When I contacted Anthony Child, AKA Surgeon, a couple months ago to pitch the idea of doing this feature, he responded with an important condition: we had to focus on live performance. Given that Child has been one of techno's most influential and consistently brilliant artists since the mid-'90s, that caveat wasn't exactly a deal-breaker. It's also a natural angle for a couple of reasons. For the last five-plus years, Child has spent most of his creative resources on developing his abilities as a live performer, in his usual techno environment as well as more abstract settings. Also, live performance remains a challenging frontier for electronic artists in general. Performance is intrinsic to instrumental ensembles—despite modern advances in digital instruments and editing techniques, the music still typically needs to be physically played to exist. Electronic producers, meanwhile, face a peculiar set of challenges.

As Child reinforced during our talk, live electronic performances too often fall into one of two traps. A familiar issue is mitigating risk. While it's understandable to want to minimise the chance of failure, this often results in an over-reliance on the safety measure of using prerecorded parts. This is a naturally tempting option, given the impracticality of recreating complex electronic music onstage, but it can sap a vital sense of danger from the performance. It can also render the performer a passenger to their own music, which chugs along seamlessly as if on train tracks, and offers only limited scope for shaping the music in a way the audience can intuitively understand. Then there's the other extreme: playing with a huge table full of gear that presents too much complexity for an artist to handle alone, leading to a paralysing overabundance of options.

Of course, these issues have existed since the days of musique concrete. But against this intimidating backdrop, Child was keen to share his experiences of the never-ending journey that is improving your performance technique, specifically with a mind to encouraging others to give it a go. He unpacked his improvisational approach and shared some of the realisations that have improved his sets in the last few years. As he rightly points out, these experiences and techniques are not the answers to your performance problems. What they do offer are ways to find an approach to performance that works best for you and inspires you to take greater risks onstage.

It's probably best to start out by establishing why this feature is concerned primarily with live performance rather than studio production.

Live performance has been my primary focus for the last four or five years. There were quite a few times that I tried playing live in the past but it honestly took me 20 years to find an approach I was happy with. I think the mistake I made initially was that I was always too cautious about the way I approached it. I see this very, very often with other techno artists.

When you do a live show, obviously you want it to be good. You don't want to look like an idiot and fall on your face. Problem is, that makes you approach it with too much caution and that in itself takes away the power of what a live improvised performance can be. The power is in the danger and risk. That's where the real excitement and energy comes from, so when you're too cautious it quickly makes it kind of impotent.

Although many styles of music are becoming less performance-based as time goes on, electronic music was always by nature less performance-oriented than other styles. Could that be why producers have a greater fear of failure than, say, a band or ensemble?

There's the simple fact that most producers just aren't used to it. Then there's this pervasive idea people have of trying to achieve the perfect set. But what they're doing by aiming at that is smoothing off all the edges. Perfection unfortunately is often pretty boring.

On the flip side, even if you're improvising without a safety net, the limitations you set can also lessen the experience. A simple but common example would be live acts using the same kick drum sound for an hour and not clocking how that homogenises everything.

Yeah, that's a common one. This makes me think of a recent interview I read with Francis Coppola where he was talking about that latest rerelease of Apocalypse Now. There was a quote right at the end that I think is very valid and important in this context. He said something like, "I never let not knowing how to do something stop me from trying it." That's really powerful. It's easy to say, but you've got to get out there and try it. You have to stand up and fail because otherwise you're just going to be stuck in your bedroom. You'll never get out if you only want the perfect set. It's important to point out that developing yourself as a live performer is an ongoing practice. There's never an end point.

Has focusing on live performance made your studio process any easier? Being able to record performed tracks is a more efficient approach than labouring over the details that computer production presents, although it does introduce a new set of challenges regarding editing.

Yeah, I know what you're saying. The last few releases I've done have been very rapid time-wise. It's something that gets said a lot about improvisation but, for me, it's real-time composition. There's always multiple layers going on at the same time in my head. I'm concentrating on really feeling the music, allowing it to flow through me. I'm a conduit. In the ideal state, I feel like a pipe that the music is flowing through. I'm very gently directing it a little bit. Then I'm also aware that there's an audience and I'm sensitive of their perception, so I'm not totally lost.

