Thor Harris has never been one to shy away from the darkness.
In 2009, Harris shared his struggle with depression in a book “An Ocean of Despair.” Harris wrote about a time in his life when he was so hopeless that he planned on committing suicide, that his brain had become “a burning cell from which I could see no escape.”


Later, Harris described this experience of depression in a segment on the Mental Health Channel: “It felt like there was something horrible going on inside my head, that if people looked at me, they could see, and it would be so hideous that it would just turn the world against me,” he said.
Similarly, as a percussionist, Harris has a shown a penchant for working with bands such as Swans and Shearwater, in which the music explores dark themes and pushes the boundaries of experimentation. Harris has been particularly influenced by minimalism – a form of music that emphasizes simple rhythms and patterns to produce a hypnotic and even cathartic effect.
Over time, Harris found that minimalist music was not only an enjoyable art form, but also something that, along with therapy and medication, helped him manage his depression. Not only did the various iterations of minimalist music give him hope that anything was possible in art and life, but also, the repetitive beats took him to a mindful, meditative place that helped him quiet his mind.
In his new instrumental album, “Thor and Friends” (with Peggy Ghorbani and Sarah Gauthier), Harris took a minimalist approach to create a soundtrack that he hopes people can play and experience the same feelings of hope and meditative relief that he has experienced with his favorite minimalist music.

And maybe other people can also make peace with their brains.

Harris’ depression started at an early age. “Looking back, I’ve had depression since I was really small, but I didn’t get diagnosed until I was 27,” he explained. “And the reason I got diagnosed was because I was planning on killing myself. I was living briefly in San Francisco and was planning on jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. I didn’t know what depression was. I just knew that I felt terrible.

“I was at war with a lot of my brain, and didn’t really know it.”

The “war” that Harris had with his brain centered predominantly on the severe negative thinking that he experienced while he was depressed. In addition to physical symptoms, such as low energy, poor sleep and agitation, people who are depressed often tend to engage in rumination — or repetitive negative thoughts about themselves and the world around them. The combination can result in a feeling of emotional agony.       

“It hurt. It wasn’t a physical hurt, but the pain was constant. My depression was characterized more by anxiety and insomnia and horrible perceptions of the world around me,” Harris explained. “When my brain is not working well, it is lying to me. The realization that I’ve come to time and time again is that my brain just becomes a really sick filter, where not much has changed in my life, but suddenly looking at the same life, I find it despicable and completely without purpose.
“But when my brain is pretty healthy, I find it’s just fine.”

More, Harris developed a sense of hopelessness that he would never be able to escape or recover from his depression. Hopelessness — or a belief that one will not have a good future — has been linked to increased risk for suicidal thoughts. For example, in a study of 207 patients hospitalized for suicidal ideation, over a 10-year follow-up period, hopelessness predicted eventual suicide.
“We all need things to look forward to. Depression completely robs you of that,” he said.

 “Life had gotten excruciatingly painful, and I didn’t think that therapy or pills were going to help me. I didn’t believe in anything helping me.

“And killing myself was going to be a mercy killing.”

Depression can often be chronic and carry a high risk for relapse after initial recovery. “Once I wasn’t suicidal, and I would feel a little bit better, it was almost like I was being stalked by a predator animal or something,” Harris explained. “Because I was constantly in fear that the pain would return and that I would have to resort to the Golden Gate Bridge to get the fuck out of there.”
Eventually, Harris turned to therapy and medication after reaching out to his sister for help. “I called my sister and said, ‘I’m going to kill myself. Do you have any ideas?’” Harris recalled. “And she said, ‘Yes, you are going to see my shrink. And you’re going to do what he tells you. And you’re going to try that for a while.’”

Research suggests that treatment combining both psychotherapy and medication may be more effective than either treatment alone. Harris found in particular that one of the most helpful aspects of therapy was being able to consider alternative perspectives to his negative thinking when he was ruminating. These alternative perspectives helped him feel less hopeless.
“When my therapist has really been a star to me, it’s often when I’ve got a blind spot from thinking the same thoughts over and over and over. She’s led me to a feeling or a thought or an opinion that I didn’t have access to — little gems that are floating around in my brain, but I didn’t realize it,” Harris explained. “Our inner dialogue is ‘I feel bad. It’s only going to get worse.’ Those silly little cheerful thoughts — depressed people don’t have those. So, if you throw one into the mix, it can do so much more good than one might think. It’s something a depressed person’s brain doesn’t think.
“You don’t think, ‘I’m going to get better.’”

