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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
Manchester-based dj and techno producer Andy Stott established himself with
a series of diligent EPs, later compiled on Unknown Exception (2008),
well representative of the early dubstep scene
(Long Drive and Replace from the EP Replace, 2005;
Credit from Ceramics, 2005;
Shes Gone Wrong from The Nervous, 2006;
the two sides of the single Handle With Care/ See In Me, 2006;
the single The Massacre, 2007;
the two sides of Fear Of Heights/ Made your Point, 2007;
the single Hostile, 2007;
the two sides of Bad Landing/ Fine Metallic Dollar, 2008).
He rose to prominence in the minimal-techno scene with
the album Merciless (2006), and then he
reinvented himself with the slow-motion jarring murky noir dub-tinged techno of the six-song mini-album Passed Me By (Modern Love, 2011):
New Ground is a simply syncopated loop with debris of sensual female vocals, but
North to South litters a convoluted beat with industrial noises,
while
Intermittent
injects orchestral samples
into a spinning beat.
The most sophisticated pieces are
Dark Details, an Afro-tribal beat that ends in a sort of solipsistic swing dance, and the reverbed, horror atmosphere of Execution.
The short release reveals a stellar amount of creativity.
Its companion six-song EP We Stay Together (2011) boasts more abstract beats (the beat all but disappears in Cherry Eye, the album's standout)
and a more gothic atmosphere (Posers), but in general it is vastly inferior.
The more trivial beats of Bad Wires and We Stay Together signal a shift towards more conventional techno music.
Luxury Problems (Modern Love, 2012), featuring vocalist
Alison Skidmore, was baroquely produced to foster
an unlikely fusion of ambient, techno and trip-hop music with a ghastly
expressionist flavor.
Numb takes a looped breathless whisper and manufactures (sexy) rhythm
and (gloomy) atmosphere out of it before using its melodic content to recover
its identity of trip-hop balladry.
Brazilian chanting collides with strident dissonance in another hummable
song, Hatch The Plan.
Operatic invocations accentuate the ghostly aspect of the pulsing fabric of
Lost And Found, slowly morphing into a busy Brazilian batucada.
Sleepless is a more straightforward dance piece, with
factory metronomes, glitchy noises and vocal snippets staging an
android pow-wow of sorts.
The abstract purely instrumental electronic fantasia Expecting borders
on cosmic and gothic music, a deeply cryptic piece of music that seems
to blend distorted samples of a thousand voices.
At the other end of the spectrum, the jovial and soulful
Luxury Problems, built around a
steady (up)beat and heavenly chopped-up vocals, breaks the spell of
the bleak suicidal mood.
And Stott closes the album in a morbidly mellow tone with
Leaving, a cross of
dream-pop litany, children's lullaby and church hymn.
This is one of the most creative techno albums since the 1990s, assuming
that it can still be called "techno".
Faith in Strangers (Modern Love, 2014) reveals a harsher side of the
artist. It opens with Time Away in the vein of the
fatalistic Brian Eno-esque undulating ambient
drift,
but the use of an euphonium (played by Kim Holly Thorpe) instead of a keyboard
lends it a macabre tone, which segues into the
glacial psychological kammerspiel torn by abrasive riffs of Violence.
The eight-minute On Oath starts with otherworldly breathing that reverbs in a cathedral-like void, and that the most fragile of female vocals use for their looping nursery rhyme, and then the beat picks up, and soon doubles, injecting new life into her tender monologue.
The sinister theme continues on Science & Industry,
despite poppy chanteuse-like singing, thanks to the neurotic combination of
slow tides of electronics and ticking overlapping beats.
The electronic melody of No Surrender exudes a sense of melodrama,
and the rhythm mercilessly assails it, booming and banging and bouncing.
Even the gentle Missing slows down to a crawling speed that evokes
inner ghosts and funereal rites, especially when the electronic wind picks up,
covering everything like a shroud.
On the downside, Faith In Strangers is nothing but a
soul ballad for cocktail lounges, "low art" camouflaged as "high art";
Damage is an industrial dance number like many heard before;
and the looping robotic How It Was lands into a Brian Eno album of the 1970s.
Demdike Stare's
Miles Whittaker and Stott were also active as Millie & Andrea, a project documented on Drop the Vowels (2014).
Andy Stott and Alison Skidmore further tamed their sound on
Too Many Voices (Modern Love, 2016). Despite the
cacophonous overture Waiting For You, most of the album contents itself
with simple songs, from the anemic falsetto soul ballad Butterflies
to the Enya-esque lullaby Too Many Voices.
There is even a melodic peak: the nostalgic laid-back techno carillon of On My Mind.
New Romantic is slightly more complicated: funky synth-pop with farting bass line, silky keyboards and Skidmore's ecstatic vocals.
Stott's cubistic downtempo is better represented by the
industrial grime of Selfish that dissolves into bubbles of female vocals and electronic ping-pong.
The nine-song, 47-minute, double EP It Should Be Us (2019) boasts the
relatively lively It Should Be Us, the tribal 0L9,
the monotonous industrial Not This Time,
the warped dub music of Versi
and especially the ambient-psychedelic atmosphere of Take.
Never the Right Time (2021) was even more disappointing, a collection
of ethereal dance songs whispered by Alison Skidmore (like the
ambient dream-pop of Away Not Gone) and of lifeless
beat-less ambient vignettes like Dove Stone.
The polyrhythmic Never the Right Time
and Answers are mildly interesting, but the album is mostly uninspired.
The cassette The Slow Ribbon (2022) is another waste of time.
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