Surgeon
Fabric 53
Surgeon – Fabric 53 Mix
Fabric Records
Many people’s first introduction to the work of Tony Childs (aka Surgeon) was when Jeff Mills uses his music in his Live At The Liquid Room Mix CD. The way Surgeon’s “Move” fit so seamlessly into Mills’ hard techno style made people think that he was just another hard techno producer, but Childs has gone on to confound expectatation throughout his whole career, with forays into dark ambient music.
Surgeon has never been content to coast on reputation, and his DJ performances are nothing short of legendary. Since going digital, his Ableton LIve DJ sets have set the standard for the creative possibilities of digital DJing; you’ll never hear anyone make a crack about him “checking his e-mail” on stage. So a Fabric mix CD was inevitable, and welcome.
Working through 30 tracks in 72 minutes, Childs covers a lot of ground. While staying faithful mostly to the 4-to-the-floor techno kick, by layering several tracks he’s able to put his own imprint on other people’s track. Yet he avoids the tendency of some laptop DJs to break tracks down to context-less loops, and lets each new track breath and establish itself, however briefly. While incorporating some of the usual techno suspects into the mix (Robert Hood, Cari Lekenbusch, Mark Broom & James Ruskin) he leavens the relentless pounding with music from artists like Scuba, Starkey, Ital Tek, and Subeena, more closely associated with the UK Bass scene. He goes to them more for snatches of lush melody, not a tourist’s visit to the land of half-stepping.
Beyond Surgeon’s unerring instinct for sequencing and dance-floor dynamics, this mix sounds better than just about any I’ve heard recently. Part of this is just the veternan’s instinct for controlling the mix, but some of the stuff here sounds so nice I suspect Childs remastered some tracks for his own DJ sets. The only criticism I have of Fabric 53 is that it’s over too soon, and some tracks are in and out of the mix before I was able to fully appreciate them. There is enough quality techno here for a mix twice as long, and judging from some of the live DJ sets he’s posted on his own website, he’s used to slightly less hectic pacing. But as an abbreviated introduction of the long form sets Surgeon drops around the world it’s pretty great.
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