Tone Glow 189: Multiples (Speedy J & Surgeon)
An interview with Multiples, the duo of legendary techno producers Speedy J & Surgeon, about improvisation, avoiding "nice music", and their album 'Two Hours or Something'
Multiples (Speedy J & Surgeon)
Multiples is the producer duo of Speedy J and Surgeon. Speedy J, born Jochem Paap, is a pioneering Dutch producer who began releasing crucial techno releases in the ’90s—including Rise (1991), Ginger (1992), and G-Spot (1995)—on labels like Plus 8 and Warp. Surgeon, born Anthony Child, is an English artist who helped define the Birmingham Sound with releases on Downward and Tresor, including Communications (1996), Basictonalvocabulary (1997), Balance (1998), and Force + Form (1999). The two have collaborated with various artists over the years, and began Multiples in 2017 when performing in Amsterdam. After performing in Berlin in 2024, they quickly hopped into Speedy J’s STOOR lab to record an entirely improvised, completely unedited debut album called Two Hours or Something (2024). Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Multiples on April 17th, 2024 to discuss the key elements of improvisation, performing together like a single machine, and the making of their LP.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: I wanted to start by asking what the differences are between working individually and when making music together or performing as Multiples. What changes? What are you able to do that the other person can’t and vice versa?
Surgeon: I have quite a few different projects with other people and all of them are completely different. What’s really fun about collaborating is the way that what you create is so individual to those two people. It’s great exploring that, developing that. So I guess my answer is that they’re completely different on many, many levels—it expands the possibilities of performing and presenting music.
Speedy J: I totally agree. I do quite a few collaborations as well, and I always think of a collaboration as a single entity. I usually don’t view it as the sum of two outputs, but it is something that only exists in the combination of those two people. And to answer your question, about what I can do that the other person can’t, I would say it’s not really relevant. Both Tony [Child aka Surgeon] and I would have never come up with any of the recordings we’ve done together on our own. We’re a new entity, it’s a new form for both of us.
Surgeon: Absolutely.
Speedy J: Of course there are elements and distinctive qualities and, you know, phrasing or the amount of restraint or action one does, but these are very vague things to pinpoint on a single person. Even then, they would never be employed the same way if we weren’t together performing at the same time.
Surgeon: When we perform—and recording in the studio is essentially performing as well—there are so many times when we can’t tell who’s making which sound. We laugh about this all the time, where I’ll be tweaking this filter and think I’m doing the bass, but then realizing that it’s actually Jochem [Paap aka Speedy J] that’s doing it. That’s a very real example of this synergy.
Speedy J: It’s possible that in some collaborations there may be very defined roles. I play with other people and sometimes roles emerge based on whatever suits you best—you end up in a role that you feel most comfortable with—but I think in this collaboration especially, we don’t have any roles. Maybe when we perform live there is a bit of separation in terms of what we do, but we can still bring the whole arsenal to the table if we have to. With the setups we have, we could perform individual sets and just take care of the whole range. I think our roles are merged to such a degree that it’s not possible to say who is doing what. Like Tony said, there are occasions when we don’t even know who is contributing a specific sound during the jam. It’s very much a game or process of acceptance; there’s this flood of sound coming out of us and we’re as much a spectator to the whole thing as a creator. It puts you in a very special place.
Can you speak to the role of improvisation in your work? How do you feel your understanding of it has changed throughout the course of your career?
Surgeon: The most important thing when it comes to improvisation is listening—Pauline Oliveros talked about the idea of deep listening, of opening yourself up to listening. I think there’s actually one interview with Charles Cohen before he died where he pretty much nails all the ideas. The level he’s talking about it on is irrelevant to style and genre. It’s just purely about the fundamentals of ideas, of improvising. I had a lot of ideas already along those lines but he really solidified it. Improvisation has been the key thing I’ve been exploring for at least 10 years in my live performances—it’s the idea of being really perceptive and listening to what’s going on, accepting what you have, and this notion that you’re always moving forward. There’s no regret in it; no matter what you throw in, you’ve got to go with it—you can’t take it back, you have to keep building on it and reacting to what’s there in the moment.
