Death Disco: The Noise of Art

One half Optimo, JD Twitch, calls them his "dream band" and Stephen Morris of New Order and Joy Division likes them so much he’s ended up producing their new material. The London based trio of Gabe Gurnsey, Dom Butler and Nik Colk who make up Factory Floor have been sporadically releasing EPs and singles for the last few years which capture the raw, mechanical even industrial quality of their music and in the process have found a cross section of fans eager for their uncompromising, hardened edge. The band’s aesthetic is not dissimilar to the video maverick Chris Cunningham who they supported as part of his live show earlier this year, both sharing a common fondness for noir-esque leanings.

When they play live Nik stands alone with her guitar, eyes barely visible under her fringe, Dom is hunched over the electronics and Gabe pounds out the primordial rhythms that drive the songs. All three members of the band had stints as art students which is reflected in their natural sense of artistic dynamic and, while music is the priority, there is an inevitable overspill of this creative side into other aspects of what the band do. An appetite for experimentation has led them to play a gig with no stage where the audience can walk around them (“so people can throw beer cans at the back of Gabe’s head,” jokes Dom) and a ‘blackout’ gig where they played in a pitch black room behind a curtain so that all the visual sense of the band was removed. The band don’t seem entirely comfortable with being the centre of attention and are happy to deflect as much away towards the music itself. However, they feel that their creative discipline has given them a better appreciation of how to approach music. "The thing with following a creative pursuit is that you have to find the solution and that sometimes means thinking outside of the box" says Dom."If you don't creatively solve these problems then, in effect, you are just following guidelines."

Guidelines are something that Factory Floor enjoy flouting, most notably those relating to song structure. Solid Sound, a ten minute soundscape of distortion and feedback, is an outright affront to pop sensibilities. Lying, found on the same EP as Solid Sound, could not be more opposing, with Nik's death knell vocals underpinned with a rugged and insistent synth pattern which builds to a thumping crescendo of guitar noise and cymbal crashes. Gabe suggests that their casual neglect of any formal style “is the art side feeding in... It's not so much an intention but it does end up being that way,” he says. “If there is something we like then we want to capture it. That's how Solid Sound came about. We are not just setting out to write songs.”

Factory Floor’s raw, unhinged sound – which they bring to Death Disco at The Arches this month – makes playing live essential to testing out songs and seeing how they go down. “The adrenaline of playing live can pull out new ideas that we might not have in the studio” Dom says. “In the improvisation of the moment we can recognise something really interesting and then we will work on it in the studio. It acts as a sketchbook for us to take from.”

In amongst all the electronics and guitars Gabe provides the band’s tireless percussive drive which, with many songs lasting past 10 minutes or more, requires a serious amount of stamina. "Well, there's always a drum machine," he laughs explaining his backup options. "It's a really primal, tribal sort of thing and having live drumming really does add a lot more dynamic...but it does take ages to pack up!” Dom agrees that this is an essential aspect of the band. "It's a lot of fun throwing sequences at Gabe to see how he reacts to them and interprets them," he adds. "Obviously if it was a drum programme we wouldn't have any of that so it's fascinating and it brings a lot of energy.”

The studio where they are currently working in North London is just five minutes away from the rioting which last month tore through parts of Tottenham. Dom sees it as an inevitability that writing and recording an album with those events as a backdrop will have an effect on the music being made. "I think music and art will always reflect the time that it is in, especially if it is trying to unravel stuff. As a band, every experience gets imprinted on us and then we reflect that back out in some kind of way."

With that in mind it will be interesting to see how this will play out across a full album; but for now it's back to the experimentation of taking those songs and road testing them live and bringing them, quite possibly, very close to destruction.