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viewing 1 To 13 of 13 items
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2x12"
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LOVE 069LP
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2022 edition. New cover art. Andy Stott's radical 2011 bonecrusher returns on its first new pressing for almost a decade, still screwing the dance and heads like nothing else with its lo-sprung suspended takes on boogie dub and claggiest rhythmic thumpers. The sludgy, slow-motion slug of Passed Me By marked a pivotal point when Stott swam against the grain of prevailing currents of the post-dubstep era's turn toward garage-techno and UKF-inspired percussive house. Working loosely adjacent to a then emergent witch-house sound, Andy screwed templates associated to Salem and Holy Other into a more muscular, thrumming style of drug chug more in key with early Actress, arriving at his own distinctive sound that sent us reeling. Between the intoxicating, syrupy gnarrr of "New Ground" with its Proustian vocal motifs, and the head-wobbling Pennine weather system compressions of its titular curtain closer, it's a stone cold classic; eliciting heads-down, wall-banging reactions in the side-chained thrum of "North To South" and a lip-biting MDMA-buzz come up with the thriller funk of "Intermittent", while sore thumb "Dark Details" gives shivering flashbacks to warehouse brukouts and "Execution" curbs the high with a K-holing drag. Delivering a narcotic, keeling dose of nostalgia that slings us back to late hours in the office and blunted afters with the goodest kru, Passed Me By was one of those records that made you reassess pretty much everything else around at the time, practically forcing you to play other stuff on the wrong speed if we wanted to DJ with it, or more simply letting it run and slowly shift temporal perceptions and paradigms in the process. Mastered and cut by LUPO. Clear vinyl; edition of 700.
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2x12"
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LOVE 072LP
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2022 edition. New cover art. Andy Stott's ultra-classic bout of screwed, knackered house is a shapeshifting, hardy perennial whose crushing traction and atmospheric grip has only deepened in the decade (+1) since it was first issued, as part of a now notorious one-two in 2011 beside Passed Me By (LOVE 069LP). Out of print for almost a decade, it's now finally available again in a new edition that's still sounding unlike pretty much anything else we've heard in the intervening years. We Stay Together was a proper watershed moment for Andy Stott in the nascent phase of an inspirational stylistic arc. While he'd spent the previous six years constructing everything from warehouse-shuddering deep house and dub techno to bare-boned dubstep, the arrival of a new decade paid witness to Stott turning inward, collapsing what he'd learnt from late night sessions with the Modern Love crew into a radical new sound that was arguably without precedent in its field. The simple move of screwing the tempo to circa 100BPM would, in turn, open out his sound, prising room between the rhythms which he colored with a palette of particularly bruised, processed outside-the-box textures gleaned from an array of guitar pedals and endlessly churned samples. There were, of course, parallels in DJ Screw's codeine-infused treatments of classic rap and soul, and their influence on the contemporaneous "witch house" style, but few, if any, were doing it within a techno and club music context that hewed so close to the darker, gristlier underbelly and animus of Manchester's warehouse heritage. This style of viscous, cranky chug proved fertile ground that would be explored in-depth over the next decade -- you can hear traces of it on everything from Overmono's sludge to Low's acclaimed Double Negative -- and it's the source of it all. But, still, nothing twats quite as smart or heavy as We Stay Together. From an opening that uncannily echoes the rinsed-out empty warehouse scenes in the closing stages of "Fioriucci Made Me Hardcore", the serotonin-depleted "Submission" triggers a side-chained momentum that helplessly drags users thru the gnarly mire of "Posers" to the zombied lurch of "Bad Wires" and its title tune's ket-legged strut. He pushes the aesthetics to asphyxiating degrees on "Cherry Eye", but not without a glimmer of hope in its underwater choral motifs that always buoys his best bits from utter doom, before "Cracked" stresses the metallic tang of his textures with a bloodlust and vital, systolic throb whose effect has only been galvanized with age. Clear vinyl; edition of 700.
