Six months after his Passed Me By EP advanced like a scorched-earth campaign over the ruins of dance music, Andy Stott is back with another six tracks of charred techno. You can bet that in the fast-zombies-versus-slow-zombies debate, Stott sides with the groaners and stumblers: As was his previous record, We Stay Together is a Frankenstein's monster pieced together from scraps of club tracks pitched down to an agonizing crawl. Funny things happen at this speed: The beats lurch violently, kicking up clouds of ash with every impact; every syncopation becomes a hesitant shudder. Sampled vocals, looming in the background, turn to a jellied groan.
The record begins rather demurely with "Submission", five minutes of choral samples and ambient flutter that suggests the sound of a thousand pigeons ruffling their feathers in a catacomb. "Posers", which follows, sets up the idea that will maintain across the rest of the record, with a slowed-down railroad chug, tri-tone strings, and dissonant washes of synthesizer; distant horns sound the mournful call of a failed hunt. Despite the leaden drowsiness, it still moves: There's an infectious sense of groove in its shuffling percussion and echoing finger snaps.
After "Posers", the record's fastest track-- around the same tempo as many of the slow-motion house and disco records being produced by artists like John Talabot, Kassem Mosse, and Blondes; it only feels slower, thanks to its blasted, narcotic production-- things get really torpid. Not just sluggish, but also nasty and mean, degraded and depraved, with more of that death-gurgle bass that led me to compare Stott's last record to Sunn O))). If anything, We Stay Together sounds even more like it could have been released by Southern Lord.
On vinyl, We Stay Together serves a two-for-one purpose: It's meant to be played at 33, but if you speed it up to 45, most of the record's tracks actually become punishing, industrial-strength techno, the kind of sledgehammers associated with Berlin's famously intense Berghain club. Even played like this, though, they don't sound like "normal" techno: they're warped, muted, blown out-- they sound wrong. "Bad Wires" becomes like Surgeon being run through a cubic meter of boiled wool; the clanging "Cracked" comes to sound like several dub techno tracks being played in parallel, with rhythms so disorienting you may wonder if Stott simply sampled a particularly hairy passage from an old DJ mix and slowed it down by 30%.
There's another reason to get this record on vinyl: It sounds way, way better. That might seem odd, given that so much of Stott's sound has to do with using compression, distortion, and other effects to make his music not just strange but even ugly. But, on wax, his swollen low end growls in a way that's almost sensual. (If you must buy digital, pay the extra bucks for the FLAC version; the difference between the high-bitrate version and a compressed MP3 is very real.)
Despite the surface similarities between We Stay Together and Passed Me By, it doesn't feel like Stott is repeating himself. Both records may seem like hellish vultures picking over the carcass of dance music, but every track on the new record yields fresh morsels. Fans of Stott's labelmates Demdike Stare, and all the other goth-n-screw artists out there at the moment, will be happy to gnaw on these bones.
