Electronic Soundbender Andy Stott on ‘Plastic’ Feel of New LP
Manchester electronic producer Andy Stott offered a strain of electronic music that was heavily narcotized, noisy and nightmarish — the beats slow and pummeling, the mood dark and menacing. But upcoming fourth album Too Many Voices shows Stott moving away from his dense, dark sound. He plays with pop vocals, more ethereal tones and lighter beats to disorienting effect. It’s the sound of a bruising heavyweight fighter deciding he wants to take up tai chi.
Rolling Stone caught up with the elusive producer after his night-closing set at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville last week and talked about how he traded his grainy sound for something more “plastic,” how his childhood piano teacher changed his musical direction and how old Dizzee Rascal and Slimzee grime mixes informed his new LP.
When you dropped We Stay Together and Passed Me By in 2011, it was a shift in your sound towards something slower, heavier.
My material prior to that was about getting used to the equipment that I had. I was finding all these sounds from records I had growing up. I was emulating Detroit-style stuff, Basic Channel, just figuring out how to mold sounds. With Passed Me By, the Modern Love label head Shlom Sviri suggested that I should start using field recordings and textures from outside my gear. When I started doing that, this whole new world opened up. I wouldn’t sample before. That was how that started. My material started slowing down, tempo-wise, and I was getting more interested in the template of slow and murky. With that and the field recordings, the grain and grit fit into that tempo setting.
How did the introduction of vocals from Alison Skidmore on 2012’s Luxury Problems change the emotional aspect of the tracks? She was your piano teacher when you were teen, correct?
I would have been 15, 16 when I was having piano lessons with her. I knew Alison was into more than just opera and classical music and [when I asked her for vocals] almost right away she was sending me a cappellas and asking, “How do you want the vocal? What language? Whispering? More pop? Operatic?” The first bunch of recordings that Alison sent, I could hear what needed to go around it. I can play a fair bit, layer chords and then bend her voice. Just like with the field recordings, it was a whole new palette. I didn’t know I could do music like this. It just brought out a different approach in me. Gradually, it changed the emotional state of the tracks. It still had the grainy production but it was offset by Alison’s clean, ethereal vocals. I started to move away from the grainy productions and moving towards making everything cleaner and brighter. Just using the vocal, you can really gain a bit more of an emotional pull in the music. It’s really smart and nice when that all comes together. It becomes less cold.
It humanized the tracks in a way. I feel like on Too Many Voices, you’ve moved even further away from those slow, gnarly, extreme tones that defined the previous albums. Was that noise beginning to hem you in?
Not at all. It’s just progression. I just naturally moved away from that sound. My interests have naturally moved on. On Too Many Voices, it’s almost a more plastic, artificial texture, to be honest. Even though I was interested in a new sound palette, at the same time, I didn’t want to completely detach from the previous works. To keep the thread running through everything, that was the knack. Shlom and I talked so much about the tracks I was working on. Once I have a body of work, he’ll sequence it and maintain the thread through it.