“What is techno to you?”
This is a question frequently asked of Midlands-born techno producer Anthony Child. One that, by his own admission, he frequently fails to answer with words. Like any genre, techno is many things to many people: a soundtrack to hedonistic good times, a boundary-pushing platform for modernist experimentation, a lifelong obsession. On this, his latest Surgeon album for the celebrated, Berlin-based Tresor label, Child presents the listener with a definitive sonic response. It’s one that may feel familiar to fans of his hard, unfussy, crisp-but-rugged production style but this vision of techno is deceptively idiosyncratic and contains within it a number of important clues to uncovering Child’s true relationship to the music that’s been his bread and butter for the last three decades.
The album opens with ‘Serpent Void’, deftly building tension with cavernous bass rumbles and slowly undulating double-helix rhythms. Early on we’re introduced to a dominant feature of the record: delay. Across the album’s nine tracks the listener is immersed in layers upon layers of slowly fading delays, branching out and drifting away from looping rhythmic centres like tracers. Through this process, the lockstep pulse of the drums is captured as echo and carefully worked into an impressionistic and mysterious soundscape. In this way, Shell~Wave sets out to explore the strange intersection between subjective human experience and the indifferent mechanical drive of programmed machines. ‘Soul Fire’ inhabits the same territory but pushes us further towards an all-out rhythmic assault. Straight 4/4 kicks keep us grounded while a pleasingly distorted synth loop stabs and squawks. The album’s sonic watermark is ever-present, a wash of echoes colouring the space and spiralling out from the grid like fractals.
There’s a temptation to describe Shell~Wave as a psychedelic record and certainly the bold foregrounding of time-warping effects lends itself to this analysis: it’s undoubtedly a trip. The use of heavy delay and reverb has been stylistically associated with psychedelic music since its pop culture inception and it’s fair to argue that there is something inherently mind-altering about such sounds. Delay in particular, with its ability to catch a single moment in time and carry it forward, echoing unnaturally into the future is undeniably disorientating. On Shell~Wave, Surgeon uses this trick of temporal dislocation to great effect. However, we get the impression that while these effects are an important part of the picture, they are not the primary goal. At its core this is dance music and in this sense its relationship to psychedelia is more akin to that of the pioneering sonic manipulators of the 1970s dub scene. It’s spacy music, yes, but at its heart, functional: designed to move bodies and destroy soundsystems.
There are echoes here not only of dub but also of the more brooding offerings of the 2000s dubstep scene. The dank, paranoid swagger of ‘Divine Shadow’ recalls the moody subterranean atmosphere of Scuba’s Triangulation or the cold metallic bite of Distance’s ‘My Demons’. You could even draw comparisons with the more club-friendly moments in Shackleton’s trance-inducing oeuvre. Surgeon and Shackleton do seem to share a preoccupation with certain spiritual ideas. The track titles on Shell~Wave indicate an interest in ancient beliefs, the cyclical nature of time and the presence of divinity within the natural world. There’s a sinister edge here though. The pummeling kicks and dread-inducing synths of ‘Forgotten Gods’ could easily soundtrack a descent into the crawling chaos of a Lovecraftian abyss.
Child has spoken of his belief that the music he makes as one half of British Murder Boys sits within the England’s Hidden Reverse continuum, a lineage that began with industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, then filtered down to the club scene via occult experimenters Coil. Placed in this context, his music as Surgeon takes on stranger and perhaps deeper qualities. Shell~Wave’s midway mark, ‘Dying’, shares at least a few strands of DNA with Coil’s cover of ‘Going Up’, the theme tune from Are You Being Served?. On their version, Coil poignantly adapt the camp piece of light-entertainment froth, elevating it to celestial heights, guiding the listener on a journey to the afterlife. ‘Dying’, an ethereal, beatless piece consisting only of a disembodied, effects-laden voice repeating the track’s title for three minutes, similarly imagines the awe and wonder possibly experienced at the moment of death. The effect here is blissful. For Surgeon, it seems, there is relief in corporeal dissolution.
On Shell~Wave, however, time moves in circles and ‘Infinite Eye’ plunges us straight back into the club with a punchy, mechanical stomp and insectoid, cicada-like hi-hats. Perhaps we’ve looped back to where we began. Perhaps we’re somewhere else entirely. It’s irrelevant. The dark, hypnotic pull of its squirming synth sequence and the spectral murmurings that haunt the mix successfully obliterate our recollection of a world beyond the dancefloor. ‘Triple Threat’ continues in an equally engulfing vein, a hint of mania creeping into its blaring two-note melody. However, a subtle tone shift occurs on the album’s final two tracks. ‘Empty Cloud’ and ‘Fall’ are still highly-functional dance tunes but a gentle touch of melancholy stirs within them. In particular, the murky pads that enter in the latter half of ‘Fall’ induce a bittersweet twinge of yearning. Once again we’re transported to the mid-2000s with a moment of Burial-esque introspection. The post-rave nostalgia for last night’s fading euphoria already lurking in the shadows.
The last twelve months or so have seen chatter in dance music circles about the possibility of a dub-techno revival and it’s totally plausible that the ever-shifting trend machine of club culture will deign to give the sound a more thorough airing in coming months. Listening to Shell~Wave, such matters could not feel less important. Firstly, it’s not a dub-techno album in the codified sense. It’s a techno record enhanced and enchanted by a dub-informed sensibility. Crucially, however, Shell~Wave stands proudly outside of such discourse. It’s an elemental statement on Anthony Child’s personal relationship to a genre he’s lived and loved for over thirty years. Bewitching, mysterious and emotive, the album speaks of an experience of techno as a strange vessel for supreme transcendence. An ultimately human experience rooted firmly in the liberating power of the dancefloor.