The last release I did was these two 12-inches called Raw Tracks. That was made with a live-style setup—a 909 with a Synthi clone called the Pin Electronics Portabella. It was basically just those two pieces of gear and a simple sequencer. This was almost exactly how I made my first tracks. You start the recorder, do a take and go, "Yeah that sounded good," then, boom, onto next one. You bang out the whole record in 20 or 30 minutes. There might be one reverse edit on Raw Tracks but there's no post-processing or anything like that. It's clearly imperfect but I think it better captures a moment in time than when I do a more involved production style.

Of course there are advantages to detailed production and it suits certain people, like Trevor Horn or someone like that. They do fantastic work and I really admire that. But I've generally been more effective when I just get it down fast.

Wouldn't it be great to be, say, a free jazz musician where you play a show, it gets recorded, and that's it, record done. You move on to the next thing without the mental baggage that the endless reflection of computer production introduces.

I think it also has to do with impatience. I like things to happen now. But what's fun in a studio project is that it's almost like breathing life into something. These flat sounds and the way you work them and put them together and put other things with them, suddenly it's like it's taking on life somehow. At the same time, it's easy to squeeze the life out of something by going too far.

I see and recognise that different people work in such different ways. I've read the other pieces you've done and think, "Woah, these people work in such a different way to what I do but it's really working for them." Like Autechre, they're programming, programming, programming. They're genius with that but I'm rubbish at it. I don't have the patience for it. I need to bang it out and have it feel good.

Not to keep hammering away at this angle but the first time we spoke you said that you don't consider yourself someone who particularly excels in the studio. What's your general confidence level like when perceiving your own work?

This is a roundabout way of answering but there were two books that had a big impact on me when I was at school. The first was Composing With Tape Recorders: Musique Concrete For Beginners. It caught my attention because even though I always knew I was interested in music, I was terrible at learning instruments. I wanted to make sound with them rather than learn scales. In contrast to that, this book was primarily about sound and collage. It got me into the processes and ideas behind musique concrete without having actually having heard any of the music.

One Christmas I got another book, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. It's full of studio notes for every session they ever did. I read all that but it was their psychedelic period that ignited my imagination. The sheer degree of experimentation was and still is amazing. Thanks to these two books, I had this idea that I was going to work for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

I've mentioned this elsewhere but I remember reading about how they made "Tomorrow Never Knows" and trying to make my own recreation of it. I managed to borrow a reel-to-reel tape recorder and had the razor blade out cutting up the tape to make loops. That was my earliest music-making experience.

So here's the point of this tangent. It talked about details in the book but it didn't specifically say how they did things technically. So I had to think, OK, there's this weird backwards-sounding seagull loop: How am I going to make that? And I experimented until I found a way to recreate it. That's how I learnt. All of my engineering sound work has been about figuring out a way to do something because there were no lessons, no YouTube tutorials or anything like that back then. There weren't books out for making techno. So it's sort of like feeling your way around a dark room. Maybe that's why I don't feel so technically confident about a lot of aspects of production because the whole journey has been like this.

Composing With Tape Recorders: Musique Concrete For Beginners

Composing With Tape Recorders: Musique Concrete For Beginners

There's a big difference between having an effect in mind that you want to create versus having prescribed best methods on how to do it.

It's fundamentally different. Of course, it's amazing what you can learn on YouTube but there is something in having to figure it out yourself. I think that's a key in my production evolution.

We'll get to the techno stuff later on but what is your overall goal and approach to your experimental sets?

The biggest and most obvious difference is—well, one of the last times I did this set, someone came up to me while I was setting up and asked, "What are you using for your drums?" And I had to be like, "Sorry mate, no drums tonight." Another huge factor is to do with the audience. With techno, the invisible script is much more defined, these unwritten, unconscious rules shaping what people are expecting.

