Bon Harris: Techno Pioneer

Sam Molineaux discovers an early techno pioneer thriving in the heart of Hollywood; living proof of the maxim 'what goes around comes around'.

Back in 1983, five years before the official birth of techno in the clubs of Detroit, a couple of Essex teenagers started fooling around with modular synthesizers to create their own brand of minimalist, beat‑driven electro music. They called themselves Nitzer Ebb (an entirely made‑up name) and, eschewing the disco‑friendly synth pop that was in vogue in Britain at the time, turned for inspiration to bands such as Bauhaus, The Birthday Party, Killing Joke, DAF and Die Krupps.

With their futuristic outlook and combination of post‑punk rock and forthright electronic rhythms, the early Nitzer Ebb became somewhat unwittingly associated with the emerging European industrial dance scene. However, thanks to a string of consistently precocious albums coupled with relentless touring (including worldwide stadium tours with Mute labelmates Depeche Mode), they eventually moved into a class of their own, deliberately at odds with most of the popular music of the day, electronic or otherwise.

So many artists have suddenly decided they're going to 'go electronic'. But it's not really an integration, it's them singing over the top of an electronic track.

The UK music press, increasingly lost for words to describe them, rewarded Nitzer Ebb with little more than indifference. But outside their country of origin it was a different story. Throughout the late '80s and early '90s, Nitzer Ebb enjoyed a huge underground following, both in Europe and in the prospering US club scene which welcomed their synth and percussion‑led techno‑rock.

Their first two albums, That Total Age and Belief, are still hailed as seminal dancefloor classics. The subsequent Showtime and Ebbhead saw them embrace a less rigid, funkier synthetic approach. By the time of their fifth and final album — 1995's sadly inaccurately titled Big Hit — they'd begun to experiment with a combination of live instruments and electronics, both to broaden their sound and to add interest to their live performance. At this point, the band had finally given up on the UK and relocated to the States. But tensions during the recording of Big Hit and the follow‑up tour eventually took their toll and the band split up.

These days, vocalist/guitarist Douglas McCarthy is back in England lending his voice to Recoil, the pet project of Depeche Mode's Alan Wilder. Meanwhile programmer/percussionist Bon Harris is living in Los Angeles and experiencing something of a career renaissance thanks to the popularity of what has become known there as electronica (see 'La Musica Electronica' box).

"People see us as one of the originators of that scene, and we're getting a lot of props from being around way before" says Harris, who admits that, although he is delighted with the current US interest in electronic music, he has a bit of trouble understanding what all the fuss is about.

"It's certainly nothing new, but I suppose like life, music tends to go in circles and things come back into fashion."

Harris' musical career is also undergoing a turn of the wheel. He's working on various film and video game soundtracks (see the 'Game On' box), and has a new recording project, Maven, which in many ways picks up where Nitzer Ebb left off. It's a more organic hybrid of synths and guitars (provided by John Napier of LA industrial/dance band Ethyl Meatplow), but this time with Harris on vocals.

"There's still a very strong electronic edge to it, but I'm also trying to interweave live played elements with the electronics. I'm not so much into just having a studio band these days, so this is definitely going to have a strong live element, with a full band and a full performance. I really believe that the more you can have that's live, the more true the experience is. There are a few obvious similarities to Nitzer Ebb, simply because I was a central part of that band and I gave it everything I had, but the Maven material is a different side of my vocal style than anyone's ever heard."

With nearly an album's worth of songs in demo form and currently two very interested labels, Harris is hoping to start recording in Los Angeles before the summer's out. And it's likely that Flood will be at the helm — the highly unconventional, not to say enigmatic producer, who was responsible for all but the first of the Nitzer Ebb albums.

"We're both really busy so there's always a chance that that might not happen, but he digs what I'm doing and I dig what he does," says Harris of their potential collaboration.

Pumpkin Eater

The Smashing Pumpkins (with Billy Corgan, left) and their new album, Adore.In the meantime, both Harris and Flood have both been working with Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan — himself a Nitzer Ebb fan and a fellow believer in breaking down the barriers between musical genres. When Harris and Corgan bumped into each other at a party just before Christmas, they got talking about a possible collaboration.

"Billy was trying to do something different, to take the Pumpkins in a different direction," recalls Harris. "Towards the end of the last record (the Grammy award‑winning Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness) he was delving into technology and getting into the synth world and he was saying he wanted someone with a little more experience to come in and just see what their take would be on what he was doing. So he offered me a couple of tracks which I went away and reinterpreted for him from a very synthetic standpoint. I took them back to him and he really liked what done."

Consequently, Harris was drafted in towards the end of the sessions for the Smashing Pumpkins' new album Adore, was provided with his own studio space at Hollywood's Sunset Sound and given the task of adding a new electronic edge to the Pumpkins' sound.

"Everything was backed up in Pro Tools so they'd burn me a CD of Sound Designer files of whichever tracks I wanted from the multitrack — normally I'd just have vocals, bass and drums — and Billy would just say 'Go for it, whatever springs into your mind, just do'. So using Logic Audio to sequence, I was basically bedding my stuff underneath and around what was already there. As I finished each song, I'd record the analogue sequences as one long track, burn those down on a CD and give them back to Billy."

