- The UK techno juggernaut taps into the power of live improvisation for one of his best albums ever.
- Over the past five years, Anthony Child struggled to find inspiration for his solo techno project, Surgeon. This might seem odd for an artist of legendary mettle, who, after moving to Birmingham and adopting his Surgeon alias in the early '90s, infiltrated the techno world with a caustic style of hardware techno that borrowed from the sepulchral grit of Coil and Faust as much as the driving energy of classic Detroit techno. His uncertainty might have been the byproduct of a shift in focus, as he spent years fine-tuning his approach to live performance. It was on stage, his second home, where Child would plant the seeds for his first album in five years, Crash Recoil. The record is a composite of all his usual influences, and more, extracting from King Tubby, The Cure and three decades of DJing experience.
Child usually views his studio work and live performances as two distinctive, unrelated practices. His live sets, which he prepares for specific environments, rarely make it back to the studio. Part of what makes Crash Recoil special is how these two worlds collide "in the same way that bands tour songs before going into the studio to record an album," he explained.
It feels like in the years since his 2018 album, Luminosity Device, Child has been looking for ways to sand down the residual abrasiveness from the time he spent working under his pioneering Birmingham techno project with Regis, British Murder Boys. That last album, complex and smeared in atmospheric pads, did away with the dungeon-like minimalism of the former duo. Recent Surgeon EPs like The Golden Sea, Europa Code and Raw Trax 2, meanwhile, basked in the generous swing of Detroit techno.
For some producers, what comes up must come down. But on Crash Recoil, Child is more invested in matching splotches of darkness with astonishing beams of light. When Child attributes part of Crash Recoil's sound to the work of the dub great King Tubby, it's likely he's admiring the melancholic spaciousness that summons visions of the tracks being jettisoned from a powerful sound system onto the walls of a cavernous warehouse.
The record has a sci-fi drama to it, which Child previously perfected with recent ambient and drone work via his Transcendence Orchestra alias. The sweeping pads, slithering pitch modulation and delayed percussion on opener "Oak Bank" makes the track sound like it's traveling far past speakers and into zero-gravity. In the last two minutes of the track, a revelation occurs: seesawing pads lacquer a Eurodance-esque bassline and walloping kick. "We laugh and clap at the circus" contains a similar closing cool-down—oppressive blasts of a squelchy bassline dissipate into luminous vapor. On "Subcultures," energy flows in the opposite direction, starting slowly with an ominous mist that darkens percolating synths, before being plunged into a knotty wormhole of hypnotic techno.
When fans crowd dance floors to see the long-standing techno musician perform, half the excitement might be watching Surgeon rapidly twiddling the knobs of his famous and ever-changing modular setup. In a 2021 interview with Torso Electronics, he explained that these days he prefers to keep that setup as simple as possible. Forget Eurorack maximalism—his live gear now more or less consists of a Pulsar-23 drum machine, Torso T-1 sequencer, Blackbox and Lemondrop samplers as well as a Soma Lyra-8.
Crash Recoil relishes in the same spontaneity offered by Child's live performances, composed of songs that feel more structured like cinematic scenes than traditional techno tracks. On closer "Hope Not Hate," undulating layers of synths are cross-hatched with knocking percussion that sound stripped right out of an industrial warehouse. A later section adds in strings that could be entombed in rusted metal, and then, farther in the cut, the album's final statement sprinkles the track's doom with a muted melody dusted with optimism. It's a gorgeous track that would probably prove challenging to DJ sans cue points. "Masks & Archetypes" oscillates swiftly and unexpectedly between Coil-reminiscent grating synths and bleak psychedelia, and less threatening—albeit just as eerie—pad-swaddled techno. On "Leadership Contest," tunnels of percussion suddenly kick into overdrive more than halfway through.
Studio projects may go through umpteen versions before they finally hit the mastering stage, which means live performance might be the closest we, as listeners, get to understanding a musician's inner psyche. In a 2019 interview with RA, Child revealed the process behind his live sets: "I'm concentrating on really feeling the music, allowing it to flow through me. I'm a conduit," he said. "In the ideal state, I feel like a pipe that the music is flowing through." In his first studio album directly influenced by live performance, this flow state couldn't be more evident, as caverns of roiling techno and shadowy ambiance embody the spiritual urgency of improvisation.
Tracklist01. Oak Bank
02. Second Magnitude Stars
03. Metal Pig
04. We laugh and clap at the circus
05. Leadership Contest
06. Masks & Archetypes
07. Subcultures
08. Hope Not Hate