“It was like we hadn’t been away,” says Gabe Gurnsey. “It felt like the best of the shows that we were playing before and to have that as your first big show coming back was a proper buzz.” Gurnsey is reflecting on last summer’s return Factory Floor show in Montreal at MUTEK Festival. It was their first in five years, the first with an added third live member, percussionist Joe Ward, and the first to debut brand new material. It was a triumphant and pulverising show, one that I was lucky enough to see, a real masterclass in push and pull, tension and release, human versus machine – with Ward now adding an extra layer of both oomph and groove – as they hammered out a set of beautifully hypnotic industrial acid techno to a stuffed, and dancing, theatre of thousands. “It was great playing with two drummers and so it had a really different dynamic to it,” says Nik Void. “And coming back and being in front of a very large audience was kind of terrifying but at the same time, when the adrenaline kicked in and the bass started there was just so much energy there. The reaction from the crowd from the start was amazing.” The recording of that killer live show is now available to stream exclusively on The Quietus in collaboration with MUTEK, here:
And this isn’t the only new Factory Floor music on the way, with a brand new single ‘Between You’ due imminently on long-time fan Erol Alkan’s Phantasy label. You can listen to it here. The track in question got an outing in Canada but it’s evolved since then. “There weren’t any vocals on it initially,” says Void. “I have had a love and hate relationship with vocals and I almost gave up on doing them entirely. If you listen to the live recording, you’ll hear cut-up vocal samples, which I love making, but at MUTEK I realised how much I missed singing. The crowd’s response to ‘Two Different Ways’ and ‘Fall Back’ was amazing, so when recording ‘Between You’, I decided to give vocals another shot. It feels like a fresh start.”
Spending the year getting into shape to play live before they got into the studio to record has unquestionably impacted the band, who say they hit the ground running as a flush-tight unit. “We wanted to bring that live aspect into it,” says Void, with Gurnsey adding: “doing that show first was key. If we’d have done it the other way around, it might not have turned out quite the same.” The track immediately sounds like classic Factory Floor, perhaps more in line with the band’s earliest incarnation with Gurnsey on drums, before they became a more purely electronic duo, with squelchy slabs of synths and those rolling yet propulsive drums – all culminating in a kind of ceaseless teeth-grinding intensity that manages to feel fiery yet euphoric. So, is this a case of going back to their roots somewhat? “I think so,” says Gurnsey. “After a bit of time away, we’ve realized what Factory Floor actually is – and it’s all about simplicity. And on this new track that really shows, it’s literally drums, synth and vocals. It’s bare bones.”
However, as Void explains, it’s often a complex process to get things peeled back that far. “It takes quite a while to get to that stage,” she explains. “There’s a lot in it, and then you strip it back in and it becomes simpler as you use the elements that really work.” That process in particularl, the back and forth refining of a song and getting to the guts of what works, is something that Void has cherished returning to. “What I’ve missed from doing solo work is not to have that person to bounce off,” she says. “To say, yes, that’s working, or that’s not. It’s so great to have that relationship back again.”
Alongside additional percussion from Ward, the new track was recorded in the studio by Stephen Morris of New Order, another element that connects the band back to their early dayy given that Morris was an early supporter and collaborator. “It’s really good to be back and to have something that really feels like it’s definitely got that Factory Floor sound,” says Gurnsey. “I think it sounds banging.”
