Drop the Vowels

The primary players involved with Manchester's Modern Love label aren't known for their accessibility. As Demdike Stare, Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker have spent the last five years exploring techno's chillier, more obtuse corners, merging the library-music aesthetic of projects like BBC Radiophonic Workshop with the harsh, pounding dub of Basic Channel. On his own, Whittaker's explored a slightly more streamlined take on dance music—albeit a take that's prone to ear-blasting noise—while psychic brethren and fellow Mancunian Andy Stott's made a name for himself with his slow, bog-dipped dub techno, most recently perfected on 2012's astounding, vocal-heavy Luxury Problems.

The music coming out of this collective is often dark, ominous, and thrilling; that said, the abstractions the trio of artists work in are such that uninitiated listeners could ostensibly accuse this music of, well, not being much fun. That's where Stott and Whittaker's Millie & Andrea project comes in: back in 2008, the pair teamed up under their gender-bending aliases (Millie = Miles, Andrea = Andy) to release an impressive run of 12"s that, while staying true to their tunnel-beat outlook, were exploratory in nature, adding slinky basslines, bursts of melody, and aromatic vocal samples into their smoky cauldron. "Too many people are really too serious about what they're doing," Whittaker told FACT late last month. "And in the end a lot of music's just fun to make." That mission statement was best exemplified on "Stage 2", released at the top of this year and marking the first new music from the Millie & Andrea name in four years; the overwhelming track's clipped vocal samples, dizzying run of tones, and deeply felt bass suggested that, in returning, the pair were looking towards the hedonistic sounds of trap music for inspiration.

It will be a relief to some and a disappointment to others, then, that Drop the Vowels, the project's debut LP, is not a trap record, despite what its trend-baiting title suggests. Whittaker and Stott are still exploring familiar territory—hollow dub techno, into-the-red noise, breakbeats that hiss and spit with static—but they're still fond of coloring outside of the lines as they did on 2009's ecstatic "Ever Since You Came Down". "Stay Ugly" feeds a colorful synth line through distortion, as a drum break cyclically contracts and expands in nastiness; "Corrosive", the album's most easily apprehensible cut, takes clicking footwork patterns and slathers them in fog, arpeggiated tones rippling endlessly in the distance before another chaotic break crashes through to disrupt the proceedings. For those familiar with Whittaker and Stott's individual output, the firmament backing these sounds are unmistakably their creators'—but the extra flourishes are what prove most surprising.

Amidst Drop the Vowels' pleasing left-turns—the clipped vocal sample that kicks open "Spectral Source", a track originally released in Millie & Andrea's first run of 12"s, carries a sugared swing while also sounding like someone being slowly choked to death—Whittaker and Stott excel when zeroing in on texture. The layers of echo and frizzy static applied throughout are done to create a 3D effect—essentially, this is body music, in that the crashing noise feels so uncomfortably close-range that it can resemble someone scraping your eardrums with a knife. Whittaker and Stott possess a gentle side, too: the chaotic tumble of "Temper Tantrum" occasionally peels back to reveal a chipmunk'd vocal sample before emptying its cargo bay to reveal a lush backdrop of drone. Stick around until the track's very end, too, when Whittaker and Stott let loose a single, satisfying bass hit possessing a brown-sound subtlety.

Up to this point, Stott's Luxury Problems stood as the best entry point to his and Modern Love's harsh, uninviting world of razed sonics; while Drop the Vowels doesn't carry the game-changing nature of that album, the relative sonic variety it provides compared to Luxury Problems' expressively singular mindset makes for a solid introduction to one of contemporary techno's most consistently exciting collectives. When working together, Whittaker and Stott pull off an enviable trick of retaining specific stylistic tics they possess separately while creating something that sounds not quite like anything either of the artists have made before, and hopefully they won't wait so long to execute their collaborative talents again.