These days, in the insulated world of electronic music, the cyclical journey from obscurity to oversaturation to insignificance (and, of course, back again) often happens in the space of a year. It’s all too easy to get numbed by minutae or otherwise lead astray away by the fickle whirlwind of hype. Rummaging through the 15 year discography of the unrelenting, steadfast techno legend Surgeon – and tracing the vast odyssey of his creative exploration – breeds a rare feeling of discovery. And genuine artistry. Surgeon (a.k.a. Anthony Child) stands tall as a true individual in the leagues of electronic music history, with seminal, landmark releases bounded only by raw passion and a transcendentally deep imagination.

“For me personally, I don’t go for heavily publicising projects, I just let things take their natural course and treat things with the longer term in mind. Over the years that I’ve been DJing I’ve seen the popularity of techno rise and fall many, many times but this doesn’t panic or concern me, I do what I do and if it’s more or less popular then that’s just the way the universe operates. But fortunately I’m still able to survive through DJing, so as long as that’s the case then that’s okay. So many times for so many years I’ve noticed people say, ‘Well everything’s been done that you can possibly do with dance music.’ It reminds of something I heard about how in Victorian times they decided that all scientific discoveries had been discovered and that was all there was to learn; it was as if science was a shut book. It’s a bizarre thing to say, and it’s the same with music. If your motivation is down or your inspiration is down, then maybe it’s just the case that you’re not looking in the right place. There’s always something there to discover or to motivate you.” – Surgeon

Growing up in Kislingbury, a small village outside Northampton, Surgeon’s first forays into music began with lessons in classical instrumentation. But it was his tape deck experiments, from a very young age, that brought to light his producer mentality: bending sounds and re-shaping ideas whilst creating dense, immersive soundworlds.

“I got hold of one of the old quarter inch tape reel-to-reel decks and started doing razorblade editing and setting tape loops and things. That was influenced by what I’d read about the way that the Beatles recorded. That was a bit of an entrance in to some kind of avant-garde stuff. There were aspects in their music that fascinated me, the sound collage and manipulation. That really fascinated me, the collage aspect of sound much more than the melodic aspects, because when I was young I knew I was interested in music but I assumed that meant I had to play an instrument. So I tried piano, violin, guitar and all these things and I got on to an extent – but with the piano, for example, I’d open the top up and start banging the strings like, ‘Ah yeah, I like that a lot better. It’s so boring learning these scales.’ Different things suit different people.” – Surgeon

Becoming heavily influenced by a wide range of sounds and sonic textures – from those of experimental musicians Brian Eno and Isao Tomita to the impassioned and raw industrial flavours of Coil and Suicide, Surgeon relocated to Birmingham to persue an education in sound engineering. It was here that he started a club night, House of God, with a close knit circle of like minded friends in 1993; even now, 17 years later, it still runs strong.

After his first release, the now legendary ‘Surgeon EP,’ and his other work on Downwards (which somehow landed in the influential record crates of Dave Clarke and Jeff Mills – itself no mean feat considering this was pre-internet file sharing), his connection with fellow Downwards artist Regis (aka Karl O’Konnor) produced their vibrant, industrial-flavoured work as the British Murder Boys. “We really thought about every detail: about how it would look and sound, and the titles and the way it was presented, and the performance. So it was like playing at the image a lot more and very much influenced by Throbbing Gristle’s industrial records and the like.”

From his edgy, powerful albums which each spun techno in an entirely new direction (‘Basictonalvocabulary’ on Tresor in ’97 and ‘Balance’ on Tresor in ’98, ‘Force + Form’ on Tresor in ‘99); to his boundary-shattering mix CDs (‘Counterbalance Collection,’ ‘This Is For You Shits’); to releases on his own innovative labels Counterbalance and Dynamic Tension; to his Frequency 7 project with Ben Sims (“It’s like listening to our musical banter. Ben’s style of DJing is very precise structurally, we can fit it together very precisely and very quickly and it just builds this thing – we don’t know what it’s going to do and it just goes all over the place. It’s really fun and exciting for us.”); to the endless list of his EPs and remixes…Surgeon’s work always contains an uncompromising devotion to a resolute vision. Similarly, it’s within his deeply focused DJ sets that give his ideas a gifted freedom, with productions coming to life enriched with energy, subtlety, frequency and power. His sets are a winding, mind-bending, colliding sonic voyage, propelled by an intimate and intense back-and-forth connection between himself and the audience.

“I do change the way I’m playing at different places. It’s having an awareness of what people’s expectations are, and then stretching the boundaries of that, while trying to incorporate different styles into it. There have always been far more experimental and avant-garde electronic artists than anything that I do, but I like to work as a kind of breach between the fringes of the avant-garde and the experimental stuff – I try and bring an essence and a flavour of that in, but try to use techno as a carrier wave, or a as medium, to sort of transmit these more avant-garde elements in. I bring it in but make it more palatable and try to bring it to a wider audience. That’s my method and for me, it’s a more effective way of introducing these flavours and sounds. It’s like testing out boundaries and figuring out how far to go so you don’t completely lose people. A lot of the time in my sets, if I’m in a place that might be more difficult I’ll definitely follow up with something easier. It’s like giving a reward.”

Flicking easily from the heavy, sheets of sound produced by his old school contemporaries, Surgeon fuses the old with the new on fabric 53, creating connections between the oppressing and the minimal that have never been as simply decoded. Honing in on the idea that a lot of ‘modern’ bass music harks back to rave and constantly re-feeds on its memory for inspiration, (“just this idea of the breakbeat, the broken beat; it’s got some echoes of rave, there are some elements of that somewhere in it”), he includes music from a veritable liege of young producers. Instra:mental’s rolling ‘Forbidden’ is used early on and adds the kind of quickened bass texture that has been carefully incubated over their workings as they slow down from 175bpm drum & bass and Starkey’s ‘Spacecraft’ is used brilliantly to juxtapose the rolling pressure of what comes before it, eliminating the 4×4 pulse and adding thicker, more leading bass tones.

“It really is a current snapshot, it’s changed even now. When I did the mix, I opened my current set and deleted a few things and this is what I was left with. This is the music that I am enjoying and I feel it represents me; and on the other side, there were some newer or lesser known artists that I really wanted to represent. It’s about making people aware of different genres, to show the likeness. It’s taking T-Polar, Subeena, Ital Tek, Ancient Methods – and putting that next to Orphx, DJ Overdose and Russ Gabriel, and mixing them all up together. It’s kind of strange looking at the tracklist, but for me it’s very natural the way these things fit together. And really, to me, this is all techno. That’s the way I think of it; I don’t subdivide genres, the beats are just slightly different places in the bar. They all have different feels and textures, but I don’t differentiate, I just like all this music so I want to mix it together.

It’s another example of what I was saying about being caught up in the detail, and detail is important, of course, but you’ve got to be able to shift from this bigger picture down to detail and back up again and not just be caught up on one level of it.” – Surgeon

ARTIST: VARIOUS
LABEL: FABRIC RECORDS
UK/R.O.W. RELEASE: 12 JULY 2010
USA RELEASE: 24 AUGUST 2010