Me and Jochem have said this before, where it becomes a spiritual practice and it becomes meditative, this being in the moment. It’s kind of like a flow state. Like Jochem was saying earlier, you’re as much of an observer to it as the audience is, and I love that you and the audience are going on the same ride, and we’re all aware that we’re participating in this risk. There’s danger, there’s risk to participating in this, and it doesn’t matter if they know what’s going on technically—that’s beside the point—but there’s a sense that we’re all taking part in this journey that may topple at any moment.
Speedy J: I think you nailed it there, but I would say the key word for you is listening. I totally agree to that as far as the process goes, but for me the main feeling when I engage in the process of improvisation, whether solo or with someone else, is the word trust. It’s this trust in the process, this trust in the other person. I think once you learn to surrender to that feeling—of “Oh, I’m just going to press start and see where the hell we end up,” it’s me trusting my intuition, trusting the other person to carefully listen, and I’m also engaging in a specific way towards the other person so they can be sure they can trust me as well. After a few decades of making music in the studio and improvising in all sorts of forms, you learn to trust yourself. You shouldn’t mix that up with confidence, though—that’s a different thing. I don’t have to put on a confident attitude to make it through; it’s a matter of trust. That’s the feeling or mindset you have to have when you engage in improvisation, you just have to focus and go on the ride.
Do you feel like these practices of listening and trust were shaped by experiences you had in your life outside of music?
Speedy J: To be honest, audiences and journalists have this need to explain where certain things come from, but if a life experience ends up in my music, it’s going to be on a very abstract level. I don’t really make those connections. Someone will listen to a track I’ve made in the past and say, “Oh, you must have felt angry when you made that.” In fact, I was just having coffee and reading the fucking manual when the sound came up and I thought, “Fuck, this is nice, let’s go with it.” (laughter). That’s really the mood when I’m making music.
Surgeon: I think that for me these connections always come after I’ve made the music and not before. But I don’t know, I just think it’s something that humans do—they love to see connections.
Speedy J: I’ll tell you a secret. You know, if there’s a concept record, usually the concept was made up afterwards (laughter).
Surgeon: Exactly.
Speedy J: Artists make the music first and then have to say something about it. If musicians were good with words, they would’ve been writers, you know what I mean? They express themselves through sound and then for some reason, there always needs to be some kind of explanation or text around it, or a concept to make it more interesting for an audience. I can only speak for myself, but I know it happens. Concepts are usually made up afterwards to make things seem more coherent than they actually are.
Surgeon: I think there is a sense for me to create something very abstract and then, afterwards, I realize what it means to me. That’s how I balance those two things out. But I think on a different level, you were talking about life experiences that influence what we do?
Yeah, and specifically with regards to being a better listener or having this trust in others and the process.
Surgeon: Being really into Ashtanga yoga for the last 15 years or so has had a real effect on me in terms of my focus and concentration. I think it’s helped with that side of it, and it helps a lot with performances and improvising. It’s about being able to accept what’s there and work with it rather than fighting against it. That for me would be a real influence, but it’s something coming from really outside of the musical sphere.
Speedy J: Funny you mentioned that because, for me, it would be the other way around. I do learn from when I’m improvising. It poses questions, you know? You’re so focused and selfless in that situation, and that’s something I try to draw into my real life. I noticed that I have tendencies to be rushed, to be less in the moment, and I think to myself, but why can I do this when I’m making music, and why am I making this mistake in my life outside of music?
I remember in an interview from the ’90s, Jochem, where you said that you don’t make music to keep other people happy. There were people at live performances who told you, “Oh, shut that off. This sounds terrible.” And I’m also thinking about you, Tony, how you mentioned once that the biggest disservice you can do as an artist is to perform to an audience and give them exactly what they want. This is a much broader question, but these lines of thinking make me curious if either of you are frequently thinking about what specific sounds signify.
Speedy J: Well, I think you’re talking about something that is different for everybody, especially with abstract electronic music that is so open to interpretation; it’s such an undefined means of communication. There are so many ways to listen to it, and in so many different environments and situations. As an artist, you put music out there that you are maybe temporarily happy with and you draw the line: this is it, this is the work I’ve done, this is the best I could do for now. It has this first life as a sort of baby of the artist. Then it starts a second life, and that’s the life of the music being listened to by an audience. And they all experience it in a different way, in a different context, at different times. Maybe they’re sitting in the subway listening to it, or they’re listening to it while meeting with the love of their life for the first time. All these memories get attached to the work, which has nothing to do with what the artist conceived, you know? Whatever my music means to other people is up to them. It’s not my fault when people have a bad experience with my music, but it’s also not to my credit when people have really great experiences listening to my music.
