Originally from Oldham, Andy Stott has been based elsewhere around and within Manchester, home to Modern Love, the outlet for all of his original productions. Too young to have experienced rave culture firsthand, he was nonetheless a voracious listener, and in school started playing keyboards, mimicking the sounds he heard on hardcore tapes. In his early teens, at the suggestion of piano teacher Alison Skidmore, Stott ceased formal music training to pursue sound design, starting with studio emulator Reason. In his early twenties, having fallen in with the Modern Love label and its artists, Stott made his 12″ debut with 2005’s Replace EP, and by the end of that year, he released two additional EPs.

Faith In Strangers is Stotts career-defining blunge of screwed production and timeless songs, a pinnacle of brittle, technoid future-primitivism that arcs from solo brass to mechanised Grime, from knackered House to lilting pop, like some ancient relic made of still incomprehensible materials. Recorded between January 2013 and June 2014, and was edited and sequenced in July 2014. Making use of on an array of instruments, field recordings, found sounds and vocal treatments, its a largely analogue variant of hi-tech production arcing from the dissonant to the sublime.Opener Time Away features Euphonium played by Kim Holly Thorpe and closing track Missing features vocals from Stotts vocal collaborator Alison Skidmore. 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 a destroyed production style that’s pioneering in spirit, buried in sentiment.No Surrender is a primitive spell making way for pitch-screwed woodblock drums, while How It Was refracts sweaty warehouse signatures and Damage comes like RZAs Ghost Dog re-factored by Terror Danjah. The title track is the album’s most beautiful, gliding on a chiming melody and the hum of Andys mixing desk. via Boomkat

10th Anniversary pressing, black vinyl edition of 500 copies. Mastered & Cut by Matt Colton

Label: Modern Love
Format: 2 x Vinyl, 12″, 33 RPM, Album, Repress
Reissued: 2024 / Original Release: 2014
Genre: Electronic
Style: Experimental, Bass Music, Grime, Techno, Dark Ambient

File under: Leftfield