Multiples aka Surgeon and Speedy J interview: “There’s no script to follow”
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Once a connoisseur of sound, it seems, always a connoisseur of sound.
We’re just getting acquainted – that’s your faithful reporter, yours truly, and techno titans Surgeon and Speedy J – via our three way Zoom call, and Surgeon’s ears are pricking up.
“I’m enjoying the contrast between Jochem’s acoustics and Ben’s acoustics,” he laughs, “from a nerdy perspective.”
Admittedly, the Juno Daily room assigned to making Zoom calls is rather a booming, echoey one, while Speedy J aka Jochem Paap appears to be, as is entirely sensible for a studio space where an awful lot of precision engineering techno is recorded, in a room that, in acoustic terms anyway, is drier than a novice nun’s 21st birthday bath.
We have to point out that there’s another contrast in evidence, too, this one visual rather than sonic. The room in his rural Worcestershire home that Surgeon, real name Anthony or Tony Child, is chatting to us in, looks to be a rather unremarkable, white walled spare room, although he intriguingly adds: “All I’ve got is these robes,” laughing as he indicates a rail of clothes in the corner, “robes for various ritualistic activities.”
Paap’s lair, on the other hand, appears to be an underground bunker, lit in a late night shade of glowing red and packed with shelves and shelves all bulging under the weight of equipment, as far as the eye can see.
It’s in this room, better known as the STOOR studio in Rotterdam, Netherlands, that the pair created Two Hours Or Something as Multiples, a truly sensational electronic experience across 11 tracks. Collaboratively improvised by the pair over two intensive days, it’s the sound of two titans of the dancefloor – Surgeon being the best known name to emerge from the Brum techno scene of the naughties, Speedy J with a career stretching back more than three decades and releases on labels from Richie Hawtin’s Plus 8, NovaMute and Rekids to Warp and Planet Mu – freed up and let loose to experiment in whatever direction the spirit of the moment and their instincts lead them.
Improvisation is of course key to Jochem’s celebrated STOOR Live events, which have become the central show at recent Amsterdam Dance Events, each featuring a dream team of techno talent all working from scratch to build, manage and guide an eight hour live performance with no prior rehearsal or even discussion. Among the names who’ve featured in past five-way epic jam sessions alongside Jochem are – as well as Surgeon – the likes of Steve Rachmad, Rodhad, Blawan, Pariah, JakoJako, FJAKK, Nene H and Voices From The Lake aka Donato Dozzy and Neel.
The gigs, which are also filmed and shown to a worldwide audience via YouTube at a later point, now also take place independently of the conference at the historic Paradiso in Amsterdam. In fact, one had just happened there a few days before we caught up Jochem and Tony. The latter is keen to get the details.
“Was it a mammoth one?” he asks.
“Yeah it was totally the same thing as we do with ADE,” Jochem tells us, “so starting at 4pm and then going on until midnight. You’ve been there a couple of times so you know how it goes. Figure it out for a bit and then it’s off to the stars, I guess. It’s great because we had Luke playing with us this time, Luke Slater, along with Dasha Rush, Polygonia and Rrose. It was really great – a really good combination.”
The mammoth – Tony’s expression is spot on the money – sessions are treated like a day time show event, lasting close to eight hours at a time, although Jochem, ever specific, says the truth is closer to a still-less-than-paltry seven and a bit hours. Musicians arrive and set up at 1pm, they plug in equipment and the technical side is checked, specifically the central sync-ing which is controlled through a single MIDI clock.
Then, as the soundcheck ends, each musician leaves their equipment producing a single, self-generating sound which the audience will hear as they enter the room, despite seeing an empty stage. Then, after 45 minutes or an hour of that sound, the musicians take their places on the stage and the jamming begins in earnest.
“There’s no script to follow,” confirms Tony. “I’ve joined in with three of those now, and I seem to recall that at all three of those we literally didn’t discuss anything beforehand.”
For Jochem, collaborations have long been a love, even an essential part, of his creative existence, from his joint album with Chris Leibing to tracks with George Issakidis, Literon, Tommy Four Seven and Terrence Fixmer, among others.
“I’ve done a lot of collaborations,” he says “even before STOOR and I really enjoy linking up with people and doing something together to see what happens. This space is great for collaboration because there’s plenty of room, there’s plenty of equipment to do your stuff – it lends itself very well to collaborations. All the gear is on shelves and for every project we build a temporary studio because everybody’s approach is different. The same as Tony, we like to record things as much in real time as possible. Just to be able to capture the moment. We try not to over-think things – just press start and see where we end up. When you have this approach, things can end up in all sorts of ways but there are always moments that everyone in the room feels like we’ve got something nice going, so the idea is to capture all the moments that happen here, either on photography or video or as audio.”
Initially, the STOOR collaborations were captured on runs of 50 ultra-limited dubplates, hand crafted on a lathe in the very same room that they were made. Two Hours Or Something is actually the 50th recording, but the first to get a full release as such. “Basically the whole idea of the lathe was to document those moments as a vinyl archive,” Jochem says, “but as we’ve gone on and there are more eyes on it, we decided to make it an actual label and do digital distribution and press a double album.”
Very much in keeping with the original theme, a limited run of 50 copies of Two Hours or Something will come with an additional, handmade lathe cut plate with additional material.
Surgeon is not short of a collaborator either – see his roles as part of British Murder Boys with Regis, his hook ups with Scorn/Napalm Death man Mick Harris and Ben Sims or getting together with Lady Starlight to open for Lady Gaga’s live set. But his experimental partnership with Surgeon is something very special that has bloomed over time. “I can never remember times and dates and stuff but I was looking in my diary and I saw the first dates we did together was back in October 2017.
“I feel that me and Jochem connect really strongly on this idea of improvisation. collaboration. It’s really at the core of who we both are as artists and as performers – we’ve really, really gone deep into that for a long time. I feel like we really connect well on that level. Some people you work with get improvisation to an extent but me and Jochem are pretty deep into it and as we’ve done the shows together we’ve gone deeper and deeper into that.”
The roots of the Two Hours or Something album, Tony recalls, were in a show the pair played a gig at a venue called Zenner in Berlin in August 2023.
“Their concept is they want people to play live,” Tony continues, “and they want people to play a three hour set – which is a long set for most people. But for me and Jochem, that’s easy!”
Jochem agrees that their relationship has developed, quite naturally, in time, into something very special, powered by an unspoken understanding and a kind of creative telekinesis.
“The shows we’ve played together have evolved. So we started in 2017 and when you first play with someone you have to figure out their phrasing and the kind of sonics that each of the parties provide. Especially when you’re on stage with a couple of thousand people in front of you, you don’t go in the deepest end right at the beginning.”
It’s a relationship that’s paid rich dividends – dividends we can all enjoy via the Two Hours Or Something, which genuinely pushes the envelope of what techno really is. Or, as Tony says, in typically to-the-point language: “I feel like as we’ve done more gigs together, what we do has got weirder and weirder. “
Ben Willmott
• Multiples play live @ Sonar by Day, Sonar Hall Barcelona, June 14
Buy your copy of Multiples’ Two Hours or Something on vinyl by clicking here