Surgeon: Yeah, I definitely relate to that. There’s a clear division between when the music is just something you’ve made and then when it’s actually released into the world. It’s out of your control now. Whenever we release music, we’re always happy with it. We’re always satisfied with what it’s saying, but when you put it out there you just don’t know—some projects people go nuts about, and other projects just disappear without a trace.
To go back to your question, let’s talk about things within the techno scene. Some artists do a great job of being hugely successful, popular, playing to huge crowds and giving people what they want in a mainstream sense. I admire that because they’re doing something that I can’t do. I feel like my mission is a mission of subversion, at least slightly: “Let’s take this framework and let’s bend it, stretch it. Let’s see how we can alter this, and how far we can take it, let’s see how far we can go until it isn’t techno anymore.” I really like the idea of having an audience and starting off somewhere that’s maybe more familiar and just taking them somewhere unfamiliar. If I hear a DJ play, for example, I love it when they’ll get me to love something that I thought I didn’t like—they showed me a way into it. So that’s what I meant when I said it’d be a disservice to give people what they want. It’s not about… I’m not into being awkward. I don’t want people to hate it, that’s not the idea (laughter). I’m not like GG Allin or someone like that. Maybe this comes back to what Jochem was talking about, how when we’re fully in this improvised flow, we lose our sense of self and our ego. It’s the same experience with the audience; I want to pull the floor from underneath them and just let them float.
Speedy J: I think you’re right. It’s a thing about playing with perception, that’s what it’s about. If you can bend people’s perception, it’s a more valuable experience than walking away with an experience you expected. I don’t know what I said in the ’90s interview, but in general I think there’s just way too much nice music, you know? There’s too much nice music.
Well, how do you define nice? What is nice music?
Speedy J: Well, it’s just nice. Like, “Ah, this is nice.” (laughter). “Nice set, man, nice set.” You know what I mean? People try to be middle of the road to not be offensive, like let’s not do this because it might piss people off. I don’t care—I don’t think about it at all. Whenever I think it has a little bit of an edge or a certain element of mind-fuckery, I’m more happy with that than when it’s smooth.
Surgeon: Yeah, I agree.
Speedy J: There’s way, way too much nice music. It’s true for art in general. If it’s made to please everybody it ends up being nothing. I’d rather only have a few people be blown away by something I make. The only criterion I’m working with is my own; I don’t care what other people think, and it’s not just me saying that. I’m happy when they enjoy it, and I’m happy when they have a positive experience, but it’s not for them—it’s for me.
Surgeon: I think the same as Jochem. I read a phrase that summed it up, like this idea of an internal artistic compass. I think we both work very much in that way.
Speedy J: If you’re making music, 90% of what comes out is from collateral damage and maybe 10% is something that fits within the range of where you thought things were going. It’s never easy to predict where it’s actually going. Generally, a good start is a very bad beginning. There’s nothing as bad as a good start—if things sound nice instantly it’s like, uh oh, it can only go downhill from here. At the end of the process, you have to make a decision about whether you can support this, and if it’s somewhere in the range of ideas that you want to portray yourself.
Has there ever been a point where you felt too many people were enjoying what you were doing, like it felt bad because it meant the music was too palatable?
Speedy J: Yeah. Too popular and too nice. I’ve had tracks in the early ’90s blow up to astronomical proportions, and if I could have chosen any track from my entire catalog to do so, they would be at the bottom. There have been a few times where something came out too easy and it wasn’t the maximum of what I wanted to achieve; I released it because that was what I was left with. And if such a thing becomes popular it’s like… ah man, this isn’t really the story I want to tell. That’s something that plays in my head, like I can do better. But at the same time it’s like, who cares. I’ll write it in a different way the next time and see how it goes. I heard Tony say earlier that an artist is satisfied with the work when they decide to release it, but I would say I’m temporarily satisfied. It is what it is at that moment, but looking back at many things I’ve done in the past, I would have done them differently. The moment dictates the decision, and it’s not that a song answers all the questions or fulfills all your ideas—it’s just a part of it, and then you let it go, and then you try again..
