Construction and collaboration
Percussionist Thor Harris builds refuge in home and songs
AUSTIN — A cat from a household clowder jumps onto the ledge of a bay window to warm itself in the morning sun.
The window is new, the latest addition in a project by Thor Harris that has spanned nearly 20 years. The La Porte native bought the small box home in 1998 for $5,000 from a neighborhood association. Over the years, he has rebuilt and expanded what was a certain tear-down piece by piece, from connecting utilities to crafting a spiral wood staircase without the use of nails.
“It’s never done,” Harris says. “But it’s home.”
The house serves as a reflection of one of the most interesting musicians working in indie rock today.
Harris is a percussionist as well as a polymath. So the home is filled with books and musical instruments, many of them made by Harris. And outside the pieces of flotsam form a ragged mosaic of sorts — lots of found objects such as tiles and scraps of wood and metal — that support his belief that there is no such thing as garbage.
Jonathan Meiburg, of the popular indie-rock band Shearwater, speaks admiringly of Harris’ ability to harness “the restless energy that’s a gift and plague to those of us with ADHD-type brains.”
Meiburg recalls a break years ago during a recording session. “He took advantage of a few hours of downtime to carve sculptures into the dead trees behind the studio, amass a giant pile of firewood and reconfigure his drum set in a way I’d never seen before. He plays music like this, too — always looking for possibilities, options, collaborations.”
Harris has, to this point, largely dedicated his energies to making other musicians sound better. In addition to Shearwater, he’s been a crucial contributor to recordings by well-regarded indie acts including Amanda Palmer, Swans, Bill Callahan and Ben Frost.
But this month he releases “Thor & Friends,” an album born of possibilities, options and collaborations. With few expectations at the outset, Harris and some like-minded Austin-based players began playing little minimalist patterns on marimbas that, with some additional spare accents — violin, pedal steel guitar, different keyboards and various percussion instruments, evolved into meditative and beautiful pieces of music. The result will be showcased Wednesday evening at White Oak Music Hall.
Like Harris’ home, “Thor & Friends” is a peaceful refuge that resulted from years of work and study.
“They’re beautiful pieces of sonic architecture,” Palmer says. “I have a deep love for contemplative cellular music like that, stuff like Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Music that starts softly and builds slowly.”
The bands Harris plays with don’t typically work in a three- minute verse-chorus-verse format. Still, he wanted to work with an entirely different form.
“The idea was to do something where all the instrumental voices were equally important,” Harris says. “No solos, no verses, no choruses. It’s extremely democratic. Anybody can play the melody, just find the right key. It’s grown increasingly collaborative. Which I like.”
‘Anything is possible’
The two core members of Harris’ Friends — Peggy Ghorbani and Sarah “Goat” Gautier — emerge from separate rooms in his home, one heading to yoga, the other for a cup of coffee.
The comfort of the place exudes the feeling of a commune. But collaboration wasn’t always Harris’ mode of operation. At 51, his path to emotional anchor for other creative types has been a long, crooked one.
Harris documented in a graphic novel the worst of his depression, in which he spent an agoraphobic year without sleep and contemplating suicide. He credits medication, as well as his business, with keeping him in a better place.
He was just 10 when his father, a mechanical engineer and an artist, died of cancer, an event that proved pivotal in Harris’ life. He points out the workshop behind his house looks a lot like the one his dad worked at in La Porte.
“I was a lower-middleclass kid, so I always saw instruments I couldn’t afford, but because of my dad’s work, we were always playing with tools,” he says. “After he died, I threw myself into building things.”
At that point, he already studied piano and was playing drums, too.
He went to Stephen F. Austin State University but dropped out and moved to Austin in the mid-’80s. There Harris tuned his carpentry and plumbing skills during the day and played drums at night.
His music gained traction in the late ’90s in an unlikely way. Harris was a fan of Swans’ music, so he wrote a fan letter to Michael Gira, the band’s ringleader. It was part letter of admiration and also a statement of introduction. Should Gira need a percussionist, Harris offered his services. Harris wrote his way into Angels of Light, the band Gira put together after he broke up Swans and before he rebuilt the band.
The letter approach also landed Harris a job with Palmer, a very popular pop/ cabaret performer, and Callahan, a long-running indie-rock singer-songwriter.
Harris quickly became a grounding element in each band he joined. His depression kept him from excessive chemical intake common to touring musicians. He became an arbiter of calm amid rolling vessels of chaos.
“A million points of light spill like milk from the eternal mouth of Thor,” Gira writes with customary flair and fervor. “Capture this milk in your hands. Drink deeply because it is sweet and nourishing. With- out it, you are a universe devoid of stars.”
Meiberg puts it a little more subtly: “He’s not just a great artist in a bewildering number of disciplines,” he says. “When you’re around him, he generates a force field that makes you feel like anything is possible. Why not build your own house? Write your own songs? Think your own thoughts? Live your own life?”
Time for himself
Harris is long-armed, hairy man. In a sleeveless shirt, the hair spills out like water. He can go from 5 o’clock shadow to a bushy beard in a rush.
“I remember the day researchers revealed that most people have Neanderthal DNA in their genomes,” Meiberg says. “I drove right over to his house to tell him about it. ‘I
knew it!’ he said.” On this day, Harris is clean shaven and his hair is pulled into two braids. Though keeping busy has been better for his depression, Harris found Swans’ touring and recording cycles too taxing. He wanted to get back some of his own life.
He also wanted to be able to more regularly visit his mother, who now lives in Katy.
So after the release of Swans’ “The Glowing Man” this year, Harris got out and let the band tour without him. Living his own life moved to the fore.
Harris had been developing almost ambient marimba pieces inspired in part by his affinity for music by Steve Reich, beautiful patterns agitated by provocative lines of additional instrumentation.
“It was nice to get away from my first instrument,” he says. “Do something I’m less good at. And it’s such a pleasing instru- ment to listen to, even for a long period of time. These pieces started to emerge. There are song forms there, but they’re pretty loose.”
Gradually, the pieces grew fuller as others — “my army of classical weirdos,” Harris calls them — joined.
With Ghorbani and Gautier, Harris headed to Albuquerque to record at a studio run by A Hawk and a Hacksaw, a two-person band featuring accordionist Jeremy Barnes and violinist Heather Trost. Barnes and Trost both played on the record, as did John Dieterich of the experimental rock band Deerhoof, who co-produced the record.
Harris gets a little road maudlin thinking about Swans on tour without him.
“Every time I see something about those guys in some cool city, I feel bad not being with them,” he says.
But he clearly enjoys being around his home, his tools and his community.
“I think he’d tell you, creation of any kind is the most powerful weapon we have against the darkness,” Palmer says. “It doesn’t matter what you’re creating, whether it’s food or a child or a chair. It could be anything. Thor knows the value of creating something.”
His hands find little rest, whether he’s drumming or building an electric viola from a crepe myrtle. Or working on new compositions to play with his Friends.
He sits on a chair he crafted and looks out a window he hung in the house he built and says with unaware understatement, “I’d like to be prolific for a while.”