- When Blueprint announced that their 20th anniversary series would start with Surgeon, it seemed like a logical idea. Anthony Child's best-known alias embodies Blueprint's core techno sound while offering a different perspective—a bit of old with the new. Outside of a collaborative 12-inch back in '97, he's also never had a full release with the label. Following two albums that saw Child exploring his newfound modular obsession in different ways, Search Deep Inside Yourself finds him back on the dance floor.
This EP is the sound of an expert techno artist returning to what he knows best. The grotty textures of From Farthest Known Objects are here, but they're sucked into the groove like a raft in river rapids. On "Search," Child carefully builds a driving anthem based on classic elements—throbbing leads, brassy synths, choppy drums—and lets them get nice and grimy. He goes filthier on "Inside," where roughed-up leads hint towards a climax that never comes. Instead, Child loops back on the central motif, making his lines thicker with each go-round.
Search Deep Inside Yourself is a reminder that, though Child is associated with a brutal and barreling strain of dance music, his work is still complex. "Yourself" might be a techno tantrum, twisting itself into pretzels, but it's also remarkably liquid, a wave of sound that washes over you instead of landing with a thwack. And "Deep," the EP's most straightforward track on the surface, has a world of spatial detail beneath. The way his sounds swirl around the stereo spectrum is fantastic. Like its title hints, Search Deep Inside Yourself feels introspective, with Child looking inward and finding the most quintessential Surgeon record he's released in a while.
TracklistA1 Search
A2 Deep
B1 Inside
B2 Yourself