Exuberance is dance music's usual purview: ecstasy, adrenaline, abandon without end. But there's a whole subset of club music that dedicates itself to the inverse of what we're expected to seek amidst a sweating, heaving crowd-- loneliness, terror, misery, dread. This isn't a new phenomenon; Simon Reynolds has written of how the collective serotonin depletion that followed Britain's acid house effusions turned breakbeat hardcore and drum 'n' bass down darker paths. That music, at least, continued to engage the body, as does its direct descendant, dubstep, thanks to breakneck tempos and spleen-crushing bass.
Enter Andy Stott. The Manchester-based DJ and producer is no stranger to dance music of the most visceral kind. In the latter half of the 2000s, he was best known for steely, speaker-destroying dub techno. Recently, especially under the pseudonym Andrea, he's tried his hand at shuddering, breakbeat-fueled dubstep and 160-BPM juke. But on a new album for Modern Love, he reinterprets techno in dirge-like fashion, slowed to a funereal shuffle and weighted down by a lead blanket of reverb. The term "death disco" has never felt so apt.
It's a modest album, just six tracks and a short, introductory sketch-- some 33 minutes in total. It's the tempos that you notice first: his 4/4 thump moves sluggishly, like a 12" 45 spun at 33 or even slower. House and techno usually lope along at somewhere between 120 and 130 beats per minute; Stott paces his tracks at 100, 90, even 80 BPM. Forget "peak-time" club music: these are trough-time beats. And it's not just a question of speed; every sound is warbly and unstable, like a warped record pitched way, way down. Handclaps and hi-hats crumble into bit-crushed detritus; kick drums and bass frequencies turn to a jellied slush, like solid ground liquefies during earthquakes.
The murky sonics often recall Philip Jeck, who uses vintage turntables with a 16-RPM setting to attain an otherworldly rumble. On a couple of tracks, ethereal female vocals float hazily over the top; "Execution" is suffused with a gravelly death gurgle that wouldn't be out of place on a Sunn O))) record. A pervasive hiss and crackle drives home the idea that we're trawling the depths of vinyl's pockmarked grooves, like one of those microscopic photos that turns a record into a lunar landscape.
Dissonance makes it even more hair-raising. "North to South" plunges darkly careening tones-- a Doppler-effect buzz with the skid of braked vinyl-- through bright, queasy synthesizers. (Kompakt fans may hear an echo of Wolfgang Voigt's M:I:5 project.) "Intermittent" revels in the seams as it patches together strings, bells, and vocal fragments into a rough-cut collage. In the song's last few bars, you can hear Stott's debt to disco edits as he finally lets a tightly cropped loop unfurl into a full phrase of music that, sped up, is recognizable as 90s R&B.
Only one track doesn't fit the mold: "Dark Details", which throbs at dubstep's quickened pulse. Still, even here, the percussion's muted clang gives the impression of hearing a rave piped in via plumbing-- some club, miles away, suddenly bubbling up from your sink, and stinking of muck. Like a counterbalance to its uncharacteristically spry tempo, "Dark Details" is followed by the slowest tracks on the album, the demonic "Execution" and the torpid "Passed Me By", a song so bleak it could make Burial look optimistic by comparison.
Ah yes, Burial: you couldn't not mention him, really. Burial's haunted melancholy certainly paved the way for Stott's even more despondent take on dance music, and Stott is hardly alone in his doomsayer's approach. You can hear similar sounds and affect in Shackleton, Raime, Holy Other, and in moments of Demdike Stare, a project of Stott's label-mate Miles Whittaker. But where Burial and Shackleton use the flickering syncopations of dubstep and garage to keep their music moving, Stott's 4/4 beats, reduced to a deathly crawl, give his music an even more hopeless cast. "Drag," the name associated with Salem's style of music, would be apropos-- suggestive, as it is, of a body being towed, or a boulder pushed uphill. Where club culture mythologizes a circuit of endless nights and after-parties, Passed Me By suggests physical and spiritual exhaustion, Sisyphus collapsing beneath the dead-eyed twinkle of the disco ball.
