For fans of: Neo Noir Electronic Sounds
Electronic producer Andy Stott established his audience with the breakthrough "We Stay Together" of 2011 on the UK's Modern Love imprint. In rapid succession, the following year saw an appearance in Seattle's Decibel Festival alongside label-mates Demdike Stare. Their visit to North America showcasing Stott, Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker's brobdingnagian body of work, what The Quietus called "An Unholy Matrimony: In Interview with Demdike Stare". On both occasions their collaborative performances delivering some of the most assured, abstract, darkly rich post-techno currently being made on the planet. Absorbing influences equally from mid-century modernism, musique concrete and late 1970s and 80s industrial, alongside two decades of British underground techno, bass and garage music. These contrasting poles are explored more explicitly, with their dance music signifiers more boldly displayed in their collaborative Millie & Andrea project via distended takes on UK bass music and jungle. Andy Stott detailed this process in his interviews for FACT Mag, "Tearing Up the Rulebook: Making Mistakes is the Most Exciting Thing You Can Do" and "Andy Stott: Lost and Found" for Resident Advisor.
Stott's most recent string of solo full length albums began with "Luxury Problems" which made The Wire's 2012 Rewind list, and saw the essential British magazine hosting a significant interview with him that same year. This was followed by "Too Many Voices" which continued the work heard first on 2014's "Faith in Strangers" in it's merging of dissonant and atonal slabs of sound jostling against fragmented song music and female voice. His sound has continued in this direction, which nods equally to the ethereal female pop of early 4AD, as the austerity of German kosmische, pivoting around the characteristic negative space and minimalism that defines much of Detroit techno of the 1980s. Now comes, "Never the Right Time", in which Stott brings the pop component into even tighter focus, infusing it with the forlorn expansiveness of This Mortal Coil, the trip hop beats and neo-soul of Portishead, and a guitar twang not dissimilar from the best of Mazzy Star. This is all wrapped in a cloak of rain-drenched neo noir, a futurist sheen sourced from the science fiction trajectory of Ridley Scott and Vangelis Papathanassíou's "Blade Runner". —(JP)