Andy Stott on Comedy, Working in a Garage, and Setting the Parameters

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it, along with a Screen Memories column every one or two weeks where I write about stuff I watched lately.

Today's installment: It's such a blessing to have Andy Stott's spectral, bump-in-the-night approach to electronic music back in the natural world again. His latest, the Modern Love-released Late Loop, dropped at the end of last month and is his first record since 2021's Never the Right Time—and it adds a few striking new wrinkles to his oft-identifiable-but-never-repeatable style. I talked to Andy waaaaay back when around the release of 2012's epochal Luxury Problems, and it was a pure pleasure to get back on the horn with him again to catch up about what's been going on in his life as well as how he put this new record together. He was plenty candid, and I especially enjoyed getting a peek into the creative process that results in such music being made. Check it out:

You've frequently made alterations to your sound, and this record underwent a few evolutions while you were making it. Walk me through all of that.
There's quite a few changes that it went through. It started off as a brass and woodwind concrète project, but absolutely drenched in reverb and effects. It was really pretty, but there was something really easy about it. My parents had a clear-out in their attic, and they found this old organ that I used to play on as a kid. They brought it down and said, "Rather than throw it out, we thought you might have it." There was no output on the organ, so I had to record it with a mic. When I was sending stuff over to [Modern Love founder Shlom Sviri], he was really into the sound of the room, so that became one of the parameters for the record. Alison was sending me vocals for these organ tracks, and it wasn't until a bit later on that I started experimenting with a certain delay unit and putting rhythms through it. There's a track on the album that's just pure drum machine through a delay with Alison, and that's it. I can't remember which track it is, but it was one of the first tracks I sent over to Shlom, and he was like, "Yeah, keep doing that."

Shlom was building how the album roughly was going to run, and we had a sitdown listening session where we were trying to work out what it was about these tracks that we liked. We had the drum machine through the delay unit, so we were like, "Right, that's a parameter." We've got the room recording, we've got the organ and the vocal. We noticed that the tracks that I was sending had no bass lines on them, so we kept that as a parameter. Those became the rules for the record.

Let's talk about your history of setting parameters for your music in general.
The previous records were a lot more loose in regards to sound palette. If something wasn't working, I'd introduce something new for another texture, or to see if I could get the track sounding more full. But this album, with these parameters, was by far the most difficult record I've ever done, because there's nothing to hide behind. With the lack of effects, you really have to concentrate on the music—the writing, the melodies—and get the message across.

One thing that Shlom said to me was, "I want to see the stitches"—and you can really hear how it's pieced together. It's very bare. It was interesting to work like that. I've never had a strict set of rules before. There's times where I thought, "There's only so much I can do. I'll never get this finished." But you just got to persevere, and it's amazing what other ideas will come. It's like cooking: How many dishes can you do with these ingredients?

There was a big chunk of time in between records this time around. Tell me what was going on in your personal life during that time.
Oh, my gosh, quite a lot. I don't want to get too personal, but due to the separation, I moved out of the family home and started again. Because of COVID, shows stopped, and I wasn't really writing music around that time, So it was very strange. I got a job working for the same boss in the same garage when I was 17. That was the first job I had, so I went back to that. There was a lot of rebuilding going on. I moved back up to Manchester, living about an hour away, building everything back up from scratch again. This record is almost like a diary of that period.

I'm still working at the moment, because I haven't got an opportunity to go back and do music full-time again, so there's another element to writing the record. Because of work and other family commitments, at the beginning I was probably getting four hours a week to work on music, so keeping momentum was really difficult. Once the album started to take shape, I added a lot of pressure, because I wanted to make progress each evening—and I only had a couple of hours. If I didn't make any progress in one evening, it felt awful, and that happened quite often. But I persevered, and I'm really pleased by the outcome.

I've talked to so many artists who, at various points in their career, have had moments of doubt regarding their ability to continue forging a career in music. Did you have any of those moments during this time?
There were definitely moments where I was thinking, "I don't know how this is going to work." But I don't think there was any moment where I thought, deep down, that I'd stop doing music. It got very, very difficult, and I may have said it out loud to friends, "I can't do this anymore." But I didn't mean it, and the balance is ticking the other way now with the release of the record. There's interesting shows, people want to book me next year. It's starting to look quite good. So now it's like, "Am I going to have to leave work again?" I'm in this weird transitional phase. I still get the thought of, "How am I going to do this? How is this going to work?" But it's tipping the other way now, which is exciting, but still a bit scary.

When you started doing music full-time in the 2010s, it was a very different period of time in terms of what resources were available to artists. I'd love to hear you reflect on the experience of the 2010s compared to now.
2010 was when I really got into equipment. Prior to that, I was just making music on a laptop. When I left work in 2012, I got my first bunch of outboard gear, so it was a huge learning curve. It was very exciting, making sounds that you can't with software, and being open to happy accidents in the studio. It was a very experimental time and a lot of fun. It's still fun now, but I've had to sell quite a few things. I've still got a few things I can experiment with, but I just haven't got the space at the moment. The 2010s felt really free. I had time to experiment, and I missed that.