Surgeon: I’ve had certain tracks really blow up that I didn’t think were the most interesting thing I did, but you know, fair enough. It’s the same sort of thing.
What’s the thinking behind having different monikers? Is it mostly a practical thing, like I’m gonna make a specific style of music under this name and do a different one under another? What’s the reason for that instead of having everything under one name?
Speedy J: It can provide a clean slate—a freedom to go wherever you want, at least as a starting point. Sometimes I start things under a new name, thinking it will be a different project, but then it’ll eventually fit in one of the earlier chosen monikers. It was a practice that was common in the early ’90s when labels were very strict with their sound. Like, okay, we have this techno label, but this track was a bit harder. Let’s create a new label for harder stuff. Then you have to come up with a new label name and a new artist name, blah, blah, blah. That’s kind of stuck around.
Surgeon: For a long time, I very consciously released everything as Surgeon because I wanted to just put everything into that project. That was a techno name. If I produced music that I felt wasn’t techno, then that’s when I released it under my own name. Then obviously, collaborations, as we’ve said in the beginning, that’s a very different thing. So it’s obviously good to have a different name for that. It’s funny. I remember at the time I felt it was very confusing with all these pseudonyms and I worked with a lot of people who had many pseudonyms, and there were so many that I didn’t even know. They were projects where I wasn’t sure if it was them or not. It’s kind of fun, but I think some of them regret that it dissipated the impact.
Speedy J: We’re at this stage now where the way you present music, on Bandcamp pages or Spotify playlists, you can still recombine them. They were shattered in the beginning when everything was sort of single releases on different labels, different 12-inches, but now it’s possible to collect everything together again.
I’m interested in talking about your collaborative album, Two Hours or Something (2024). This is an interesting project to me because it’s fully improvised and unedited. It’s a long album in general too, and I think it’s great just to have all this music in one place. I’m curious if you could talk to me about what it was like to go into the STOOR lab in Rotterdam and make this album.
Surgeon: The start of all this was the gig that we played. We played a gig in Berlin on a Thursday at a venue called Zenner and it has quite a different feel—it’s not a typical Berlin club. They have a series where they like to get people to come and play live for three hours, which is, you know, a long time. So me and Jochem played a three-hour live set there, and I think we really went a lot deeper into our musical character as Multiples than we had done before. We flew back to Amsterdam and then went to Rotterdam and spent, I keep forgetting, is it two or three days?
Speedy J: Two days, yeah. It was all recorded, cut, and mixed in two days.
Surgeon: Yeah. We used exactly the same gear that we used at this gig. We set our gear up on this table, pretty much facing each other, and we went in again. The gig really warmed us up. Something very special and very weird happened in that session. It had a very strong gravity, I would say. As an example, who was taking the photos again?
Speedy J: Sander [Voets] was there. It’s funny you say this because we were so focused and so much in the zone, and we were both kind of like… this is going great but the terrain we are exploring is fucking out there. It is very telling that you don’t even know who took the pictures because he was there for two hours, around us and with the camera (laughter).
Surgeon: I couldn’t even remember who was there. It really was a powerful, psychedelic type of experience with the music. I love the fact that Sander was taking the photos, and it was very obvious he was getting mentally affected by what we were doing.
Speedy J: The Zenner gig was definitely something that set us on that path to do more deep exploration, but we both kind of knew it was also because we did these sessions during the pandemic. The remote sessions were pretty out there, too. Maybe not as out there as this one, but we knew it was part of the range that we could both end up in. Some of the gigs we did before the Zenner gig were peak-time dance floor slots, so you don’t really venture out too much. We were just exploring the range of the gear and how far we could push the sound we came up with together.
What was it like to perform at Zenner, where there is an audience, and to then go into STOOR where there isn’t one?