However, Harris has found that medication and therapy are only part of the solution for him. He found that listening to and playing music was crucial for his ongoing management of depression. And Harris’ experience is consistent with research suggesting that listening to or playing music may be effective adjunctive therapy for treating depression.

For example, one study of 79 participants diagnosed with major depression found that patients who engaged in music therapy in addition to their regular treatment had lower levels of depression and anxiety and improved overall general functioning at a 3-month follow-up assessment.
Overall, Harris thinks that music allows him a range of emotional expression that he was not able to attain with words alone. “Words are kind of just crude tools to describe our feelings, which are immensely colorful and strange and abstract,” he explained. “Words about feelings are like a dance about architecture. They’re blunt tools at best.”

But there was something unique about minimalism that was particularly helpful for Harris in coping with depression. He thinks that there is something exciting and hopeful about the way minimalist musicians break the rules of what classical music was “supposed” to be.

“Minimalism — when you mention that music in front of a bunch of music geeks, it’s like you brought a puppy out. People love that music. Like if you mention Moon Dog, or Steve Reich or Terry Reilly, Phillip Glass — those guys might as well be saints,” Harris explained. “Classical music had been so uptight and been so about virtuoso … and then these 20th-century dudes came along.
“And for what they did for classical music, that was more punk rock than punk rock.”
In particular, it was the minimalism of Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians,” which felt life-altering to Harris — more hopeful.


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“When I was a little kid and had depression, what music did for me a lot of the time was show me a piece of the world that I didn’t even know existed. And to know that it existed changed my worldview to be a lot more hopeful,” Harris explained.

 “When I heard …  “Music for 18 Musicians,” I thought, ‘Wow, that’s possible? This isn’t such a bad place to be after all.’ That record came from the same place that the blues comes from, a place of beauty and sadness. It becomes a part of the world, and the world seems a little more bearable.”

In addition to the music helping Harris to feel hopeful, the repetitive beats in minimalism felt meditative and mindful to him as well. Research has found that mindfulness can be an effective treatment approach to managing issues such as anxiety and depression. The reason is that, in theory, mindfulness allows an individual to slow down their thinking and thus disconnect from harmful, ruminative negative thinking.

“I heard that when a master musician picks up his or her instrument and starts playing it, the state they go into is very similar to the state that a Buddhist master goes into when he or she is meditating,” Harris explained. “Listening to really repetitive, slightly morphing over a long time music really seems to help my brain to stop … oddly enough, to help me not be so obsessive …

it seems to break the loops that my brain gets stuck in.”

And so when approaching the “Thor and Friends” album, Harris wanted to pay it forward with his own original take on minimalism. He wanted to provide people with an album that allowed them to be in a more mindful state that would soothe and calm them.

“Even if a musician doesn’t have a mental breakdown, I think musicians as they get older and older work less and less from a place of ego and more and more from a place of — like, a universal tool of good will toward our fellow humans,” he explained. “It’s intentionally aimless … . Each part is just another part, and they all fit together and make sort of a fabric that doesn’t go anywhere — because fabric doesn’t go anywhere. It just is.

“So I wanted to make a contribution to that music, however minuscule.”

And so far, Harris seems to have succeeded in making an original contribution. Stereogum describes his current work as distinct from his work with Swans as “eerie meditative passages … gentler and more solemn, yet intense.” New Noise Magazine raves,

 “You’ve probably never heard anything like this before, but will want to hear it again and again.”
And The Quietus calls the album “perfect in its imperfection.”

Harris realizes that helping others is no easy task. “I used to work at a suicide hotline for four years. And that was the hardest thing, if they said they had tried all these different meds, and nothing helped, and they were just in pain. That was the hardest one to argue with,” he recalled.

“Because you’d like to say, ‘Well, you didn’t always feel this way, and you won’t always feel this way.’ But sometimes, I would get someone on the line who actually did feel that way for 10 years or something.”

Harris hopes his life and music can serve as an example to people who struggle with depression and suicidality that there is hope.

“I’m this dude who’s still working creatively, and I toured the world, and I play music. And I still deal with this shit,” he said. “And so maybe that makes somebody else feel like,

 ‘Well, I’ll put off this suicide thing for another day, because this guy’s somehow making it work.’”