ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2011: #6 SURGEON BREAKING THE FRAME

Albums of the Year 2011: #6

Surgeon - Breaking the Frame

Another album, another fantastic album cover (I swear I'm not picking these just because I like looking at their covers). If you'd told me at the start of the year that an album like Breaking the Frame would place this high on my year-end list, I'd have assumed you were joking. What draws me into this album? There's some truly great drum programming (I love that panning, skittering beat on "Remover of Darkness"), but there's also a very impressive sense of movement and development over the course of the tracks ("Presence" feels like Four Tet's "Ribbons" pulled inside out). So much of the album seem tied to some kind of birth of the universe narrative and, to a certain extent, it is quite easy to hear this music as bursts of radiation from stars or the remnants of the big bang. The melody in "Transparent Radiation," for example, seems like it's flickering before my eyes on a spectroscope, a tightly controlled blast of colours from up and down the scale. Indeed, tracks like "Dark Matter" and "Radiance" manage to give form and shape to intangible images in much the same way that the title of Tim Hecker's Harmony in Ultraviolet seems perfectly descriptive of the music found therein. Indeed, the opening of "Radiance"--and the middle section with its long climb through detuned swells of synths--is like a musical illustration of a star blowing out and throwing off its layers.

Unlike Black Sun, though, scarred and pitted with its images of decay and apocalypse, Breaking the Frame is (coldly) elegant, like a thirtieth-century court ball. Given the extremely tight control on display in this music (Surgeon's moniker is apt--everything here is razor sharp and incredibly precise), it's initially quite hard to reconcile the music with the title of the album. Listening to Breaking the Frame, I often get a sense of holographic grids and graphs flying around before my eyes, describing a universe of equations, of pure information (this is the same feeling I get when listening to something like A Guy Called Gerald's Black Secret Technology). What could possibly break this frame? The answer that gradually emerges, and what really makes this album something special, is twofold: the human presence that creeps in from time to time and the sheer scope of the cosmic grandeur described above.* The chopped and stuttering melody on "Presence" feels like it has a single balalaika player hidden in it somewhere.  When the steady kick drum of "Those Who Do Not" drops after the chilling tones of "We Are All Already Here" (a track that also brings to mind radiation), it's a reminder that, for all of its abstraction, this is an album made by a DJ, and the dancefloor beckons even in the midst of cosmic meditations. Similarly, the waves of crowd chatter that punctuate the start of "Not-Two" are a brilliant disruption in what had threatened to be a cold, sterile universe, and, if it's not miles away from the opening "Dark Matter," it's a fittingly celestial send off. Picture it as humanity's contribution to the background noise of the universe; it's lovely that way. 

*The same applies to Black Secret Technology, actually, although on that album it's the presence of those diva vocals and, uh, Finley Quaye.