From Kent Williams Sent Thu, Jul 16th 1998, 18:58
From Kent Williams Sent Thu, Jul 16th 1998, 18:58
Surgeon * Balance Tresor 96 To some, Surgeon's tracks would be the antithesis of IDM. 4 on the floor kick, 2-beat loops -- pure DJ tools, right? Guess again. This disc is where Anthony Child comes out from under the shadow of Jeff Mills. When he's banging out a track, he may remind you of Mills, but where a Mills track seems about 1/2 total dancefloor calculation, and 1/2 isolationist soul, Surgeon is all about a kind of rigorous execution of sound experiments. Hence the moniker I suppose, but where Mills seems to be exploring the subatomic structure of dance and soul, Child is constructing machinery, both simple in the large, and complex in the small. To dismiss his stuff as 'tracky' or 'loopy' is to miss the point. Of course it is. But beyond the simple repetition there exists a whole world of subtle shadings that fade in and out. And while the first CD "Basic Tonal Vocabulary" is pretty much all tracks from his dance 12", "Balance" actually changes gears on some tracks, and explores its theories without the invariant beat. The first two tracks sound like nothing else he's done -- 'Preview' is an interesting bit of ambient dub, with plenty of basic channel teutonic hiss. The second, "Golden" wouldn't be out of place on Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works II, even as some swinging 909 sneaks in. 'Circles' is recognizable as a classic Surgeon cut, from the slamming kick and clattering analogue percussion. But over this bed he works a marimba-like loop on one note, playing two copies off each other a la Steve Reich. And while you think the clattering rim shots are repeating exactly at first, they seem to be loops of some odd length that takes the whole track to repeat. 'The Heath' plays with looping a 3 beat pattern against 4, which takes 3 bars to complete. Beyond that, it's all hectic, morphing 909 patterns. Down to the 40 second fade out, this track never lets up. "Pnuma" electro beats are cushioned with hissing and squeaking noises that occupy a weird reverb-space that seems to surround your head if you listen in headphones. Through it all a random DX-7 vibraphone line burbles along, seemingly at random. "Set One" sets a sped up samba loop against an analogue dischord, which fades out into a printing-press style filtered percussion loop. "Set two" heads back for the dance floor, with an assortment of hectic percusion loops that drift from sync to counterpoint. "Box" heads back for the dance floor, working a 2 beat loop through a series of subtle morphs. "Dialogue" is an assemblage of muffled ring modulated noises and random tones that bounce around. Beatless, and again he works with reverb and panning to construct strange space for all the sounds to exist in. 4 minutes of twisted noise sculpture. "Dinah's dream" again sounds like Aphex Twin, with an oddly touching loop that gets under your skin. A soft, rhythmic chant begins as layers of reverbed synths build up. Absolutely lovely.