhythmic events. It reminds me of early GILBERT & LEWIS projects, but darker, so much darker, a simplified glance at what TG were but taken much further. And where LULL worked as a dark, LYNCH-influenced ambience with little recognizable 'beat', the addition of a muted-down slow flat drum sound takes it even further. Delay helps build towards noisier points where hints of 'Dub' enter, but this is way beyond that. Not much happens here, and what does happens slowly - but, hey, we're in no rush - this is deep listening music - a gut-level exploration which is overall more relaxing than challenging, although I can't imagine coming across this in some New Age shop - their pastel-shaded speakers would never take the subterranean depth of this sound.

A superior driftwork which I guess fits into the realms of Isolationism, but the ambience, as dark and decayed as it may be, is actually warmer and more lulling than most. Often so subtle that you focus on unheard phrases after hearing it ten times or more.

Antony Burnham (courtesy of the Metamorphic Journeyman website)

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- Imagine a window between the stars, the galaxies, the infinite .....

... somewhere inbetween the nexus of synapses / human electricity and current diagrams of sound-tools lies this seamless, endless music - estatic, dreamlike, routed in futures, spiralling into pasts. MICK HARRIS, together with ANTHONY CHILDS (whose work as SURGEON I know nothing of...) has created his finest 'continuous' piece here in this 'Live, Berlin 98' limited edition CD (it should be more widely available, truly....) At times redolent of full-coloured version of (the originally-monochrome) 'After Cease To Exist', and then again of some non-beat Krautrock canvas, and then again something truly of it's own imaginings - this one puts you in a different place. The warp of menace that often informs M.H. material is something conspicous by it's absence in this open, embracing music instead it sounds to my ear like music to wonder at / envision thru / dream upon / music to empathise with a wider world-picture to .... its about lending an ear to hear 'What the stars did tell me' .... a vast, vast canvas of minutia and beauty. Mmmm

Martyn Bates (courtesy of the Metamorphic Journeyman website)