"Black", a track featured on Mary Anne Hobbs' (2006) compilation, is a great introduction to Manchester-based producer Andy Stott's masterful ability to experiment with dub and techno music to create eerie, surreal sonicscapes that Pitchfork's Grayson Haver Currin describes as "ghostly environments filled with glitches, pops, hazes, lurid synths, clarion vocals, graceful footwork, and enormous bass".
It thus seems perfectly apt that a fan decided to pair "Black" with visuals from Toshio Matsumoto's Atman (1975) - which makes interesting use of a Noh Ghost Spirit Mask. The unsettling, uncanny effect can be traced to Stott's signature use of a bass churn and machine noises - which produces a dark, ominous, subterranean atmosphere. There's a sense that something terrible is about to happen, but the track also evokes something subtler - it wouldn't seem out of place as a soundtrack in a horror movie, but it also seems to intend to do more than simply spook the listener.
In his review of Stott's fourth album Faith in Strangers (2014), Currin manages to articulate that unique state of being that Stott's music seems to evoke: "Stott operated both inside an uncanny valley and within its inverse, making the artificial seem natural and the alien seem familiar. After more than a dozen releases, Stott could now call an approach—a liminal state of the human and inhuman, of the driving and the drifting—his own."
It's always hard to qualify what kind of aesthetic effect a purely instrumental track creates, but "Black" seems to do just this: maintain a precarious balance between the edgy, the eerie, the unsettling, the unknown and a reassuring forward-looking rhytmn. Amidst this artifice of darkness, once feels human by virtue of that primal emotion that most music does not aim to evoke: fear.
