We Stay Together - EP

iTunes Review

When My Bloody Valentine’s Glider EP dropped in 1990, some people, upon hearing Kevin Shields’ floating tremolo guitar for the first time, believed their vinyl copies were warped. Andy Stott’s innovative approach to techno—sounding intentionally blown out and muddy—might be ingested similarly. There are sure to be some folks checking their speaker cones for rips and tears. The We Stay Together EP picks right up where his preceding Passed Me By left off, with dark and nebulous post-apocalyptic electronic music that would perfectly accompany a movie about rave zombies. “Submission” opens with nearly five minutes of shadowy ambience, as Stott loops samples of choral snippets set against what sounds like the feral flutter of feathers from the avian stars of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. “Posers” follows, with distant locomotive rhythms forging a drowsy groove under muted horns and murky synthesizers. If electronic music could somehow be created and played underwater, it would come off sounding like “Bad Wires”: seven minutes and 21 seconds of submerged beats and obscured noises grasping for their sonic lives.