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2LP
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LOVE 119LP
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Double LP version. It's been a decade since Andy Stott released Passed Me By (2011), a radical re-imagining of dance music as an expression of "physical and spiritual exhaustion" (Pitchfork). What followed was a process of rapid remodeling: We Stay Together (2011) -- slow and fucked, for the club, Luxury Problems (2012) -- greyscale romance, Faith In Strangers (2014) -- destroyed love songs, Too Many Voices (2016) -- 4th world Triton shimmers, and It Should Be Us (2019) -- the club, collapsed, a run of releases that gradually untangled complex ideas into a singular, chaotic body of work somewhere between sound-art, techno and pop. In early 2020 - with a new album almost done and an offer to produce for a completely mainstream artist on the table -- personal upheaval brought everything to a sudden standstill. Months of withdrawal eventually triggered renewed curiosity, a different approach. Stott began to record hours of raw material; slow horns, sibilance, delayed drums, wondering flutes -- whatever, whenever. And although software made it possible to iron out every kink and knot, Stott tirelessly looked for them -- in pursuit of a sound that was human in all its awkward asymmetry. With vocals recorded by Alison Skidmore, the album was finally completed late in the year -- taking on a completely different shape. Its songs were desolate, melancholy, defiant, beautiful -- often all at once. The sounds echoed music around Stott during those months: Prince, Gavin Bryars, A.R. Kane, Bohren & der Club of Gore, Robert Turman, Cindy Lee, Leila, Catherine Christer Hennix, Junior Boys, László Hortobágyi, Nídia, Prefab Sprout -- the unusual, the familiar. And echoing that mix of new and old, each of the songs on Never The Right Time seem woven from the same thread despite following different trajectories; from the lovelorn shimmer of opener "Away Not gone", to the clattering linndrum pop of "The Beginning", through "Answers" angular club haze, and the city-at-night end-credits "Hard To Tell". These are songs fueled by nostalgia and soul searching, but all hold true to a vision of music making as a form of renewal and reinvention. A ten-year cycle, complete. Mastered by Rashad Becker.
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CD
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LOVE 119CD
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It's been a decade since Andy Stott released Passed Me By (2011), a radical re-imagining of dance music as an expression of "physical and spiritual exhaustion" (Pitchfork). What followed was a process of rapid remodeling: We Stay Together (2011) -- slow and fucked, for the club, Luxury Problems (2012) -- greyscale romance, Faith In Strangers (2014) -- destroyed love songs, Too Many Voices (2016) -- 4th world Triton shimmers, and It Should Be Us (2019) -- the club, collapsed, a run of releases that gradually untangled complex ideas into a singular, chaotic body of work somewhere between sound-art, techno and pop. In early 2020 - with a new album almost done and an offer to produce for a completely mainstream artist on the table -- personal upheaval brought everything to a sudden standstill. Months of withdrawal eventually triggered renewed curiosity, a different approach. Stott began to record hours of raw material; slow horns, sibilance, delayed drums, wondering flutes -- whatever, whenever. And although software made it possible to iron out every kink and knot, Stott tirelessly looked for them -- in pursuit of a sound that was human in all its awkward asymmetry. With vocals recorded by Alison Skidmore, the album was finally completed late in the year -- taking on a completely different shape. Its songs were desolate, melancholy, defiant, beautiful -- often all at once. The sounds echoed music around Stott during those months: Prince, Gavin Bryars, A.R. Kane, Bohren & der Club of Gore, Robert Turman, Cindy Lee, Leila, Catherine Christer Hennix, Junior Boys, László Hortobágyi, Nídia, Prefab Sprout -- the unusual, the familiar. And echoing that mix of new and old, each of the songs on Never The Right Time seem woven from the same thread despite following different trajectories; from the lovelorn shimmer of opener "Away Not gone", to the clattering linndrum pop of "The Beginning", through "Answers" angular club haze, and the city-at-night end-credits "Hard To Tell". These are songs fueled by nostalgia and soul searching, but all hold true to a vision of music making as a form of renewal and reinvention. A ten-year cycle, complete. Mastered by Rashad Becker.
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2x12"
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LOVE 114LP
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2020 black vinyl repress. Andy Stott's first release since 2016 and first EP since 2011, It Should Be Us is a double EP of slow and raw productions for the club, recorded in 2019 and following a series of EPs that started with Passed Me By (LOVE 069LP) and We Stay Together (LOVE 072LP) early this decade. Recorded fast and loose over the summer, these eight tracks harness a pure and bare-boned energy, melodies subsumed by drum machines and synths; slow, rugged hedonism. It's all about rhythmic heat and disorientation, pure dance and DJ specials rendered at an unsteady pace, from percolated house and percussive rituals to moody tripped-out burners. There'll be a new Andy Stott album in 2020, but in the meantime... this one's for dancing. Mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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2LP
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LOVE 101LP
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Repressed. Double LP version. Too Many Voices is the fourth album from Andy Stott, a follow-up to 2014's Faith in Strangers (LOVE 098CD). It was recorded from 2014-2016 and sees a diverse spectrum of influences bleed into nine tracks that are as searching as they are memorable. The album draws inspiration from the fourth-world pop of Japan's Yellow Magic Orchestra as much as it does Triton-fueled grime made 25 years later. Somewhere between these two points there's an oddly aligned vision of the future that seeps through the pores of each of the tracks. It's a vision of the future as it was once imagined; artificial, strange, and immaculate. Full of possibilities. The album opens with the harmonized, deteriorating pads of "Waiting For You" and arcs through to the synthetic chamber pop of the closing title-track, referencing Sylvian and Sakamoto's "Bamboo Houses" (1982) as much as it does the ethereal landscapes of This Mortal Coil and Dead Can Dance. In between, the climate and palette constantly shift, taking in the midnight pop of "Butterflies"; the humid, breathless house of "First Night"; and the endlessly cascading "Forgotten." Longtime vocal contributor Alison Skidmore features on half the tracks, sometimes augmented by the same simulated materials as on the dystopian breakdown of "Selfish," and at others surrounded by beautiful synth washes, such as on the mercurial "Over" or the dreamy, neon-lit "New Romantic." It's all far removed from the digital synthesis and the abstracted intricacies that define much of the current electronic landscape. The same cybernetic palette is here implanted into more human form; sometimes cold, but more often thrumming with life. Mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy.
