Three in the Room: Dom Butler on Factory Floor's steady evolution

It’s mid-October 2010: posturing gothic post-punks O.Children should be stalking the stage of one of Manchester’s more established basement venues, The Ruby Lounge, as part of the now-defunct In The City music conference. On arrival, though, it is not the menacing drawl of Tobi O’Kandi or his group’s wiry guitar lines that have stunned the audience apparently static.

Onstage, spits of white light fleck the cloaking darkness; fleeting illuminations reveal limbs moving as pinions in and among wires-on-wires plugged into analogue boxes. Combined, they release an unerringly penetrative rhythm that pounds repeatedly into the quivering walls. Three bodies are just about visible, connected to one another in near-robotic synergy; the intermittent rumbles rolling forth from the stage, though, have the feel of fallen divinity, plumes of discord pouring forth as through from out of the cracks in the earth’s crust.

It is relentless, hypnotic; the group are locked-in, lost together in their own chaos. As the rotations of noise draw ever more vast rings around the room, a fourth figure suddenly clambers onstage, his face desperate, furious. He doesn’t feel like a part of this scene, and it soon becomes clear why. It’s O.Children’s manager. He lurches towards the drummer and attempts to wrench the sticks from his hands. Cables are flailed at, tugged apart from their machines; the sounds rise in pitch and become more incoherent. In delirium, the spectacle collapses in on itself.  

Factory Floor’s Dom Butler remembers that gig. “He was really angry,” he chuckles down the phone, when reminded that his group ran nearly half an hour over their allotted stage time that night. “I think he sent a load of angry tweets about us afterwards too.” Such are the levels of immersion that subsume Butler and his bandmates Nik Void and Gabriel Gurnsey during their live performances that only an increase in profile and subsequent headlining slots have prevented other bands' managers from baying for their blood. Be it late-night in one of Europe’s rabid techno holes, in the open air of a festival, or – over the last two years – in gallery spaces like London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts or the Tate Modern, the London trio now run until the night’s oil runs dry. “Those earlier sets were fuelled by nerves. They still are, really; these performances could just fall apart,” Butler says. “They go on because we lose ourselves in them rather than attempting to keep control. It’s like the breaks have broken and we’re just rolling down the hill, trying to hold on.” 

It's fair to say that Factory Floor have cemented their live reputation with a bloody-mindedness in how they strive to meet their audience. Delivered at phenomenal volume, their music has always seemed to achieve a live connection through confrontational means: the power of their industrial abrasion ultimately drills down into the core of their crowd with a force that at first overwhelms, then holds participants trance-like in its grip, leaving mind and often body at its mercy. “It gets to a temperature,” Butler agrees.

“The breaks have broken and we’re just rolling down the hill trying to hold on” – Dom Butler

However, he posits that such attrition is just the surface layer of what is a multifaceted onstage journey, citing My Bloody Valentine’s infamous 'Holocaust' – the remorseless blitzkrieg of noise delivered towards the end of their set that has, in many instances, stretched towards the half-hour mark – as an example of how hammering the decibels can help both artist and audience achieve a near-meditative state. “For myself, and I’d say the others too, it’s definitely escapism," Butler says. "It’s this thing where you saturate yourselves with sound. It’s similar to being out in a thunder storm and it’s pissing down; it’s that moment when you realise you’re drenched and there’s no point protecting yourself from the wind and the weather, and so you just accept it. It’s a peaceful state of mind once you’re there, amidst utter chaos.” 

At odds with the turbulent balance between calm and calamity that makes up Factory Floor's live set is their debut LP. Out on DFA, Factory Floor has been a long time coming in the eyes of the group’s steadily increasing following, many of whom tracked them down in earnest after 2010’s brutally affirming EP A Wooden Box, which featured collaborations with New Order’s Stephen Morris and Throbbing Gristle’s Chris Carter – apt, given the inflections of their respective acts on Factory Floor’s output at that time. Yet Factory Floor feels free of the latter connotations in particular; though still largely lying on rhythms of taut rigidity, there’s a real bounce and playfulness on tracks like Turn It Up and How You Say, with subtle hooks sneaking out from the inter-rotation of hissing machinery. The production, too, is altogether sleeker than one might expect. It’s some way from that early, gleefully torrid and abruptly halted Ruby Lounge gig – and yet it was not, Butler insists, a consciously intended direction.

