Balance

Anthony Child performs as Surgeon, and alongside Karl O’Connor (Regis) as British Murder Boys — the duo project that ran parallel to Sandwell District and represented the harder, more confrontational end of the Birmingham sound. The story of Sandwell finding its aesthetic is specific: Function played at Tresor, mixed a Sleeparchive EP into Regis’s “Guiltless,” and O’Connor came up to the booth with a microphone and started singing “Peggy Sue” over the slow industrial techno. That is the moment Sandwell District found its sound — a drunk Karl O’Connor singing Buddy Holly over a Sleeparchive record at Tresor in 2004.

Balance (2015) on Tresor is the record that places Surgeon squarely in that transatlantic conversation — a Birmingham producer, on a Berlin label, making techno that sounds like what happens when the industrial North of England processes the sounds that Detroit sent over. Reynolds traces this lineage with care: Downwards Records (Regis’s Birmingham label, which Sandwell extended) as the British outpost for the kind of industrial-inflected techno that Chain Reaction’s dub and Detroit’s militancy had made possible.