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CD
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LOVE 101CD
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Too Many Voices is the fourth album from Andy Stott, a follow-up to 2014's Faith in Strangers (LOVE 098CD). It was recorded from 2014-2016 and sees a diverse spectrum of influences bleed into nine tracks that are as searching as they are memorable. The album draws inspiration from the fourth-world pop of Japan's Yellow Magic Orchestra as much as it does Triton-fueled grime made 25 years later. Somewhere between these two points there's an oddly aligned vision of the future that seeps through the pores of each of the tracks. It's a vision of the future as it was once imagined; artificial, strange, and immaculate. Full of possibilities. The album opens with the harmonized, deteriorating pads of "Waiting For You" and arcs through to the synthetic chamber pop of the closing title-track, referencing Sylvian and Sakamoto's "Bamboo Houses" (1982) as much as it does the ethereal landscapes of This Mortal Coil and Dead Can Dance. In between, the climate and palette constantly shift, taking in the midnight pop of "Butterflies"; the humid, breathless house of "First Night"; and the endlessly cascading "Forgotten." Longtime vocal contributor Alison Skidmore features on half the tracks, sometimes augmented by the same simulated materials as on the dystopian breakdown of "Selfish," and at others surrounded by beautiful synth washes, such as on the mercurial "Over" or the dreamy, neon-lit "New Romantic." It's all far removed from the digital synthesis and the abstracted intricacies that define much of the current electronic landscape. The same cybernetic palette is here implanted into more human form; sometimes cold, but more often thrumming with life. Mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy.
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2LP
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LOVE 098LP
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2015 limited vinyl repress. Double LP version. Making use of on an array of instruments, field recordings, found sounds and vocal treatments, it's a largely analog variant of hi-tech production styles arcing from the dissonant to the sublime.
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CD
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LOVE 098CD
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Faith in Strangers was written and recorded between January 2013 and June 2014, and was edited and sequenced in late July of 2014. Making use of on an array of instruments, field recordings, found sounds and vocal treatments, it's a largely analog variant of hi-tech production styles arcing from the dissonant to the sublime. The first two tracks recorded during these early sessions bookend the release, the opener "Time Away" featuring euphonium played by Kim Holly Thorpe and last track "Missing," a contribution by Stott's occasional vocal collaborator Alison Skidmore, who also appeared on 2012's Luxury Problems. Between these two points Faith in Strangers heads off from the sparse and infected "Violence" to the broken, downcast pop of "On Oath" and the motorik, driving melancholy of "Science & Industry" -- three vocal tracks built around that angular production style that imbues proceedings with both a pioneering spirit and a resonating sense of familiarity. Things take a sharp turn with "No Surrender"-- a sparkling analog jam making way for a tough, smudged rhythmic assault, while "How It Was" refracts sweaty warehouse signatures and "Damage" finds the sweet spot between RZA's classic "Ghost Dog" and Terror Danjah at his most brutal. "Faith in Strangers" is next and offers perhaps the most beautiful and open track here, its vocal hook and chiming melody bound to the rest of the album via the almost inaudible hum of Stott's mixing desk. It provides a haze of warmth and nostalgia that ties the nine loose joints that make up the LP into the most memorable and oddly cohesive of Stott's career to date, built and rendered in the spirit of those rare albums that straddle innovation and tradition through darkness and light, lingering on in the mind like nothing else. CD comes packaged in a 6-panel digifile.
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2CD
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LOVE 1070CD
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2014 Jewel case repress, replaces the original oversized gatefold digifile edition. Two acclaimed albums from Andy Stott, including four bonus tracks. Produced slowly and meticulously, these two EPs were originally released on vinyl during 2011 and have become the most widely-admired productions yet from Manchester-based Andy Stott. Taking influence from an array of seemingly incoherent noises, from the indefinable and unforgettable mind-tricks of Arthur Russell to the slow house of Kassem Mosse, from the alternate VHS realities of James Ferraro and Jamal Moss to the Linn Drum classics of the vintage Prince-era -- these tracks create their own pace and agenda, largely shying away from the dancefloor in favor of something more complex and hard to define. Mastered at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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12"
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LOVE 095EP
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Earlier this year, Andy Stott found himself playing on the same bill as New York "heavy metal hoarders," Batillus. Despite operating in completely different spheres, Batillus had been playing Luxury Problems, Stott's most recent album, on their tour bus and suggested a remix. The result is pressed up on this one-sided 12", a deadly reduction that pitches the original down into the abyss.