The three realised early on during the album’s making that they couldn’t possibly replicate their live sound in a studio. “Live, we feed off the different spaces that we play, so when we had to go to our studio and capture it, it was hard,” he comments. “It was a definite learning curb, like, ‘right, we haven’t got a lot of elements that we have live. There’s no audience, the nerves aren’t there, we can’t be as loud.’ Plus the commitment of the live situation is that you can’t press stop, you just have to move with it.” 

For an act who have committed so much of their development to the natural environment of the live arena, the contrast between that and the studio has been marked. It's one thing having so many options available when undertaking the recording process, but it also threatens much of the organicity that’s already known and intrinsically trusted, possibly burying it under re-edit after re-edit. “But the live situation is what we know as a group,” answers Butler, “so in the warehouse where we record we just set up a big PA and played for massive chunks of time and just recorded it. Then we’d edit back.” This went against their natural instincts: “A live show is a journey where even the bits that aren’t working and feel like they’re going to sink are still heading towards somewhere; they still affect the emotion and the experience. For the album, we needed to partially re-create that but then edit out the bits where it was falling. It was really hard; some of the ideas were 20 minutes long and it was like ‘shit…there’s not going to be enough vinyl!’”

It may have felt like going against their instincts, but it hasn’t affected the finished album. Factory Floor is imbued with a light touch that belies its two-year gestation period. Retaining the unremitting directness of the group’s live shows means that its sonic path evolves through nuance rather than sharp changes of gear, and the structure of the record has clearly been considered – in between the arpeggiated grooves of Here Again, the juddering dystopian disco of Fall Back and How You Say’s scything serration lie three short, disparate pieces: ‘One,’ ‘Two’ and ‘Three.’

Featuring separately a looping warped vocal, a brash guitar sample and an ominously burbling synth, One, Two and Three duck under the constant forward drive of the album and offer a portal beyond the fizzing friction of the group’s mechanical techno. They feel like short reveals of the individuals behind the scenes – full glimpses of the human touch that sits just underneath the rest of the record. “They were ideas that came from each one of us,” Butler explains. “It’s similar to what we did on the Fall Back b-side where we took the elements that we individually brought to the song. We’ve always enjoyed the intricacy in our set where things drop out and leave the other elements standing. It was important to have that on the album because it gives the listener a deeper understanding of how Factory Floor works. It reflects how we work live, too. Sometimes we can clearly recognise one of the others is doing something strong within the music, and so we allow that individual idea to push through and follow it.”  

The outside perception of Factory Floor is that it took a while to write. Singles Two Different Ways and Fall Back had almost two years between them, while album talk was circulating even around earlier standalone release (R E A L L O V E). Butler agrees to an extent, but points out that they were also playing live a lot during its creation – which was ultimately key in piecing together the ideas for the finished work. “Part of it was wanting to explore things as much as we could and so sometimes ideas would go beyond a certain point,” he explains. “So a track would have been ‘finished’ but we’d carried on with it and have to come back round on them to find that point again. We’re not just going to the studio and bashing out a load of songs. We put the ideas down and then start to tinker with them and shape them. It’s more of a sculptural way of working.” 

The last time Factory Floor spoke to The Skinny, they distanced themselves from any suggestion that they sought to place a narrative on their music. A year on, that hasn’t changed. “But then I don’t find it strange that people do put their own framework on it though,” Butler qualifies. “It’s a very visual sound that we create and I think that people will always draw their own conclusions. I see why people will apply a narrative because it helps them to try and understand and explain the music. For us, though, I don’t think we do; it’s more of a feeling thing. Sound and vision is the same language for me, it’s just different tools that I’m using. But I like that it brings out different readings. It’s when people don’t have much to say you have to start worrying.” 

Instead, Butler describes what he feels is “a very kind of primitive dialogue” between he and his bandmates. “There’s no ‘let’s do a song based around the colour blue’ or anything like that,” he adds. “As we’re playing, it might start to feel like something like that but we’re never consciously doing it. It’s just an instinctive direction that we follow.”

Intuition is what links Factory Floor live with Factory Floor in the studio. The great success of their debut album is not that it defines what people already know of them; it's that it retains that while presenting them through a fresh sonic prism – their snarling physical embodiment coming together with a sleek, jocund sound to create a blistering, brilliant whole.