QUOIT
1/ Going After (Harris) 7.25
2/ Clang (Harris) 7.02
3/ Cells (Harris) 7.35
4/ Trek (Harris) 6.34
5/ Close Season (Harris) 9.09
6/ Detour (Harris) 7.31
7/ Lurker (Harris) 7.23
Created and mixed in the Box4 2001
Produced by Mick Harris
Mick Harris: all sounds.
2001 - Quartermass (Belgium), QS 126 LP (2x12")
2001 - Quartermass (Belgium), QS 126 CD (CD)
REVIEWS :
Drum and bass bores me. Much like house music, it takes a good idea and drives it so hard into the ground that, after five minutes, I'd rather be
bludgeoned by a gang of English school children wielding cricket bats than waste any more of my hearing on the repetitive thump and clank of
d 'n' b. Yet I'm hear to flog what is, ostensibly, a drum and bass album. Why? Because Mick Harris understands two things: rhythm and
atmosphere. You get these two things right and a lot can be forgiven.
A quick history lesson: Mick Harris, one-time power drummer for that machinery of metal mayhem, Napalm Death, lost interest in traditional
song structure, ditched his old school drum kit for a rack of electronic equipment and dove off the deep end with Scorn. Threatening to rupture
the fabric of time and space on more than one occasion with the low end power of Scorn, Harris has also been exploring the glacial atmospherics
of the landscape of nightmares with the dark ambient project, Lull, culminating in the sixty-minute single track Continue. Somewhere in there, he
diagramed an overlap and called that space 'Quoit.' Properties, his second album under the Quoit moniker (the first came out on his own Possible
Label), takes the more frenetic rhythms of Scorn and sends them scampering across heavy atmospheres straight off a Lull record.
Properties begins with "Going After," an instant 0-to-60 start that hammers you like a speed mugging. "Cells" swarms with drifting bell tones and
warped, back-masked drones, dark ambient background for the chattering, chopping drum work that seethes over the top. The center of the
record is dominated by "Close Season," a nine-minute exploration of the spastic heartbeats of the monsters which live under the bed. Harris
sets the tone with crawling miasmas, drifting atmospheres cut and slashed by a glittering cymbal rhythm, the bass pumping like the accelerating
heartbeat of a cornered teenager. The first third of the song is a gradual wind-up, a tightening noose as the atmospheres are split again and again
by the beats, the rhythms coming faster and faster until everything explodes. If Dario Argento had been allowed to direct Monsters, Inc., this
slithering, glittering, frenzied music would be Randall's theme song.
Mick Harris works alone in a studio that he calls The Box, yet his music consistently explodes that same structure. With his Quoit project
and Properties, he detonates the stagnating landscape of drum and bass with squirming and snarling rhythms.
Mark Teppo (courtesy of the Mark Teppo (dot) com website)
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As the 2002 Winter Olympics proved, humans enjoy controversy much more than confluence. Judging scandals, drunken arrests, blood-doping: these actions
became larger than the games themselves because they sparked spontaneous, unscripted conflict. It’s the same reason people love a film’s antagonist. Purity
and goodwill is great for humanity and all, but evil is flat out sexy.
This is one of the (indirect) reasons Quoit’s (a.k.a. Mick Harris) dark new album, Properties, is so appealing; it rubs you the wrong way. Quoit specializes
in hardstep breakbeat with a proto-terrorist vibe that pounds away without respite, rarely allowing the eardrums much time to defend themselves. The
onslaught of jagged edges and thumping bass makes no apologies and offers a suitable guerilla antithesis to the asinine resurgence of two-step.
Quoit’s drill ‘n' bass has an understandable and elaborate history. Harris has pulverized ears since the early 1980s when he drummed in Napalm Death. Since then,
Harris spawned Scorn, which specialized in the dub-horrific. He also played with John Zorn and Bill Laswell in Painkiller, and ran Possible Recs, which released
records by Ambush, Interceptor and the like.
Harris’ dub-terrorist background is evident in Properties via the records’ raw, but meticulous production. Quoit’s mechanical mayhem cuts like a Texas
chainsaw, but with the preciseness of a Black and Decker handheld. Harris layers his scraps well, giving his pieces a progression and separating them from
the mindless loops of typical drum ‘n’ bass. On “Detour,” the opening tinny breakbeat turns into a freeway of accelerated synths and snares. Harris does
not let the loops stand for themselves and manipulates them to keep the music fresh and ferociously unpredictable.
All this is not to say that Properties would not work on the dancefloor. “Cells” features an unsteady break that EQs into a distorted, pitchshifting bass hook
before a relatively standard drum ‘n’ bass loop bursts into the forefront and rocks the parti, occasionally interrupted by an eerie piano sample that helps keep
the piece’s sinister feel. The album’s highlight and centerpiece is the nine-minute “Close Season.” The piece slowly builds, alternating foreboding bass with solitary
high-hat before Harris brings out all the artillery three minutes in and lets his sounds compete for the spotlight.
Despite the perceived chaos, Quoit’s post-industrial groove never disappears. Harris (and contemporaries Techno Animal) restrain their carnage for easily
digestible doses and steer clear of freeform noise collages. Rhythms are always of the utmost importance; the main reason Properties can rock your headphones
or a packed club of drunk hooligans, not unlike, coincedentally enough, the 2002 Winter Games (It all comes full circle...)
Otis Hart (courtesy of the Dusted Magazine website)