Surgeon's DJ mix for Fabric was one of last year's finest, in part because it was so furiously banging, and in part because it captured so elegantly the current zeitgeist for the post-Jeff Mills school of hard-edged minimal techno. Scowling ferociously in the corner, techno seems blessed by its own misanthropy: Never the crossover dance music of choice, it's accorded a certain fearful level of respect and admiration regardless of what might be today's story and (inevitably) yesterday's news. (It's the perennial "real shit" for the cognoscenti with a more discerning understanding of the infinite shades of variety afforded by a stoically pummelling kick drum.)
Techno seems to be "back" at the moment, largely due the partial absorption of dubstep influences into its high-pressure bloodstream, its lacerating percussive attack tending more toward syncopation and snare-heavy swing than in the bad old days of stentorian four-by-four pound. The shift is less one of wholesale transformation than a kind of magnetic realignment, dubstep's clattering and clanking syncopation inspiring a reemphasis of those same qualities always already lurking in techno proper.
Breaking the Frame, the first new album from the British producer (real name Anthony Child) in a decade, isn't nearly so gregarious: Surgeon's return to the artist full-length foregrounds the chilly austerity associated with the veteran producer's name throughout the late 1990s. Think of it as the Arctic cousin to the more passionate explosions of Surgeon's DJ mixes, a series of twisted rock formations left behind by the frozen lava of a sweaty night out on the town. But for all that, the album remains bang up to date, with nearly every groove structured around the absent centre of a 4/4 kick drum, that punishing pulsation eschewed in favour of either a halfstep lurch ("Transparent Radiation", "Remover of Darkness") or hectic breakbeat assault ("The Power of Doubt", "Radiance"). Only on "Those Who Do Not"-- by some distance the least memorable moment here-- does Surgeon succumb to the kick-drum's wearied trudge.
Almost entirely devoid of anything you might call a tune, Surgeon's productions nonetheless place a high premium on narrative development, plunging from the surface of rigorous acid chugs to clattering rhythmic undercarriages to the rising panic of synthesiser chords so gracefully and organically that the effect is like a microscope training its gaze from the impenetrable solidity of skin to the frenetic molecular activity that secretly comprises it. One can describe these qualities endlessly and barely come closer to pinpointing what it is that makes Breaking the Frame so unexpectedly listenable for the uninitiated: For all that a tune like "Radiance" may sound like two continental shelfs grinding past one another, for instance, its forbidding assault is executed with a compositional neatness, clarity, and vibrance that seems to leap out of the speakers.
Even more so, the iridescent hum of "Presence" glowers and shudders with the compressed heat and intensity of an angry star in the moments before it collapses into a black hole. It's typical on an album whose structures throw shadows of bleak, inhuman grandeur: Enormity, rather than velocity, defines the best work on Breaking the Frame, and there's a masochistic pleasure in being made to feel very small as you lose yourself on the dancefloor.
