We live in the time of “dodgy rips” that clip and fudge your precious music. Crap, flat, dead sounding mp3s might well be the key reason that gets all you tune-filching Oinkers back into the shops to buy music that sounds as it was meant to. My previous experience of Pantha du Prince’s This Bliss was blighted by bitrates of only 128kbps, a reminder of just how crap mp3s were/are, and how much you really do miss out on by not listening to a prime source (or at least a high quality rip).

So it was (do I confess to much?) with my recent copy of Andy Stott’s EP The Massacre – a pre-release purloin, the codec kept coughing and spluttering all over a bassline that was simply too fat to chew on without choking. I ordered the vinyl the next day, and haven’t looked back. Stott’s recent work has brought in greater and deeper bass, to the point where a wooferless recital is only half the goodness, at most. “Unknown Exception” makes my headphones quiver on their headband, sending rippling buzz down the cable. Inside the can it’s a different matter, as the delicacy that Stott always fixes in high contrast to the threatening brutality of the deep below plays itself out. It’s extremely hard to believe this guy’s only been making music for a couple of years, and that he’s Claro’s “apprentice”.

“The Massacre”, the B, takes a burbling drum machine pattern then puts a very Moritz-y melody over it, sending it forth into the never-never with another huge bassline. The closer on Efdemin’s recent (and exceptional) RA podcast, this track is the definition of deep, the soul of techno laid bare. The outro is exceptional, as tiny amounts of delay are added to the basic percussive pattern until it skips into itself, just as the bassline sidles up underneath, then pulls back, then returns, then fades back down. Ahhh. Listen closely and you can hear each element modulating slowly and inter-acting – nothing has been allowed to “just loop”: everything has been considered and placed perfectly in the mix, each part plays with every other. Rarely is techno so subtly or skilfully written.

Modern Love / LOVE 035
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[Peter Chambers]