Available on: Modern Love 2×12″
Andy Stott’s sound seems to get more and more primitive every year. The Manchester dub-techno legend, one of the UK’s most impeccable techno producers going, introduced some real grit to his sound in 2009 with dancefloor stompers like ‘Brief Encounter’ and ‘Drippin’. Then, ignoring his bass-leaning work as Andrea, Stott’s last official release was the ‘Tell Me Anything’ single, where every element was swollen to grotesque proportions as the beats heaved and groaned, but it was a sublimity more austere than awe-inspiring. Thankfully, any worries that Stott might slump into dub-techno complacency can be put to rest with his latest doublepack EP – which is, in fact, kind of awe-inspiring.
It’s as if Stott has awoken from some long and laboured sleep, emerging haggard and caked in petrified dirt: everything here sounds broken, sawed-off, obfuscated, even Hellish. The grinding, blurred landscape of ‘Tell Me Anything’ feels like luminous clarity in comparison to the misshapen Stonehenge structures on Passed Me By. Stott fosters a pervasive mood of uncertainty and druggy, half-awake terror: the first time you hear the loud, dissonant vocal emerge from the dry ice fog on ‘New Ground’, you’ll never quite be the same again. It’s a feat of wholly manufactured un-manufacturing, where the makeshift rhythm cracks wide open as the intrusive gasp “there’s something about you” is shoved through, before the mysterious substances reassamble themselves back into the track’s terrifying limp.
When Andy Stott reduces his dub-techno to this kind of prehistoric frequency-fucked futurism, he owes a distinct debt to Actress, a relationship fully revealed in the EP’s flat-out amazing highlight ‘North to South’. Struggling to complete every bar on a stagger that makes its predecessor sound like a Highgrade release, ‘North to South’ is a nightmarish vision of 2-step, establishing the cyclic hypnotism through what sounds like a plane crashing – screeeeech, thud, screeeeech, thud – a herky-jerk dynamic that feels utterly Splazsh-esque. The impact is painfully visceral every single time, and it’s such an oddly effective rhythmic device that it also remains disturbingly compelling, the carnage impossible to look away from. Elsewhere, Stott descends to the demonic, with ‘Dark Details’ wading through bubbling tar pits as pitched-down vocals bark and the kick drum struggles to slice through the slime, and ‘Execution”s gravelly chords sound like noxious fumes from the breathy exhortations of some hideous monster.
Actress isn’t the only act inspiring Stott: his vision of the past also digests those ’80s pop touchstones that are currently infecting nearly every facet of independent music, and tracks like ‘North To South’ and ‘New Ground’ have a monolithic boominess to their percussion that screams mawkish mid-eighties. But when repurposed for these gurgling caveman techno incantations, it becomes a threateningly violent mechanism, only adding to the foreboding alien unfamiliarity. Not content to end it there, Stott plays with the dynamic on the cheeky ‘Intermission’, which pairs a syrup-laden, boulder-strewn progression with big ol’ chunks of pop melody, before the whole thing speeds up and unravels to reveal itself as a prime slice of R&B-lite muzak. Sure, The Field might have done the same thing with ‘A Paw In My Face’, but compare that producer’s soothingly glassy grooves to Stott’s thundering detonations and it’s a whole different game. Stott does make a move back towards slight accessibility and pleasantry with the title track, but even its careful drone feels permanently scratched, chipped, and thoughtlessly vandalized.
Touching on all the trends it does, it’s tempting to see Passed Me By from the angle of uncanny opportunism, but it’s just as tempting to view it as the masterwork of a fine producer fearlessly stepping into the next stage of his career. Stott’s is a transition that seems predictable in hindsight but nevertheless strikes deep in the gut upon first encounter, leaving an indelible bruise and dragging you kicking and screaming back to its sweltering smelter again and again, where drums are melted down and reconstructed into disgusting disfigurements of their former selves. The EP’s striking cover art — monochromatic, ancient, and packed to the brim with xenophobic, primitive anxiety — bears resemblance to T++’s Wireless from last year, both records exploring the pinnacle of technological possibility using source material from the past, and both utilizing the imagery both aural and visual of long-forgotten ‘savage’ cultures to make equally savage and uncompromising music. At a time when dub techno is one of the laziest and least inspiring genres in electronic music, one of the brightest people at its peripheries shows just how far into the jungle those borders extend, and it’s one hell of a place to visit. Hopefully you can make it out alive.
Andrew Ryce