That determines the range of what you can do without totally losing people. Within those confines, you can still test and tease and provoke and make it a little uncomfortable before bringing it back. But with the abstract setup, people have much less of an idea what to expect. But that's great because it makes the boundaries so much wider.

There's this idea of ambient, and these sets are often labelled that way. But I would say that's not a useful term for it. To me the original definition of ambient is this Brian Eno idea of background music. That's totally fine but that's definitely not what this is. Hopefully this is engaging and it becomes quite physical and parts of it are uncomfortable. It goes almost into pure noise at times. Simply put, it's a balance of harshness and melody. I'm playing with those two forces, like good and evil.

There's a very strong element of trance, too. Not as in the genre obviously but the state. It's about drawing people into a sound story. It puts people into a very unfamiliar place. That's a really powerful feeling, taking people out into space, mentally speaking.

With a techno performance, I'm in a much more technical mindset. Basically, there's more admin to think about. To be techno, it has to be structured in a particular way. I'm arranging things live so I have to be conscious about structure whereas these abstract sets are much looser. When I perform with other people, like Paddy Shine from Gnod, and Dan Bean when we do The Transcendence Orchestra, it makes it even more powerful. I feel like I experience it along with the audience much more than I do with the techno set where I'm more analytical and detached, even though I'm feeling it. But with this, I'm out of my mind at the end of it. Dan always has to lie on the floor.

The Transcendence Orchestra sets have developed into something quite theatrical. We use a lot of ritualistic ideas. We've got these robes that we wear, we burn loads of frankincense, it becomes a total sensory experience. When we turn up wearing the robes people wonder what the hell is going on. Already you're setting something in their mind. We're using all these different elements to bring people right inside sound. It sounds strange but I think even people who are music fans quite often have never really been brought deeply into abstract sound. For us performing it, we really become part of that, that kind of mind state.

In what ways has your approach developed in these sets since you started?

Currently this Soma Lyra-8 synth is quite important. I've previously used the Buchla Music Easel and the Portobella Synthi clone I mentioned before for a similar task. It's about finding an instrument that is very individual and flexible but has a mind of its own. These are more temperamental, esoteric instruments that, if they're in a certain mood, won't work how you expect. This was definitely the case with the Easel. Every time I performed with it something would happen that I'd never heard before and you'd have to run with it, which is part of the magic.

That job now is being done by the Lyra-8, which is from a Russian company called Soma that's run by Vlad Kreimer. I really love their philosophy for this instrument. There's no MIDI, you tune it all by ear, there's no quantisation. You trigger sound with these touch panels. Kreimer was inspired by the theremin and other early electronic instruments. The whole signal path feeds back on itself in really bizarre ways. It has eight oscillators, you can cross modulate them. It really becomes something that's alive, it's a very organic type of machine. To a large extent, I have to surrender myself to it.

The Octatrack I use in the techno set is on the other end of the spectrum. It's a workhorse, it does what you tell it, you program it and it says, "Yes sir." Whereas the Lyra is like, "Sorry mate, I'm going this direction today."

All that cross modulation and feedback is making it sound like extended technique on a sax.

Yeah, along with the two LFOs, the frequency modulation and the delay—it can add up to strangely organic sounding timbres. It also produces properly bowel-churning low frequencies, too. I'm using it along with the baby version of the Roland SH-101, which does arpeggiated melodies. Right now the melodies are stored into the sequencer's memory but if I have space I'll take an Arturia KeyStep for playing parts in live. Both the Lyra-8 and the the Roland are fed into this Electro-Harmonix 45000 looper, which takes either four mono or two stereo loops. Given the steady development of these performances, it's quite effective to layer sounds up into the looper and let them slowly decay as you build in new ideas. It's like this constantly evolving story that you get drawn into.

Needless to say the looper plays a crucial role here.

Yeah it's vital, it's the centre of this setup really. Whatever else I was using with it, I've always used this looper. With this one I can clock the arpeggiator of the SH-01A so it seamlessly overlaps. I don't really need it when I play with Paddy and Dan but it's essential when I'm on my own.