For his sound arsenal, Harris relied almost entirely on modular synthesizers: his trusty old Roland System 100M and an Oberheim Xpander, along with a modern Doepfer A100 and the recently‑launched Clavia Nord Modular.

"Much as I like working with old modular synths, you can pretty much only do one sound at a time. You have to record that sound immediately and do a patch sheet. It's a very old‑fashioned and time‑consuming process. Things like the Nord Modular make it a little more feasible to do it with a deadline".

Vintage + Digital

The only purely digital instrument Harris has in his setup is a Kurzweil K2000, which he uses primarily for its sampling and DSP capabilities.

"With the Kurzweil, you can take virtually any sound, bend and distort it and do whatever you want, until it's no longer recognisable. It was a good system — vintage analogue synths on the front end and then quite sophisticated digital editing and digital processing on the Kurzweil on the other. It provided a lot of possibilities for manipulation."

Harris worked on just over half the songs on Adore, subtly reinterpreting certain areas and adding some drum programming in places, but never to the extent of detracting from the Pumpkins' alternative rock style. Nevertheless, anyone familiar with Nitzer Ebb will certainly notice Harris' influence, particularly on the album's first single 'Ava Adore' with its solid synthetic pulse. Presumably Billy Corgan was happy with the results?

"He pretty much liked everything I did and he seemed very happy most of the time," says Harris. "But there were so many slave reels for each of these songs, so many guitar and drum parts, it was inevitable that the mix process was going to involve a lot of weeding through the things. We both knew that, great as some of the ideas were, they might not make it into the final mix just because there were so many other good parts vying for position. Some of the songs are very acoustic and stripped back, and didn't really warrant my input at all."

During the recording sessions, this combination of quite heavily electronic and almost entirely acoustic songs seemed a little bit at odds for one album's worth of material, but, as Harris explains, with Corgan at the production helm and Harris' old associate Flood coming in at the mixing stage it worked out very smoothly.

"It's quite a testament to the mix job that nothing really jumps out at you as being super‑different, which was some of the craft of Billy and Flood getting together for the mixes. You're aware of there being a different approach, but no one thing or the other is highlighted. It's very much a subtle integration all round, and it's really forged its own sound, it's not like 'Here we go, this is electronica!'"

Something Old, Something New (Part I) — Bon's giant Roland 100M modular system shares studio space with the all‑new Clavia Nord Modular, a laptop PC, and a top‑flight Power Mac running Digidesign Pro Tools.

Smashing Boundaries

But as a genre, electronica is already beginning to spill out of any strict definitions. While alternative rock bands like the Smashing Pumpkins welcome synths back into their fold, former techno acts are bringing in real instruments to enhance their live performance. And at the same time solo artist/producers are realising their own rock‑pop‑electronica fusions. This middle ground is essentially what Harris and McCarthy were investigating back in the last few years of Nitzer Ebb, and it's an area Harris still sees as having great potential.

"So many artists have suddenly decided they're going to 'go electronic'. But it's not really an integration, it's them singing over the top of an electronic track. That's one of the reasons why the new Pumpkins thing is so good, because it's not like that. Similarly, it's what I'm working on with my own project, although I'm coming at it from the electronic angle, and trying to build upon those foundations."

Something Old, Something New (Part II) — on top, the Doepfer A100 modular system, fully analogue throughout, while underneath lurks the entirely digital Pro Tools I/O hardware and Alesis ADAT.

On The Ebb?

So does all this mean that Nitzer Ebb is no more? Harris: "We haven't disbanded as such, but it's highly inconceivable that anything will happen for a very long time."

Nevertheless, the recent reawakening of interest in '80s synth pop has led to a number of newer electronic acts expressing interest in reinterpreting some of the early Nitzer Ebb material. There's apparently a 'best of' remix compilation in the pipeline (once a legal dispute involving their first two albums and their US and UK record labels is settled). Meanwhile, acts such as Kraftwerk and Gary Numan, both currently on major venue tours of the US, are reaping the rewards of having been there at the outset.

Something Old, Something New (Part III) — A well‑worn Korg MS10 sits atop a Sony DAT and Bon's highly prized Kurzweil K2000R, as well as an Oberheim Expander and Roland S50 dating from Bon's days with Nitzer Ebb.

"I think it's great that someone like Gary Numan can still be around and doing his thing. He does have certain enduring qualities, and he's still good at what he does," says Harris. "There are lots of great bands and lots of great sounds around at the moment, especially in the current electronic scene, but I don't see many of them really pushing the envelope of the genre anywhere. There are still not really any songs and relatively few personalities involved. I think Portishead are one of the few examples of a band with personality that uses electronics in an interesting way, and there's Tricky, who's awesome — but not much of the more straight up electronic stuff is actually forging its own sound."

While working at the forefront of a newly flourishing electronic scene has brought its share of new challenges and increased diversity, Bon Harris' musical philosophy remains unchanged.

"Even working in the commercial realm, as I have been lately, I still find myself incapable of doing something totally throwaway. It's got to be real, and there has to be an undeniable emotional presence in what's happening, otherwise it isn't music. All the music I listen to has that streak of sincerity and honesty in it. The moment that you don't feel like you mean it, stop!"