Force + Form

Surgeon: Anthony Child (DJ).
At a point in time when techno had become a bit exhausted in terms of musical development, Anthony Childs, the British techno producer who calls himself Surgeon, managed to push the decade-old genre forward with his Force & Form album. It was at this point in the late '90s when techno songs had evolved into sincere tracks, short cycles of looped rhythms characterized by repetition and a lack of progression. Jeff Mills' Purpose Maker releases such as Kat Moda had perfected this practice of producing music with DJs in mind rather than the home listener. The reason Force & Form can be seen as such a breakthrough rests in its status as a record just as appealing to home listeners as DJs. Child accomplishes this challenging task quite brilliantly. There are four sides of vinyl on Force & Form, meaning that the four songs on the album each get an entire side to itself. Drop the needle at the outermost groove and the spinning record will emanate a ten-minute adventure into cycling tribal techno rhythms with heavy percussive bass. Unlike the Maurizio records, which also spin for epic lengths, the songs on Force & Form actually progress through actual movements, where rhythms change and new arrangements construct themselves as if two different techno records are being seamlessly mixed. Each of these four songs begin with several minutes of repetitive techno rhythms similar to the sort of tracks Child recorded for his Basictonalvocabulary album. After a few minutes of locked groove-type sounds, the songs then shift with the low-frequency bass rumbles being eclipsed by tranquil atmospheric tones. Soon the serene subtly of these high-frequencies gets shattered by the slowly growing construction of the next monolithic percussive hailstorm that will carry listeners through the final few minutes of the song. As if the rhythms weren't marvelous enough -- challenging even Mills himself as the latest contender for king of techno dancefloors -- Child's ability to craft brave multi-sectioned epics makes this an even more incredible album than anything he had accomplished up until this point. His debut Tresor album from two years earlier, Basictonalvocabulary, only hinted at his potential to become one of the genre's most important producers. ~ Jason Birchmeier