How do you know something so abstract is going to work?

There's this story of when Duke Ellington went with his band to Japan to perform shortly after WorId War II. They went down amazing playing this new music that most people over there had never heard before. How can that be? They're bringing this new form of music to people who've never experienced it. It's very abstract and freeform. Ellington said the first point is that the audience has to have a sense of what's happening physically. They see a musician moving and expending physical energy with an instrument, they understand that's where the music is coming from. You don't have to understand how to play an instrument but you see someone doing it and you know that's where the sound is coming from. The next thing Ellington said is that there needs to be a sense of risk and the audience participates in that risk. It's not just playback. The musicians have to believe in what they're doing.

It's great when these artists who've thought at the deepest level about these things have an unlikely meeting with the dance music world and some of their experience rubs off and makes the place a little richer. Oliveros is an obvious recent example—dance music people now regularly namecheck Deep Listening, which is great.

These people are masters at what they do and there is so much you can learn. I learn from the approaches that David Bowie had but that doesn't mean I'm going to go and start a glam rock band. You shouldn't be thinking, "Well, that doesn't apply to me." It all does.

I learnt a lot on this front from William Bennett. There were loads of great books he turned me on to. He told me to read Stanislavski's An Actor Prepares, which is like the bible for method acting. At first I was like, "I'm not an actor, why would I read that?" Then I read it and it opened my head and really changed my opinion on performance more generally. I might not be the most performative performer but it all feeds into it. I learnt a lot from these people, philosophically, conceptually.

That's an interesting thing about improvisation. When you follow it to an extreme it brings on fairly weighty political and existential connotations. The British free improv scene was notoriously wracked by ideological conflicts over these topics.

I love the way that when you go so deep into a subculture or art form, you always end up at the same place. But it's dangerous when you get fundamentalist about it.

Fundamentalist improv.

Yeah, once people start saying, "It's not like that, it's like this," things get unhealthy. Again, I really want to emphasise that everything I'm saying here is just where I'm at now—my ideas might change tomorrow but this is what I've learnt from actually going out and playing a lot.

If I had to boil down my take on all of this, it's about wanting to have people's boundaries expanded somehow. They would come in with a certain idea about things and leave with that widened. That's the aim of music and performance for me, to open people's heads up, to give them an experience outside their normal routine or life, to make them think there's something else out there. To reconsider the boundaries they set on the world they live in. Maybe these boundaries and ideas are not so fixed and solid? They're really very loose, I believe. That's the whole idea of music, to transmit that idea, to make them bend their idea of the world.

All the people wanted was for you to talk about modular synthesisers and now you've gotten all spiritual on us.

I did a workshop that was filmed at Schneidersladen that ended with some don't-be-afraid-style speech. It always ends up being some sort of quasi-life lesson.

It's quite a rude transition topic-wise, but I'm looking forward to talking about why you don't perform with a modular anymore. It's past being obvious that the fixation on Eurorack has gotten way out of hand so it'd be great to get a more tempered perspective on it from someone who actually used them intensively in a real-world performance environment.

Just to clarify, the fact that the modular isn't part of this current setup isn't down to any sort of political reason. I very quickly became seen as some sort of modular guy and that made me really uncomfortable. Modular is just one of the machines or approaches that I've used and being tied to one thing like that is weird to me. I can understand that in terms of selling your image as an artist or whatever, it's effective to be simple and straightforward like that and be like, "Hi, I'm the modular guy." But I recoil from anything that's limiting like that.

I quickly found there was so much focus on modular being positioned as the answer to your artistic problems, which is absurd because there is no answer. The problem is everyone is looking for a simple answer as to how to best express themselves.

The answer is: go on Modular Grid, look up Surgeon's rig, buy all those modules, make amazing techno.

Yeah, exactly. I don't like to give that information away largely because people are going to think that gear is going to give them the answer. That is a concern I have about doing this feature even. Hopefully the good things outweigh that side of it. It's so funny how often I try to ram this point home but people are still like, "Yeah all right but what gear do you use?" I think you can pick up ideas from looking at my setups but please do not believe that this is the answer for you. This is the answer for me this month.

