Surgeon: "My music is not just techno, it is inside an infinite world"

For 30 years, Anthony Child has forced us to ask ourselves this question. Techno or not techno? Techno, of course, from the first bar of almost any song among the hundreds the Brit has released under the name Surgeon since 1992 – dozens of EPs on the cult Downwards, Blueprint, Tresor or his own labels Counterbalance and Dynamic Tension, and ten albums, a good half of which have become monuments to the brutal, dissonant, and abstruse techno of which the city of Birmingham has become an epicenter thanks to his music and that of his rhythm brother Karl O'Connor, aka Regis.

But also, not techno, or rather, not really, or even, so much more. Precise memory of Force + Form in 1999, stacking of endless industrial hammering disturbed by almost absurd atmospheres and grains with strange consistencies everywhere in the gears; or of The Crawling Frog Is Torn and Smiles , rarity lost on a vinyl B-side in 2010 developing around a single note of electronic sound in its simplest synthetic device, cardioscope beep to the bone, the most ingenious machine funk of creation; again in 2025, on the terrible Soul Fire , pièce de résistance of the new Shell~Wave , an overly rushed bass drum, two unstable notes that catch fire in a delay that takes the head until it knocks it out.

Techno is there, oh so much, but also its opposite, that is to say all the rest of music, psychedelic rock