Passed Me By

Like many a UK dance music producer who's managed to rise above the conventions of his chosen genre (Burial, Actress, James Blake), Manchester-based Andy Stott has cultivated a complex, oftentimes complicated, relationship to his stylistic roots within the so-called 'dub techno' scene. Since his relatively monochromatic 2008 full-length, Unknown Exception, Stott has made unpredictable sidesteps into styles as disparate as dubstep and juke (a fast-paced, Chicago-birthed variant of ghetto house). And if such releases came off as throwaway experiments to fans of his earlier work, Stott's 2011 mini-album Passed Me By seems poised to win back his acolytes while raising the boundary-defying stakes even further. Pitched down to achingly slow -- by techno/house music standards -- tempos of between 80 and 100 beats-per-minute, and submerged in unstable, distortion-laden layers of hissing and crackling, the album has a haunted, elegiac quality reminiscent of turntable abusers Janek Schaefer and Philip Jeck, as well as the more conventional, loop-based ambient of Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project. But for all of the album's dark, nuanced sound design, it's terrestrially grounded to a low-end undertow as deep as anything in the Basic Channel oeuvre. It's like listening to a steadily moving yet slowly eroding glacier.