Michael John Harris (born 4 October 1967) is an English musician from Birmingham. He was the drummer for Napalm Death between 1985 and 1991, and is credited for coining the term "grindcore". After Napalm Death, Harris joined Painkiller with John Zorn and Bill Laswell. Since the mid-1990s, Harris has worked primarily in electronic and ambient music, his main projects being Scorn and Lull. He has also collaborated with musicians including James Plotkin and Extreme Noise Terror. According to AllMusic, Harris's "genre-spanning activities have done much to jar the minds, expectations, and record collections of audiences previously kept aggressively opposed." Early life Michael John Harris was born in Birmingham, England. He grew up listening to the radio shows of John Peel and would later record Peel Sessions with both Napalm Death and Scorn. Harris was influenced by listening to bands such as Coil and Skinny Puppy. He started playing drums in 1984 at the age of 16, after a friend in a psychobilly band called Martian Brain Squeeze asked him to play. Harris then joined a punk band called Anorexia with Dave Cochrane. After applying unsuccessfully to join Napalm Death as a vocalist he later joined as drummer. Napalm Death Harris replaced Napalm Death's founding member Miles "The Rat" Ratledge as drummer in 1985. He was the driving force behind Scum and From Enslavement to Obliteration, being the only band member to play on both side A and side B of Scum. A subsequent review of From Enslavement to Obliteration in the punk/indie fanzine Flipside went as follows: "This sounds like someone is literally firing a fully automatic rifle while a bassist and guitarist try to keep up." After the release of the EP Mentally Murdered, Napalm Death became more interested in the death metal scene and their sound started to move away from the British grindcore sound. At this point Bill Steer and Lee Dorrian departed the band due to creative differences. Harris left the band in 1991. While in Napalm Death, Harris also played drums for Doom and Extreme Noise Terror, and participated in a side project with Mitch Harris called Defecation, which produced two records, Purity Dilution and Intention Surpassed, through Nuclear Blast. Harris contributed only to Purity Dilution. As a drummer he is generally credited with popularising the blast beat, which has since become a key component of much of extreme metal and grindcore. Harris coined the