Factory Floor

Known for their micromanaged and micromanaging tracks, it’s fascinating to see that even their words about themselves are efficient, each phrase and constituent particular effervescent in their appearance and disappearance, yet wholeheartedly lunging themselves into place, forming a whole crystalline and formative structure.

Whether it's the muffled, unsettling synths that peer out from underneath the groove, the mannered and highly potent collision of seemingly incongruous drum patterns, or simply the masterful arrangement, it all adds up to make a record that's difficult to second-guess and lots of fun to unpack.

Factory Floor might be known for their life-changing gigs, but their album proves that, in the studio, they also have the ability to induce shivers, body jerking and a rush of blood throughout your entire body.

Basically, it’s a fantastic debut.

Comparing it to where they once were, somewhere middling between post-rock and meandering industrial ambient, the sound of Factory Floor is of a band that is now confident in their own original and entirely dominant sound.

Factory Floor’s music is distilled down into three elements. Rhythm. Synths. Vocals. That they make something so evocatively alienated, so compulsively unknowable and so bleakly irresistible from simply this is a sharp, uncompromising, emphatic victory.

In a year where the likes of Kanye and Trent Reznor have reached deep into the dark circuitry of the Wax Trax back catalog to revive the corpse of industrial music, Factory Floor’s relentlessness suits the present moment.

Factory Floor have achieved a pure distillation of their live experience: this is as direct, exciting and thrillingly minimal a dance record as you’ll hear this year.

With repetition and fractures, tiny noises amid stark silences, Factory Floor generates extraordinary propulsion in its dark, empty spaces.

A well-considered and promising debut album, one that knows just when to stop and breathe before breaking another sweat.

At its best, Factory Floor powerfully blurs the lines between human and machine and back again, and is very hard to argue with. [Oct 2013, p.91]

Factory Floor achieves something that many albums don't--it serves up as a impressive album with no expectation.

Salute the heavens, then, that the result is an absolutely belting 10 songs.

Worth the three years it took to materialize, this is a strong, assured debut that shows Factory Floor can build on their influences in a way that feels fresh.

Considering the trio are relative newcomers to dance music, the programming throughout Factory Floor is acutely deft. Elegant, in fact; so much so that the sound can comfortably be described as chic.

This is an album then of irresistible forward momentum; brutal and gentle, alien and human.

Given the gestation period and polish, the humanity that manages to shine through this tight, crafted record is a triumph; the sound of a band having a whole lot of fun in the hope that ultimately you will do too.

Big, bold, invigorating stuff.

Punitive, scientifically exacting, and obstinately anti-melodic, Factory Floor is a bizarre, kinetic manifesto that rewards your attention while it screams at you to move your body.

As a whole, it’s not so much sonically austere as utterly aesthetically totalitarian.

There’s plenty to suggest that Factory Floor has only scratched the surface of what it’s capable of, something the short pieces that buffer the longer compositions hint at.

For now, they’ve delivered a derivative LP that’s also, ultimately, very much theirs.

Theirs is a physically and mentally overwhelming (and exhausting) form of full body sonic experience that's equally akin to the psychedelic techno battery of Jeff Mills and the blissed-out sensations of swimming through MBV's arcs of feedback. With its airless surrounds and restrained feel, however, Factory Floor clearly doesn't sound quite like they do onstage.

Much of this album resembles the kind of murky '80s proto-techno recently unearthed by Trevor Jackson for his Metal Dance comps, with Nik Colk Void's monotone vocals ceding centre stage to the restive machine rhythms that constantly threaten to rise up and over throw their human masters. [Oct 2013, p.67]

Impressive but so unblinkingly stern. [Oct 2013, p.101]

There's the sense that the group are holding back a little. Some tracks just don't quite work on a visceral level, as dance or as forcefields of conflicting elements. [Sep 2013, p.51]

It’s never a bad record, or even less than listenable--the individuals behind it have more than enough good taste and sense for that to happen--but it is a mildly disappointing one, considering the sheer potential of those early releases.

As a whole, it's a highly inventive take on the house template, very much in keeping with the rest of the DFA label's output – though a pattern emerges that sees Void's languorous, treated vocals backed, and often dominated, by highly aggressive synth lines.