Surgeon’s Shell~Wave easily tops my favorite techno records from 2025, a nice return to form for Tresor Records. But as we’re awash in generated artwork, let’s devote our own brain cycles instead to listening to Surgeon talk to Taiwanese artist Jazz Szu-Ying Chen about the craft of making this album cover by hand.
For this year’s Favorites of 2025, I’m doing a series of individual spotlights rather than losing too much in lists…
I’m not entirely sure why Tresor Records sent this out, and I would not be surprised if I’m the only person to pick it up. But — isn’t this the point? Surgeon and Jazz can spend as much time talking about paint and texture as some people will do just spewing some look-alike AI slop with text prompts. And it’s beautiful. I mean, yes, the video call gives this vaguely COVID vibes, but I wound up just putting this on while puttering around some other things, happy that they took the time.
In it, apart from collaboration and personal development, we get to hear about dancing skeletons, memento mori, and a dance macabre in starfish and seashells. It brings the abstract music to imaginative life; it brings the music’s spirit to light.
And this record deserved this. I love everything about it — sumptuous locked grooves that you don’t want to stop, gently dubby machine loops, everything sitting nicely in place. It’s not mastered within an inch of its life, either; honestly, I think techno benefits so much from dynamic range, since it’s about details and groove. It’s easier on the ears. When you play it on a big system, you’ve got the power, anyway; there’s no reason to master it like you think people will play it on a 1960s transistor radio.
I don’t really have much to say about it beyond that, because it doesn’t need a gatekeeper saying things. It’s just instantly something that transports you to another world.
So the artwork from Jazz is a perfect combination.
Now, one of the arguments I see in favor of AI prompting is, what if you don’t have the budget? But honestly, I’d rather see you without any budget go, buy some paints, and paint the cover yourself. I don’t care if it’s perfect. I don’t care if you know what you’re doing. That’d be personal. (Hey, even if you drew it yourself in MS Paint, that’d be personal, too, so it’s not about the computer! Or if you do use AI, bring back self-trained models that are trippy and glitchy and broken and yours.)
And that’s not to say we won’t find ways to use AI in interesting ways; it’s been fantastic for everything from categorizing presets to aiding in rigging animations to doing gesture analysis for computer vision so you can wave your arms around. But if it gets in the way of you taking the time to think about what you want your cover to look like, or making it and reflecting on how it’ll reproduce, we’ve lost something, no?
I do sincerely hope that even without budgets, we can find a way to value each other as artists, even if we have to resort to some creative bartering. Because I’ll bet there’s someone in your life who would appreciate you listening to them talk about their work, or life, or whatever — really talking to them and not only your computer.
Jazz is doing significant work on the Taiwanese art scene, as this clip reveals:
For more of Jazz Szu-Ying Chen’s work, here apparently is some set in motion from 2020’s Torn Relics, which, judging by view coun,t we are the first to see! (And maybe we’re not supposed to see it, but I enjoyed this!)