Today.

Yeah! Today even. The most important thing is finding a balance between simplicity and flexibility. I see a lot of people performing with a table full of gear. You might think you've got more options or it's more safe or you've more sounds to draw on. But when they perform they're in a state of absolute panic. One person can't manage all this equipment and controls. It's totally overwhelming.

A really important point me and Colleen (Lady Starlight) came up with was this concept we called 50 percent stupider. The concept goes like this: when you perform live, you're 50 percent stupider than usual. Always remember that. When you're at home and you're practicing, make it half as complicated. When you're performing you have all these other pressures and the sound is weird and people are looking at you. It's so easy to get overwhelmed and enter a state of panic and then you can't think properly and you rush through your set. Then it's horrible and no fun and you're probably transmitting that bad energy to your audience too. So 50 percent stupider is a really vital thing we learnt.

This could apply especially well to something like the Octatrack, which rightly intimidates people because of the sheer scope of what it can do. But you can massively dumb it down, streamline it and focus on one part of it in a very effective way.

I do that by using a Faderfox MIDI controller. You can plug it into a web browser and map each of the Faderfox's knobs to whatever Octratrack parameters you want easy access to. I've got it set up so I have important controls like volume, high- and low-cut for each individual track immediately accessible without having to dive into the Octatrack's menus. It makes it far more useable.

I still sort of hate the Octatrack but I've had it for a long time now and it's the best at doing what I want it to do. In this current techno configuration, it's giving me six drum sounds, some atmospheric beds are playing off it, it's mixing levels and I'm using the effects and filters.

Are you sequencing this monosynth from the Octatrack, too?

Actually no, it's got an internal sequencer. It's called the LEP LepLoop. The sequencer is based off a sample and hold signal so it's quite unstable in a musically pleasant way. It's a bit hard to explain if you're not into synthesis but it's grabbing values from white noise, which results in a more properly random-sounding sequence, or an LFO, which sounds a bit more like a regular loop in comparison. If I have the LFO amount and offset feeding the sample and hold just so, it'll give me instant techno. If I set the amount or offset higher, it'll vary the sequence.

So this is more or less the same as what you were doing with the modular: a monosynth with some drum voices.

Yes, but to return to the whole not-using-modular thing—what I've come to appreciate is the skill and art of interestingly designed instruments. That's the thing with modular. It seems like this amazing open field but when you put together all these different modules…

You have to be the designer.

Exactly, and that's an overlooked skill and art. There's a lot more to it than I realised. You've seen what I used to do with my system and it was OK for what it was but it's a different realm if you're using well-designed pieces of gear. Maybe that's why right now I'm into these desktop synths like the LepLoop.

I think even when you have a clear goal for a modular system, simple things like making sure ten percent of a knob turn over here equates to ten percent of a value change over there is really hard to get as consistent as a non-modular synth. You need a whole section just to make sure your voltages are scaled properly.

I appreciate that a lot more now than I did before. I have a higher level of respect for how amazing Don Buchla's instruments were designed and also Vlad Kreimer from Soma. He's coming out with the most insane drum machine—you can barely even call it that—called the Pulsar-23. He demoed it at Superbooth and people were freaking out over it. But I know when they buy it, they're going to hate it. A lot of the time, people want something like a modular because they think it's the answer to their problem, where really what they need is a reliable, stable VST plug-in.

With both your old modular system and your current techno rig, having consistently interesting riffs is of the utmost importance. When you only have drums, effects and a riff, that riff better be good. I know you don't like cueing sounds so you don't know how a sequence will sound until you begin fading it in. So how do you know it's going to be good?

The way the LepLoop sequencer works, I don't know what it's going to spit out. When I fade or filter it in, I'm like, "OK, this is what I've got, I have to work with this." So I've got to manipulate it to make it not sound shit. But that's part of the fun. It was the same with the modular. I set up the sequencer and the sound and I'd have a vague idea of what the result might be like. But once it's there in front of the audience, I have to work with it, warts and all.

