When I got on the phone recently with the musician Andy Stott from his home in Manchester, England, he was having a little trouble. “Sorry, the dog’s going bananas,” he told me, as the canine yelped in the background. He was home after a brief United States tour with friends and label mates Demdike Stare, where he was able to test some of the material from his new album, “Faith in Strangers,” which comes out November 18 on Modern Love Records.
“The record was announced when I was on the road, and there was a good buzz about it,” he said. “The live show is a total afterthought when I’m making the album,” he claimed, so he has no idea how the songs will translate to an audience of bobbing heads. During our conversation, he told me that he’s currently building a live set for some upcoming festival shows in Mexico City, where he was travelling to the following morning.
Aside from the jet setting, “Faith in Strangers” marks a notable shift in Stott’s career. Because of the success of his previous album, “Luxury Problems,” he was able to quit his day job and focus on music full time. The new album was recorded in his converted-basement studio, and it was initially difficult to adjust to the new freedom. “It took me a while to realize that all of a sudden I was just home with nowhere to go,” he said, laughing. “I couldn’t get used to it. But as soon as I realized that this is what I’m going to be doing with the rest of my time, I just had to sit down and really figure out what I wanted to do musically.”
But when I asked if the new freedoms affected the sound of the album, he was reluctant to make the connection. “I think even if I had all the time earlier, the material would have been the same,” he said. “It’s been a natural, different evolution.”
With “Faith in Strangers,” that evolution results in a continuation and solidification of the sound he’s been pursuing over a number of releases. On “Luxury Problems” he added vocals to his blend of damp, reverberating beats and icy, distorted synths via Allison Skidmore, his former piano teacher. She returns here, her voice more organically intertwined with the music, flowing through the cavernous spaces like a breath exhaled in the freezing cold.
The processes of creating the sounds on the album, which are sinister and ethereal in equal measure and sound unlike anything else, required a lot of patience, according to Stott. “There’s been days when literally all day I’ve been sitting in the studio and just get one sound,” he said. “But it’s not enough. It’s how two sounds interact with each other. Once you have two sounds that bounce off one another, you’re off.”
While I suggested that “Faith in Strangers” is less aggressive than his previous work, which could often feel like you were being pounded over the head with sound, he countered that what I’m responding to is the use of space in the songs, a process he was more conscious of during the recording. He was influenced by the “eskibeat” tracks produced by the enigmatic British electronic musician Zomby, which he first heard during a regular hangout with musician friends, where they play each other’s music and exchange ideas. “I started thinking, how could you get a track that has maybe four elements, but with so much space in it and really beautifully done, yet has this aggressive undertone?” he said. “It wasn’t about the sound but the presentation of it.”
We ended our conversation talking about a different kind of presentation: the artwork. Modern Love is known for its distinctive cover designs, which feature striking black and white photographs that capture the moods of the music through juxtaposition. Together, the covers form a definitive aesthetic, and “Faith in Strangers” features one of the most disquieting examples — a stone sculpture of a mask, on display in front of a window.
“When you first look at it, there’s something really odd about it,” Stott said. “The setting is familiar but there’s something really wrong about the image at the same time.” Before I had the chance to mention the obvious connection, he did it for me. “That’s what the music says to me. There’s something really familiar but there’s something really bent about it.”
