9. SurgeonThis Is For You Shits
This CD was 100 per cent my gateway into techno. I bought it when it came out, so late 2007 or early 2008. It came out about a year after I’d first properly got into dance music, but at that point, I was mainly listening to blog house, so Ed Banger, Erol Alkan and the electro of that era. I considered putting something from that era in this too, but a lot of it isn’t retrospectively very good. A lot of the techno I think I’d heard up until that point was quite minimal-adjacent because I was a fabricfirst member at that point. Being in Oxford for university, it was only a one-hour bus down to London so I’d go there maybe once a month and I got the mix CDs in the post every month. Around that time, there were mixes by Ewan Pearson and M.A.N.D.Y., so that was the techno I knew and it wasn’t really speaking to me then.
This Surgeon mix, though, channeled an energy that felt more incisive and crucially joined the dots between techno and the Warp stuff that I’d been listening to from a few years before. It’s mixed in a really exciting, upfront and dynamic way too. I flicked back through it the other day and the vibe of the mix felt quite different to how I remembered it. It felt even more wild and raw, rough and ready, than I remembered it being. There is a lot of pitching tracks way higher or lower than their original tempo. There is a lot of light and shade to it that I wasn’t getting from the techno and minimal that I had encountered up to the point before I came across it.
