Andy Stott seems to revel in the art of mystique. The UK producer leaves his album artwork enigmatic and their titles ambiguous; a stark presentation to entail what bleak milieu lies ahead. Many use symbols, logos, and typefaces to characterize their mystique, but Stott's distinctly bare choice of imagery is what remains inseparable from the music's desolate air. Appropriately yet imprecisely his material is commonly associated with dub techno, a variety in which Stott utilizes many of its principal elements, but the term "techno" and its inextricable attachment to electronic music are rather distant from the primal nature of Passed Me By and We Stay Together, Stott's two 2011 efforts.
With his 2006 debut Merciless, Stott attained an instrumental foundation of synthesizer refrains overlying plush, subtle rhythms. Passed Me By is a self-evident transformation-- a progression by way of regression. Its greater impression is warranted by austerity, with its focal point ascribed to the percussion. At the hand of Merciless' melodic penchant deteriorating came a loss of humanity as its followup had grown ugly and obscured by a pall of dust, distinguishing Stott from a great stretch of other producers. Months later, a companion piece has been uncovered to coexist in this freshly viscous atmosphere.
From where its predecessor emerged as an astonishing proposal, We Stay Together thickens, innovates, and excels. The near-formless opener "Submission" is smitten with degradation, awash in a static tide, and its successor "Posers" accumulates pace through a mutant, sinister stomp. "We Stay Together (Part One)" alternates between a four-to-the-floor pulse and a warped snare roll, amassing stratum with each earth-shattering measure. At the tail-end, "Cracked" possesses the closest semblance of a tune with a quivering smudge of voices. We Stay Together is a challenge to the ilk which it bestrides, too measured to fully encapsulate the avant-garde and too unearthly to find a home on the dancefloor; visceral and cerebral all told.
[Andy Stott Discogs]
[Stream/Buy We Stay Together from Modern Love]
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