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2LP
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LOVE 079LP
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Limited 2023 repress, transparent violet vinyl. Gatefold double LP version. Following on from a pair of extended players released in 2011 (Passed Me By/We Stay Together) Andy Stott returns to Modern Love with Luxury Problems, an eight-track album of new material recorded over the last 12 months. Five of the tracks on the album feature the voice of Alison Skidmore, Andy's one-time piano teacher whom he hadn't seen since he was a teenager back in 1996. There was no grand gesture in mind, it just sort of happened -- but after almost a year of studio work, the result is really quite unlike anything you'll have heard from him before. "Numb" opens the album with Alison's voice; layered and looped, but essentially left bare and exposed, tumbling into a dense shuffle, sort of somewhere between Theo Parrish and Sade, but more fucked. "Lost and Found" follows and deploys a growling rave bass line and a disturbed vocal, the beat assembling itself around a squashed Linndrum like a submerged Prince/Cameo production, haunted and impenetrable, but full of funk. "Sleepless" started life as an African drum edit that sooner or later succumbed to Stott's intense rhythmic shifts. It's a sound that's been imitated countless times since the release of Passed Me By, here re-tooled and re-built for its next evolutionary phase. "Hatch the Plan" ends the first half of the album with some heavily treated location recordings and a low-end grind that probably doesn't quite prepare you for the vocal arrangements that follow -- it's just a beautifully inverted pop song. The second half opens with "Expecting," the most recognizably "Stott" moment on the album: a wrecked, deliriously knocked-out 4/4 shuffle deployed at half-speed; those heavy kick drums sucking in everything around them. "Luxury Problems" offers up the album's most quietly euphoric moment; conventional arrangements and drum loops are disrupted by sharp disco bursts that mess with what you know: it's straight and beautiful and unbalanced and damaged, somehow all at once. "Up the Box" fucks with the narrative and goes somewhere else entirely, an extended intro that seems to build continuously for 3 minutes before breaking off into a slowed-down amen edit, creating a kind of narcotic jungle variant that fragments everything and ends just at the point you think it's going to go off, before "Leaving" finishes the album with an almost unbearably-beautiful arrangement of voice and synth and a final key-change that takes you from joyful to forlorn in an instant. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Air Studios.
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CD
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LOVE 079CD
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Repressed! Following on from a pair of extended players released in 2011 (Passed Me By/We Stay Together) Andy Stott returns to Modern Love with Luxury Problems, an eight-track album of new material recorded over the last 12 months. Five of the tracks on the album feature the voice of Alison Skidmore, Andy's one-time piano teacher whom he hadn't seen since he was a teenager back in 1996. There was no grand gesture in mind, it just sort of happened -- but after almost a year of studio work, the result is really quite unlike anything you'll have heard from him before. "Numb" opens the album with Alison's voice; layered and looped, but essentially left bare and exposed, tumbling into a dense shuffle, sort of somewhere between Theo Parrish and Sade, but more fucked. "Lost and Found" follows and deploys a growling rave bass line and a disturbed vocal, the beat assembling itself around a squashed Linndrum like a submerged Prince/Cameo production, haunted and impenetrable, but full of funk. "Sleepless" started life as an African drum edit that sooner or later succumbed to Stott's intense rhythmic shifts. It's a sound that's been imitated countless times since the release of Passed Me By, here re-tooled and re-built for its next evolutionary phase. "Hatch the Plan" ends the first half of the album with some heavily treated location recordings and a low-end grind that probably doesn't quite prepare you for the vocal arrangements that follow -- it's just a beautifully inverted pop song. The second half opens with "Expecting," the most recognizably "Stott" moment on the album: a wrecked, deliriously knocked-out 4/4 shuffle deployed at half-speed; those heavy kick drums sucking in everything around them. "Luxury Problems" offers up the album's most quietly euphoric moment; conventional arrangements and drum loops are disrupted by sharp disco bursts that mess with what you know: it's straight and beautiful and unbalanced and damaged, somehow all at once. "Up the Box" fucks with the narrative and goes somewhere else entirely, an extended intro that seems to build continuously for 3 minutes before breaking off into a slowed-down amen edit, creating a kind of narcotic jungle variant that fragments everything and ends just at the point you think it's going to go off, before "Leaving" finishes the album with an almost unbearably-beautiful arrangement of voice and synth and a final key-change that takes you from joyful to forlorn in an instant. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Air Studios. Deluxe 6-panel digifile CD.
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viewing 1 To 13 of 13 items
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