MICK HARRIS & JAMES PLOTKIN

COLLAPSE

  1/  Momentum                                   (Harris,Plotkin)              11.58
  2/  Collision                                  (Harris,Plotkin)              10.29
  3/  Collapse                                   (Harris,Plotkin)              19.24
  4/  Drench                                     (Harris,Plotkin)              14.41
  5/  Dissolve                                   (Harris,Plotkin)              9.50

          Recorded at The Black Box during Summer and Winter 1995
          Produced by Mick Harris and James Plotkin
          Mastered at the Compound, San Francisco by mixture 151

Mick Harris and James Plotkin: looped guitar, natural and unnatural sound, processing.

          1996 - Sombient Records/Asphodel (USA), 0963 (CD)

REVIEWS :

This beatless piece of ambient drone work shows that ambient music needn't be fluffy and weightless. There are spacious pieces that you can fall asleep to, and then there are pieces like those collected here, that are more likely to inspire horrific nightmares than anything else. This sounds to me as though it were a field recording in a cave where some primitive ritual was going on. It's difficult to detect a single timbre here, and all of the played sounds and found sounds tend to roll together like waves. At one point, I left this disc in the CD Rom drive of my computer and everytime I would play Descent II, it would come on and I would think that this was the perfect music for flying a spacecraft through a series of dark tunnels. When I figured out where the music was coming from, I had to remember to put it in the drive whenever I booted that game up.

mjeanes

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Two ex-grindcore gods create some excellent dark ambient isolationist music. A total of five tracks, all quite minimal, in a cool digipak is the external description. I'm not going to try a deep review on this one, its minimal isolationist stuff, with some loud parts (notably track 2), that will only appeal to fans of the genre.

Overall - 4/5

Creaig Dunton (courtesy of the False Prophet Campaign website)

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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 joined 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.

Antony Burnham (courtesy of the Metamorphic Journeyman website)

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OLD boy JAMES PLOTKIN and SCORN supremo MICK HARRIS have hit on a creative marriage that is made in Heaven, but stoked by the fires of Hell. "Collapse" consists of five long instrumentals which have been put together 'through use of looped guitar, natural and unnatural sound', but what growls low from the belly of their beast is something much more exciting and threatening to the senses than those simple sound props suggest. PLOTKIN has already acknowledged the influence of such early Industrial Krautrockers as CLUSTER in his work and to some extent the electronic space drone present on that group's first two albums can also be detected here. The bulk of "Collapse", however, owes more to an earlier incarnation called KLUSTER, who were far more abstract and abrasive in their approach. PLOTKIN and HARRIS are also discovering new ways to play guitar and gladly allow power chord technique to be overthrown by technology so that the instrumental loses form and melts into the general organised chaos of the music. Here that raw edge of brutal experimentation is sharpened considerably and the result is a record which cuts deep into the subconscious and draws blood.

Edwin Pouncey from THE WIRE 151