Speedy J: When you play for an audience there is an exchange of energy. You’re sending out energy and you receive it back—you enhance one another—and you can play with that. If you change the amount of energy you hold back, you can wait and actually utilize that exchange of energy in a way to make the performance more interesting. And obviously, that’s something that you don’t have when you’re in the studio. I would say, however, that the process is the same. We are still there listening to each other and trying to come up with something that fits the moment. Then you meander and stumble upon things until you both think, okay, let’s go with this for a while.
Surgeon: The audience being there, just as Jochem said, is a different factor in terms of the energy exchange. In this situation I felt that doing the gig at Zenner was a perfect warmup for the recording sessions.
Speedy J: To illustrate what the sessions are like, there are very few words exchanged. It’s basically some housekeeping things like—“Is the sequencer running, is this recording, do you have this cable, shall we have coffee?”—stuff like that. It’s non-musical. But in terms of the music, we didn’t have any plans beforehand for any of the tracks. It was true improvisation—we just started the clock and got the machines running, and then we responded to whatever was going on.
Surgeon: Another factor that worked really well was Jochem had the master clock, the master tempo that we were synced to, but he ran it from the 909 drum machine. It’s essentially just turning a dial, and it doesn’t sound that significant, but it’s very different from typing in a tempo on a computer or some sort of digital readout. I think that technique came at Zenner because I can’t remember if we’d done that before. It was just this idea of, “Here’s a section, let’s just destroy it.” So he’d turn this knob, not knowing what it is, turning it higher and lower. We weren’t paying attention numerically to the tempo; it could be really slow, it could be fast, but we started there and stirred up chaos (laughter). Here we go—boom.
I know this duo started in 2017 or so. How do you feel like you two have evolved as a duo?
Surgeon: You know, I’ve done techno and Jochem has as well for a really long time. And the reason I still love it is that I haven’t run out of ways of stretching that. There is the structure—let’s call it techno—and you can stretch it and pull it and distort it so much, and it’s still somehow techno. I feel like a lot of other styles are much more clearly defined; it’s much easier to disrupt them in a way where it’s no longer that style anymore. That’s what I love about techno, and with Multiples we’re just stretching it in this way that I haven’t done before. It’s just like, this is great fun. Let’s just keep going.
Speedy J: When we started, there were these roles that were a little more clearly defined. We were both using our then-current live setups and, in the beginning, the roles were like… I was more concerned with the backbone of the sound, like the bass and drums. I was basically a drummer and a bass player, and Tony was the guitarist and the singer (laughter). Or Tony was the rapper and I was doing the beats (laughter). The more the project developed, the more we became like a single machine.
Can you tell me about how the song titles came about? You have one called “Coffee Nerd.”
Surgeon: I think unintentionally, one way of looking at the title and all the track names is that it’s almost like an anti-concept album because they’re very biographical. Someone else mentioned that they sound like in-jokes, which they sort of are, but they just relate to things from those days we made the recording.
Speedy J: We were just there to have fun with the machines. We did some stuff outside of being in the studio, like having a walk or going to get a coffee or a sandwich. We incorporated those activities into the titles. But there honestly is nothing heavy or serious about this album. It’s just us having fun, right? There was no intention behind it. If people think it’s a serious album, it’s not.
Surgeon: But not nice (laughter).
Speedy J. It is not nice. I would say it’s a very easy-to-digest album, to be honest, because it keeps you in one place all the time. It’s not demanding or anything. You can keep your distance from it, you can have it on in the background or as part of your environment without being annoyed all the time. I think it’s because it was all made in one go, in one state of mind. It basically captures the mood of those two days of recording, and that’s it.
Was there anything that we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to mention?
Surgeon: I think this interview covered things really well. It felt really easy and flowing, as we like it.
Speedy J: Good session (laughter).
There’s a question I end all my interviews with and I wanted to ask it to both of you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
Surgeon: I would say it’s my persistence, but it’s a double-edged sword. It’s like when there’s awareness attached to it, then it’s very good. But when there isn’t awareness, it can be more destructive.
Speedy J: I don’t know man, I’ll email you the answer (laughter).
Multiples’ album Two Hours or Something is out now.
Thank you for reading the 189th issue of Tone Glow. Never got that email.
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A great interview and insight to Surgeon and Speedy J's creative process
Had no idea this was a thing. Thanks for the pointer!