If I fade a sound in, you can't go back because then I'm showing that I've fucked it up. There's that jazz idea of making the same mistake enough times so that it begins working. A sequence can really be on the edge of acceptability but it works if you keep repeating it. You manipulate it, filter and modulate it, and it has a reinforcing effect where it eventually sounds right, no matter how crazy it is.

More specifically, it sounds like you consistently use a certain flavour of scale.

With the abstract setup, for sure. I find that the harmonic minor scale is pretty effective for both setups actually. To me, harmonic minor scales feel like they never resolve. Practically speaking, it's helpful using one scale because then I know everything is going to fit harmonically. It's the same when I perform with Dan and Paddy. I relate to that Indian rag-style idea of exploring all the subtleties of a single scale.

You're running your techno setup through an OTO Boum Warming Unit here, too, which funnily enough featured in the last Art Of Production with Paula Temple.

It's a very recent addition. I've only done one gig with it. It's a typical problem with hardware performances, where you're playing after a DJ who's playing very processed and maximised tracks. Live hardware sounds so different, there's so much more transient energy and dynamics in it, so it's hard to follow a DJ. It can take a while for the crowd to become accustomed to the different sound. But by that same token, this can also work well. So I'm trying having everything running through this compressor-analogue-warmer thing to get it a bit closer to what a finished, mastered track sounds like.

Some of my early tracks were really heavily compressed. I was more using the compressor as an instrument rather than a transparent effect. When it's dealing with much more stripped-back material, the way it can make the sounds dance around each other can be magic. The music has to be quite stripped for it to work, just a few drums and an atmosphere. But the way it pumps and the way the rhythms move around is great. So that's what I am trying to achieve running everything through the OTO. I also want all the parts to move around when you add a new element, which is a very techno sort of thing.

You mentioned earlier that you're using preprepared samples in the Octatrack to add atmosphere to the techno set. How much trial and error goes into preparing these?

These backing beds have taken me a really long time to get happy with. It's quite a different discipline making these compared to other sorts of production.

How so?

Just landing on something that consistently works. Something that performs its function. It can't be too dominant but it has to actually contribute to the music. Does it fulfil its place in the mix? It's a fairly pragmatic thing. It needs to be long and evolving without being all-consuming but also work well with whatever else is happening. Getting the balance right has taken me a while. How much bass do I need in it? What sort of spread of frequencies? I found often with the modular that it was really powerful in the mid-range but lacked the real sub-bass and high frequencies that you get in digital music. I'd keep that in mind with the atmosphere beds—I'd scoop the middle frequencies out of them and let the modular fill that part of the frequency range. That sort of worked. But as always, it's an ongoing process.

What I like about these current backing tracks is that they were made with the Portabella, which has a very particular sonic palette that really comes out in a live context. It's very different from the other things I've got going on so they don't clash much.

I wanted to talk about what you might call "moves." I'm thinking of the sort of performance vocabulary that controls the tension and structure of a techno set. Something like: mute kick drum; change kick drum pattern while muted; unmute kick drum while muting the hats.

I guess you could call it live arrangement. I know what you mean. For me it's very instinctive. I've had this DNA of techno so ingrained in me that I know what is and isn't techno. I don't want to pin it down so much but the way that you mute and unmute, exactly like you're saying, it's like a vocabulary or grammar. It's like visual grammar, which I find fascinating, the visual grammar of films. The way a shot will pan this way and then cut and there's a certain way that it works…

A set of moves.

Yes, a set of moves that everyone knows unconsciously.

I think in techno you could basically count them on two hands. You've got opening and closing envelopes, mutes, filters…

Sure, I'm using that classic Jeff Mills type of vocabulary. But it's fun to consciously break those rules. I can start off following them and then purposely go off track later on and create tension that way. This could be as simple as making something go on too long. Obviously this stuff is so powerful. What I said earlier, the overall aim I have with these sets is a very positive one but you have to have a bit of discomfort in there. It can help you come out the other side.