Surgeon - fabric 53

These days, in the insulated world of electronic music, the cyclical journey from obscurity to oversaturation to insignificance (and, of course, back again) often happens in the space of a year. It's all too easy to get numbed by minutae or otherwise lead astray away by the fickle whirlwind of hype. Rummaging through the 15 year discography of the unrelenting, steadfast techno legend Surgeon - and tracing the vast odyssey of his creative exploration - breeds a rare feeling of discovery. And genuine artistry. Surgeon (a.k.a. Anthony Child) stands tall as a true individual in the leagues of electronic music history, with seminal, landmark releases bounded only by raw passion and a transcendentally deep imagination.

"This is the music that I am enjoying and I feel it represents me. And on the other side, there were some newer or lesser known artists that I really wanted to represent. It's about making people aware of different genres, to show the likeness. It's taking T-Polar, Subeena, Ital Tek, Ancient Methods - and putting that next to Orphx, DJ Overdose and Russ Gabriel, and mixing them all up together. It's kind of strange looking at the tracklist, but for me it's very natural the way these things fit together. And really, to me, this is all techno." Surgeon

Flicking easily from the heavy, sheets of sound produced by his old school contemporaries, Surgeon fuses the old with the new on fabric 53, creating connections between the oppressing and the minimal that have never been as simply decoded. Honing in on the idea that a lot of 'modern' bass music harks back to rave and constantly re-feeds on its memory for inspiration, ("just this idea of the breakbeat, the broken beat; it's got some echoes of rave, there are some elements of that somewhere in it"), he includes music from a veritable liege of young producers. Instra:mental's rolling 'Forbidden' is used early on and adds the kind of quickened bass texture that has been carefully incubated over their workings as they slow down from 175bpm drum & bass and Starkey's 'Spacecraft' is used brilliantly to juxtapose the rolling pressure of what comes before it, eliminating the 4x4 pulse and adding thicker, more leading bass tones.

TRACKLISTING:
01 Location recording from Kuramae Subway Station, Tokyo, Japan
02 Scuba - Glance [Hotflush]
03 Surgeon - Bad Hands (Drums Only) [Dynamic Tension]
04 Marco Bernardi - Giro (Exium Remix) [Dirty Planet]
05 Instra:mental - Forbidden [Apple Pips]
06 Forward Strategy Group - Applied Generics A [Forward Strategy Group]
07 Reeko - Agile Movement [Theory]
08 Surgeon - Bad Hands Part 2 (Drums Only) [Dynamic Tension]
09 Robert Hood - Superman [M-Plant]
10 Planetary Assault Systems - X Speaks To X (Al Tourettes & Appleblim Remix) [Ostgut Ton]
11 Ritzi Lee - Black Star Ritual (Ben Sims Remix) [Underground Liberation]
12 T-Polar - Crab People [Digital Distortions]
13 Ital Tek - Spectrum Falls [Atom River]
14 Surgeon - Klonk Part 1 (Drums Only) [Dynamic Tension]
15 Subeena - Picture [Opit]
16 Fran Hartnett - It Was Written In Vapour [unreleased]
17 Mark Broom & James Ruskin - Hostage [Blueprint]
18 Stephen Brown - Stress Free [Music Man]
19 Ancient Methods - AM04B1 [Ancient Methods]
20 Surgeon - Compliance Momentum [Dynamic Tension]
21 Greena - Tenzado [Apple Pips]
22 Starkey - Spacecraft [Planet Mu]
23 Starkey feat. Anneka - Stars (Slugabed Did A Remix) [Planet Mu]
24 Cari Lekebusch - Spindizzy (Luke Slater's L.B. Dub Corp Remix) [Mote-Evolver]
25 Surgeon - The Crawling Frog Is Torn and Smiles [Dynamic Tension]
26 Orphx - Threshold (Substance Remix) [Sonic Groove]
27 Gatekeeper - Blip [If Symptoms Persist]
28 Mark Broom & James Ruskin - No Time Soon [Blueprint]
29 Russ Gabriel - El Juan [We Play House]
30 DJ Overdose - What [Lunar Disko Records]