The UK producer Anthony Child, better known as Surgeon, traffics in toughness. He's long represented one of the most forbidding corners of the techno scene; just consider the name of his turbulent duo with Regis, British Murder Boys. But even at its most bruising, his music is marked by its formal inventiveness and formidable intelligence. The beats on his late-'90s Tresor trilogy—Basictonalvocabulary, Balance, and Force + Form—seem unusually alive, like the shuddering birth pangs of AI; when people talk about electronic music having "organic" properties, this is what they mean.
While he once titled a mix CD This Is for You Shits, Child has been dialing down the screwface lately. Recent years have found him trading dungeon pummel for beatless soundscapes: His ambient sets at the Freerotation festival have become legendary for their lysergic drift, and on albums like 2013's The Space Between People and Things and last year's Electronic Recordings from Maui Jungle Vol. 1, both released under his own name, he has turned his hand to experimental electronics—cerebral, austere, and unconnected to anything as carnal or compromised as a dancefloor.
With his new album, From Farthest Known Objects, he wades back into techno's roiled waters. All eight tracks employ four-to-the-floor rhythms, flickering triplets or 16th-note syncopations, and studiously greyscale atmospheres. There are no melodies, just gnarled one- and two-bar loops that wend their way across the tracks' blasted expanse like inchworms through radioactive ash. "z8_GND_5296" swings like Kompakt's slinky "Schaffel" releases; "GN-108036" barrels forward as inexorably as Jeff Mills' most single-minded rollers. (The track titles all reference distant galaxies at the dawn of time; Child imagines the tracks themselves as waveform transmissions from these faraway star clusters, which is itself an idea that goes straight to techno's roots.)
On closer inspection, though, nothing here resembles conventional techno: for one thing, save for the anchoring kicks, where are the drums? This is not your usual percussive array: There are no snares, no hi-hats, no claps, no toms—just knots of metallic whine and white noise. The low tones grumble like weary old men; the high ones scatter like drops of water in an oiled pan. Even the kick drums barely register as such; on the opening "EGS-zs8-1" they crumple like paper bags, and on "BDF-3299" they might be gargantuan oil drums struck by a felt-tipped mallet.
The more time you spend with the album, the more it begins to feel like a universe of pure texture. But to say that there are no drums is also to acknowledge that there are no "notes," either: Put another way, it's all drums, just not the usual sound sets we've become accustomed to. Despite the softness of their attacks, every element here is essentially percussive in nature, which imbues the music with an unusually primal sensibility: The gnarled "A1703 zD6," with its wooden clunk and spongy texture, suggests early humans thwacking gourds and logs, and it heaves like a rotten tree trunk spitting termites.
One of the things that distinguished Maui Jungle was its sense of discipline: Most of its tracks sounded like they had been made using just one machine or process, and From Farthest Known Objects is no different. Despite its greater density and complexity, it represents the same kind of rigor. I have no idea how Child made the music—he has said only that he explored "new production techniques using old and unlikely hardware"—but it doesn't sound like the output you'd get from a standard array of gear, with drums and bassline down below, and pads and leads on top. It sounds like one source being spun in nearly infinite ways, like a single electrical signal being channeled down a long, convoluted pipe and emerging like a live wire spitting sparks. It feels elemental, which is appropriate, given the subject matter—like a techno tribute to Carl Sagan's famous maxim: We are made of star stuff.
