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Factory Floor
For the longest time, I could not understand why people were so excited about this act, but last year's Carter Tutti Void album re-ignited my curiosity enough for me to give it another chance.  While it still remains a mystery to me how Factory Floor became so quickly revered, their first real full-length is intermittently wonderful and dramatically better than much of their earlier work.  Obvious Chris & Cosey comparisons aside, this trio is definitely onto something uniquely their own, stripping their thumping, retro-dance formula down to little more than a beat, a simple modular synth pattern, and Nikki Colk Void's appealingly languorous sexy-android-on-heroin vocals.  As it turns out, that is all they need.
The power of minimalism is a remarkable thing, as the only substantial difference between earlier, somewhat generic-sounding Factory Floor songs and their more recent (and superior) work is that the trio have purged themselves of all unnecessary drama, density, manic energy, and ornamentation to leave behind only sharply realized, precision-executed doses of the things that are absolutely indispensable: an insistent, unrelenting groove and (occasionally) some kind of vocal presence.  In this sense, they actually share a lot more common ground with a band like ESG than they do with Chris & Cosey.  While Void certainly sounds a bit like Cosey sometimes (and tends to also play a guitar unconventionally), Factory Floor's so-basic-it-almost-seems-naive palette of a simple beat and a few synth bleeps and blurts bears only passing resemblance to anything Chris Carter-esque (aside from perhaps sounding like it involves cutting-edge dance technology from 25 years ago).
When the formula works, it works beautifully, as Factory Floor's endless repetition and robotic blankness make for hypnotic listening (and a perversely distinct sound as well).  The most extreme example is the opening "Turn It Up," which features almost nothing but Gabriel Gurnsey's muscular, constantly shifting beat and a few creepy, heavily processed mutterings from Void.  The rest of the album is a bit more ambitious musically, but not too much: the band's resident knob-twiddler (Dominic Butler) walks a tight rope, offering up just enough of a bloopy synth hook to give each of the songs some semblance of structure, character, and catchiness, but never enough to grab the spotlight (and never anything that consists of multiple parts).  In fact, most of Butler's "riffs" have so few notes that they can be counted on my fingers and the idea of throwing in a chord change for a chorus or something seems to be utterly unthinkable (or possibly just impossible, given the gear used).
Butler's finest moment comes with the rapidly stuttering chord that makes up the entirely of the music for "How You Say" (the album's clear highlight for me), but he almost always manages to leave enough space for Void's breathy vocals, echo-ey guitar noises, and subtle samples to make their full impact.  Few bands are as adept at staying out of each other's way as Factory Floor.  As deceptively simple and regressive as some of this music might seem at first listen, it is hard to imagine many other artists handling similar territory this effectively.  It would only take the slightest misstep or bit of clutter to wreck or hopelessly blunt the impact of these songs.  It may have taken them several years to reach this degree of craftsmanship (Factory Floor have been around in some form or other since 2005), but it is not a plateau where they have much company.
The few critiques that I can make are basically ones that can be made for almost all dance albums: there are only a handful of strong "singles" amidst these ten songs and listening to a full album of such similar-sounding material tends to be become increasingly draining as it unfolds–there is a very good reason why 12" singles are the preferred format in underground dance.  Also, three pieces are basically just brief interludes rather than songs and some of the actual songs are a bit too self-consciously, kitschily "retro" for my taste ("Work Out" sounds like a mid-'80s break-dancing jam, for example).  That said, almost all of the other potential singles are stellar (a category that also includes "Here Again" and the previously released "Fall Back" and "Two Different Ways") and it is very convenient to have them all in one place, as endlessly buying singles is annoying.  In fact, Factory Floor comes damn close to being a debut album that doubles as a greatest hits album–there are certainly a few other wonderful Factory Floor songs out there (Optimo's remix of "R E A L L O V E" springs to mind), but not many are quite as good as these.
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