Artiest: Surgeon
Title: Breaking the Frame
Label: Dynamic Tension
Release Date: May 2011
Medium: Digital and Vinyl (2×12”)

Here’s a challenge. We would like you to listen to and then categorize Surgeon’s latest album, “Breaking The Frame”. Put a label on it, classify it and please be as precise as you can be. Once you’ve done that, you can continue reading this review.

If you’re still reading, it’s likely you either a) didn’t bother to listen or b) failed our little challenge. If the former is the case we urge you to refresh this page and approach it as if you haven’t seen it before. If the latter is true, then don’t be ashamed, as the title of the album should have given away the true nature of our trick challenge. The meticulously chosen title “Breaking The Frame” reveals the essence of what it is that this album does. It takes all that we use to define music into account and then utterly destroys it, leaving two crucially important emotions behind, an eerie feeling of being left outside alone and naked, intertwined with a tremendously exciting freshness of breath. To achieve this, it takes someone that has developed a complete understanding of the blueprints, mechanics and composure of the framework, who is capable of envisioning a way out, and realizing that, for new things to grow, the grounding soil needs to bent, broken, twisted and eventually completely left behind. Destruction yields rebirth. The frame needs to be broken. Surgeon is such a person.

In a recent interview with Louise Jolly, Surgeon explains that he sees himself as a “Habitual Symbol Manipulator”, a term coined by English writer Aldous Huxley in his novel ‘The Island”: “A talent for manipulating symbols tempts its possessors into habitual symbol manipulation, and habitual symbol manipulation is an obstacle in the way of concrete experiencing and the reception of gratuitous graces.” A DJ-set is a means of communication in which symbols are often habitually manipulated from start to finish, and while Huxley states that as such truly experiencing it should be hard and would never lead to “gratuitous graces”, Surgeon explains that that does not necessarily have to be so. In music it can also lead to something else, something new, a surrounding in which both artist and listener are connected on a level that allows for near-direct communication, unlike the inherently primitive and limiting form known as “language”, that we’ve all grown accustomed to.

This philosophy is that of “Breaking the Frame”, an album that tells a utopian story and is therefore everything language isn’t. It’s emotional, it’s personal, it’s engrossing, it shapes images and then erases them, only to see them restructured in a slightly different manner moments later. This album communicates. Yet it is language that classifies, that labels and in doing so guides our expectations. Once on this path the only way forward is by narrowing down, pulling the boundaries of the acceptable ever inwards with each step until there is hardly any space left to fill. Techno, a host, a moniker, a linguistic tool, becomes an irritation at first, but slowly turns into a choking capsule that threatens to erase the soul, the idea, it was envisioned to protect. It is then and there that the frame needs to be broken.

But unlike many, making techno isn’t Surgeon’s goal. It’s a vehicle to get his message across, or to use his own words: “we make the rules”. This album isn’t just not a techno album; it’s a deliberate annoyance, creating friction and alienation in an attempt to find a free and accepting vein in which to inject a lethal yet vital dose of renewing destruction. By looking towards and incorporating elements from modern classical music and experimental spiritual jazz Surgeon does just that. He offers an outside perspective of what the inside could resemble, once it frees itself from its self imposed boundaries by no longer looking in but out and managing to step onto a path that broadens instead of narrows.

“Breaking the Frame” is a future promise and likely to prove itself as one of the essential albums for coming generations. Surgeon sets a much-needed existential challenge for the genre as a whole. While on its own that should be all the encouragement one needs to listen to it, let’s not be unmindful of the fact that, if anything, it is a masterfully crafted and intensely enjoyable audible experience.

Tracklist

01 Dark Matter

02 Transparent Radiation

03 Remover Of Darkness

04 The Power Of Doubt

05 Radiance

06 Presence

07 We Are All Already Here

08 Those Who Do Not

09 Not-Two

Reviewers Sieuwe Kooistra and Harrison van der Vliet (Showhosts Default)

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