Surgeon
Breaking The Frame
Dynamic Tension
Its been ten years since we last saw a full length from electronic musics favourite brummie and to be honest it has been worth the wait. Anthony Child's eight track long player is a carefully crafted and personal affair opened by the ear piercing frequencies, gloomy bells and ice cold resonance of Dark Matter, this eases us into the rolling rhythm of Transparent Radiation, an industrious yet melodic affair seeing Perc style hits swagger above grizzly undertones. Remover Of Darkness' initial drum pattern zips and zaps around a mish mash of keys which eventually take a back seat to some phase anomalies first made famous by Steve Reich's 1965 It's Gonna Rain.
Power Of Doubt will no doubt be a dancefloor favourite amidst the clubs thanks to some Scuba-esque percussion and a therapeutically soothing tom, bass and kick combo audible at roughly one minute. A sort of ethereal foreverness is a constant theme throughout Breaking The Frame and comes in the form of unsettling chords, celestial pads and rayless ambience, used to perfect effect in the LP's show stealer Radiance, a track harbouring the power of a black hole that will pound any reveller, DJ or passer by into submission have they cross its path, time travelling techno, you've been warned.
Rapid oriental pluckings fall softly upon Presence's scuffled dub template whilst We Are Already Here drones and manipulates itself in a similar fashion to what can be heard on Anthony Child's largely overlooked Sleep Deprivation 3 on the Black Dogs Subject To Delays EP, released last year on Sheffield imprint Dust Science Recordings. Those Who Do Not will receive a warm welcome and sigh of relief from techno boffins after some good ol' fashioned four to the floor Surgeon functionalism, pure Berghain fodder given Chris Liebing at the controls.
Surgeon's Not-Two or outro to Breaking The Frame sees field recordings and possible Cagean ideals put to practice with what can only be imagined as a busy Akihabara arcade parlour full of young Japanese teens challenging each other to Dance Dance Revolution, only to then be overtaken once again by Surgeon's trademark ability to unsettle thanks to some foreboding synthesis which so frequents the album. Breaking The Frame is the second of seven LP's Surgeon has released on his own Dynamic Tension label and looks to be right on par with his best work to date.
