The one-man army known as Andy Stott used to work as a paint-sprayer for Mercedes-Benz in Oldham, near Manchester. Given that there are so many electronic music producers who work with, or find inspiration in, the mechanical chuggings of motor vehicles, Stott's case is particularly interesting. His sonic palette is far from the rigid patterning of techno—or, really, any genre in particular. Some of his albums feature guest work from opera singers. Six years ago, he had a track that sounds like a ship blaring its mournful, deep-sea horn on-and-off for upwards of six minutes.Stott is unusual in that he's not typically assessed against others who operate in a similarly gelatinous space between genres, but in that he's measured most often against himself. Nowhere was this sensation more concentrated than in, a piece that was really, finally, truly a crossover work in the grand sense, mixing elements of his past albums (and dance music's history)—dub stuff, slow-mo techno, post-punk patter, a rapid oscillation between love and dread—to a more refined DNA of purely Stotty proportions. It sounded so, so reliably and ultimately part of his wheelhouse that it seemed as if, in order to listen to the album, one necessarily had to listen to his past work to properly assess its strengths and weaknesses.Stott's records can feel like a very apt template for the ideal trajectory of an electronic music producer in this decade. First, a requisite dabbling across standards of various genres like jungle and Chicago house ("For a long time," he said in an interview , "I was just getting that out of my system"), then onward to an honestly personal form that belongs only to the artist. In Stott's case, that's one of not deconstructed club music (which is, at this point, a punchline and a signal for macerated, frenzied, high-concept work), but re-constructed club music, taking the bit parts from a menu of genres and rejiggering them back to life. It's more alchemical than mechanical.Also on this list: Morphosis - What Have We Learned