Album Review: Passed Me By [EP] by Andy Stott

Dubstep is mutating. It isn't dance music anymore. No more artificial fog and elaborate light shows, no more skittish 4/4 beats. Much of it released these days is submerged in the dark, below sea level – music an anglerfish would listen to. Andy Stott's Passed Me By is no exception to this change ….

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Review Summary: Sweaty, dirty music made for a club from hell.Passed Me By is deep. Andy Stott's most recent offering of minimal dub techno sounds absolutely massive yet almost uncomfortably intimate, the heavy bass of "North To South" bearing more than a passing resemblance to a subtly skipping heartbeat while the reverberant low end of "Execution" feels like a cavernous sonic void. Yet unlike Demdike Stare, Stott's labelmate on Modern Love and frequent point of comparison, this is also rhythmically intense stuff.

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Exuberance is dance music's usual purview: ecstasy, adrenaline, abandon without end. But there's a whole subset of club music that dedicates itself to the inverse of what we're expected to seek amidst a sweating, heaving crowd-- loneliness, terror, misery, dread. This isn't a new phenomenon; Simon Reynolds has written of how the collective serotonin depletion that followed Britain's acid house effusions turned breakbeat hardcore and drum 'n' bass down darker paths.

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