Andy Stott

The electronic music that Manchester’s Andy Stott made during the last decade always felt like watching slow-motion footage of some heavy demolition, the speed of the tape adding tandem layers of romance and intrigue to the detached violence. On landmark records like Luxury Problems and Faith in Strangers, things always seemed to be falling apart or oozing out, but the descent into oblivion was beautiful and strange. As a kid, Stott took piano lessons from Alison Skidmore, an opera singer “with an alternative side to her,” as he once put it. As an adult, he started learning about the intricacies of listening to and ultimately making electronic music from his pals at Modern Love, the trendsetting label that became his mentors. He reached back out to Skidmore and asked if she might want to collaborate, supplying vocals that he would edit and abstract and warp, pulling them through structures of static and rhythm like cotton candy or air.

A father now, Stott stepped away from his relentless release schedule after the pandemic. The haunted quality of his work perhaps felt too real in the pandemic’s wake, a lugubrious if exquisite sketch of what was actually happening. But he returned to Modern Love in 2024, with a blissed-out 7” that complicated the pulse of house with dub flourishes, drums tripping over themselves and bright bursts of keyboard pushing through the mix. At his most active, Stott’s live sets would often start slowly and then increase in intensity and meter, not unlike the arc of his music at this moment. “The point is for someone to have a neurological breakdown during my live set,” he once half-joked. “That’s the end-all, be-all.” Stott plays a rare set at Big Ears during some of his first stateside performances in nearly five years.