It would be hard to improve upon Philip Sherburne’s characterization of these two EPs by English electronic music producer Andy Stott – he claims that they sound “like hellish vultures picking over the carcass of dance music.” If it isn’t immediately obvious to the reader what that might mean, one listen to the music contained in this sinister-looking double-CD package will have you nodding in understanding and agreement. Stott is making doom techno. As in doom metal, the tempos are slowed down drastically, the bass is deeper than hell, and the mood is one of funereal majesty. Unlike doom metal, the listener is spared sub-Throat-Singers-of-Tuva groans and kitsch-horror wails and shrieks. There is nothing cartoonish in Stott’s arctic dread. More than anything else, these tracks – and the style on each is more or less of a piece – scan as a distorted, disturbing mirror image of the halcyon drift of Wolfgang Voigt’s final Gas album, Pop, which was similarly stripped down, and whose beats were similarly submerged in a kind of catatonic murk. Stott’s nightmares are as compelling as Voigt’s narcotic paradise, to which they pay homage even as they undermine and infect.
Request it.