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Subscribe to RA's YouTube channel: Visit the RA feature page: It's been very rewarding to be an Andy Stott fan over the years. If you got into the Manchester producer early on, you would have enjoyed the quality and quantity of his singles for the excellent Manchester label Modern Love. Stott had a knack for writing novel tracks out of classic sounds, and in particular dub techno, a genre that's notoriously tricky to get right without sounding like a Basic Channel replica. He eventually grew tired of his club-orientated music, and after a period of banging his head against the wall, Stott returned with a distinctive new style he described at the time as “knackered house“—sludgy tempos, grainy sounds, dense atmospheres. It was a sharp left turn, but rather than losing followers he seemed to gain lots more. This period established Stott as an album artist, and he's since written two more full-lengths: Faith In Strangers, RA's favourite album of 2014, was weirder, more diverse and, in places, song-orientated, while its follow-up, Too Many Voices, came out last month and pushed deeper into the unique sonic space he's created for himself. Stott's artistic development over the last ten years has been exemplary, a textbook case of coherently pushing forwards. One of the standouts from Stott's new album is “New Romantic,“ which features the voice of his long-time collaborator Alison Skidmore. In this live session recorded late last month at our London office, Stott emphasised the track's arresting bittersweet core, a quality that defines so much of his best music.
