Factory Floor live review
When Factory Floor’s debut album proper finally arrived in September, it somewhat unexpectedly took the form of a gleaming new, seamless steel skyscraper: pristine, megalithic and disappointingly shorn – or maybe cleansed? – of the splashes of grit, fuzz, reverb and chaos that had been scattered across the band’s earlier EPs and live shows. The result was a spotless techno record of immaculate purity, atomic flawlessness and technical virtuosity, but one, crucially, with only a fleeting resemblance to the band that has been so alluring on stage for the past three years. The studio had apparently put their music on a marathon-runner’s diet, stripping it of all fat, leaving a muscular but characterless husk, and while that Spartan, boiled-down approach was ear-catching and weirdly seductive, the vanishing act was ultimately under-nourishing. Indeed, seldom must an act have existed whose live performances differed so much from their debut recorded statement.
Thankfully, though, this musical asset-stripping hasn’t spread as far as the trio’s stage incarnation: tonight’s Factory Floor offer a full-fat performance of frantic improvisation and rhythmical interplay that also reintroduces Nik Colk’s scabrous guitar playing that was all but absent on the band’s debut. That they do all this at uncompromising volume and considerable length – an hour and a half of unbroken sound is unleashed with almost sadistic zeal – suggests that the slimline studio variant of the band has been left just there.
That’s not to say, however, that the austere sound palettes and space that characterised their debut is absent: tonight, their songs don’t so much begin as creep into life, each one stealthily assembling a hulking mass of defibrillating beats and sinuous synth before allowing the additional thrills of reverberating vocals and shrapnel guitar to cut across the mix. It’s a hypnotic effect: the band shift from track to track with a machined precision, warping one’s sense of time in the process, and it’s only when they embark on what the set-list describes as “30 Minutes Deconstruction” that you realise an hour’s passed and they’re through with playing the album. The improvised jam has an apt title: what’s initially physically and mentally exhausting ultimately ends up eliciting a zen-like calm reminiscent of ambient pioneers Stars of the Lid as almighty waves of feedback drone, sine wave and mechanised thud intertwine and mutate. With at least four false endings, glorious spontaneity throughout and a thrilling demonstration of the band’s maverick hive brain, it’s the freest, most impressive part of the show and is also, tellingly, the farthest the trio stray from the sleek blueprint of their debut.
Of course, Factory Floor are not the first band to struggle to make a successful trip from stage to studio – if, that is, they did struggle at all: what tonight proves beyond doubt is that while their songs may be compositionally slight, there are myriad ways of executing them. Indeed, the band have argued before that a recording just represents one incarnation of each piece, itself no more valid or definitive than any given live rendition, and with that stylistic restlessness in mind it’s a tribute to the band that they still appear so pleasingly bloody-minded and self-expressive, and that their appeal remains so potent.
Indeed, not unlike Battles – three more assertive, strong-willed and enormously talented individuals who combine their obvious musical differences to make something utterly captivating – one gets the impression that Factory Floor won’t let trifling matters like sonic consistency or outside approval impinge on their artistic direction on stage – especially when the output is as focussed, animal and oddly transporting as this.