Yeah, a lot of artists I've talked to over the last five or six years have definitely felt a similar change. You have to carve out space and time to be an artist these days, which is definitely something that people have been getting adjusted to on a larger level.
Yeah, and that was a big thing with this record—really carving out the time and turning up. Doing a full day's work, getting home and having some dinner, and then sitting down for half an hour. Some evenings, I didn't want to do it—but that's when some of the tracks happened that are on the record. You've just got to show up.

Let's talk about the nitty-gritty when it comes to your work at the repair shop.
Where I work is a good place to work. The funny thing is, the guys that I work with really don't care about the music stuff that I do. There's one guy in the office who's got an idea, but he's more of a gabber guy. His name is Phil. He came out once into the workshop and he went, "You've got a Wikipedia page." I was like, "I know"—and he was like, "That's unbelievable."

I can't say anything bad, really, because I told them when I started, "Look, I've got this music career, and sometimes I'll go and do shows." And that's fine. And then I said, "Sometimes I'll go to America or wherever for three weeks," and they were like, "Well, no, you can't do three weeks, but you can do 10 days." So, I've been doing 10-day stretches of tours. They've been really accommodating with allowing me to have the time off to go and do them.

But the job itself, ugh. It's good, but it's freezing cold. If it's minus-10 outside, it's minus-10 in the workshop. That's the only thing I find difficult—the winters are brutal. But the guys I work with and for are fantastic.

How has being on the road felt?
At the moment, it's a lot of fun. The past couple of tours, I did with Debit. We struck up a really strong friendship immediately, and we've done quite a few shows together now. She's stayed over at my place when she's been in Europe and had time off, and we talk very regularly. On this tour, I've done a few shows with Carrier—and again, we really got along, such a nice guy. We have the same outlook on touring, we find the same things difficult, we get nervous about the same things. I've got two shows coming up in Austin. and I'll be on my own for those, which is totally fine. Two shows I can get through on my own. But, sometimes, to do a tour by yourself, it can be a lonely place.

As much as this new record sounds like yourself, it also sounds in conversation with a lot of stuff that I've been hearing from the underground. I'm thinking about stuff like Joanne Robertson, and even a group like HTRK, who have become extremely influential over the last few years. Was that stuff on your radar while making this record?
It wasn't anything really super modern or underground that I was listening to.
There's no direct inspiration that I took from anybody. This record is completely honest and came from how I was feeling at the time. I said to someone the other day that it was almost like writing a diary entry and then releasing that to the world. It felt that personal. But I was listening to Prefab Sprout and Talk Talk, as well as Tirzah and Mica. Depeche Mode as well, but at the same time, some of the Griselda stuff, like Westside Gunn and Roc Marciano—but those things definitely haven't filtered into the record.

You brought in a new vocalist for this record, Elaine Howley, and you also work with Alison again, who's been a frequent collaborator for you over the years. Talk to me about working with both of them.
With Alison, nothing changed at all. She continues to send me vocals. We've not changed the way we work since Luxury Problems—and we've never been in a studio together either. Alison will literally send me a cappellas, and I'll pull them to pieces or build tracks around them. But Elaine was a suggestion from Sonia Stott of Boomkat Editions. She thought something interesting could happen, and she wasn't wrong, obviously. But I worked differently with Elaine. We were sending her sketches, ideas, and some completed tracks, and she'd put the vocals on and send the thing back.

What I didn't know was, Shlom would send her the tracks, but he'd been messing with the tracks as well. He'd actually pitched everything down, and I didn't know which tracks he sent us. When I got everything back, I was like, "My God, what happened to this?" But it sounded incredible. Elaine would record a lot of layers, and it gave me so many options of where I would take the track. I'd strip a ton out—beautiful layers, harmonies, and things like that. She was being very generous and giving me a lot of options to work with, which is really good.

Let's talk about your creative relationship with Shlom. From what you've said, it's quite collaborative when it comes to the direction of your music.
It's definitely collaborative. The only thing Shlom doesn't do is come into the studio with me—but everything else, we do it together. As soon as I finish a track, I send it over to him—it could be a two-bar loop or a fully formed track—and he'll give advice. When we did the "Violence," it had hi-hats on it, and I remember he said, "We need to get rid of these hi-hats, I think." It wasn't until much later where I listened back to the version with the hi-hats on that I was like, "My God, he was right." He can just hear what needs to be removed. With this record, I played him one of thpse organ tracks, and he was like, "Take the reverb off. Kill that vocal. No effects." It was so difficult, because I'm just used to putting effects on things. But that's what he does: He'll put me down a path, and his input like that has been since day one. The records wouldn't sound the way they sound without his input.

Do you like watching movies?
I don't watch as many as I used to because I don't have time.

What's the most recent thing that you've watched that you've enjoyed?
Obsession was the last thing I went to the cinema and saw.

Nice, that's a good one.
It was good. I don't really watch horror films like that, but that was the period when Delia was staying with me, and she dragged me to the cinema. I'm more of a stand-up comedy guy. I love comedy writing and theater. The last thing I binge-watched was Atlanta. I've seen it so many times.

Who are some comedians who get your goat, so to speak?
Probably very typical-sounding ones. I love John Mulaney. I've recently discovered Ali Siddiq. He's fascinating, that guy. Unbelievable. Every special he's done—just really good. Obviously there's classic people like Pryor and Seinfeld. I love comedy.