Factory Floor: “We don't just want to tread the same path as everyone else”

It may have taken two long years for Factory Floor to put the finishing touches to their debut LP – made lengthier by the fact that their early EPs were just so damn good – but by god it was definitely worth the wait.

Effortlessly juggling elements of disco, dancefloor, acid, minimalism and post-punk, Nik, Gabe and Dom produce compositions which are just as much art as they are music. We caught up with the London-based trio ahead of their set at Italy’s best boutique dance festival, Alfa Mito Club To Club, to talk crowd-sourced music making, Donnie Darko and their fear of fucking up.

It feels like your sound has this industrial, almost metallic texture to it – what kind of emotions are you looking to convey and express through your music?

I think we’re primarily interested in just making people dance! We have quite an organic approach to dance music, and over the years we’ve sort of combined it with much more experimental elements which overall works really well. In a lot of ways we’ve taken kind of a tribal approach to repetition and fused it with this much more modern humanistic element. We play a lot of stuff on standard instruments, so what you’ll hear on the tracks is me trying to replicate a drum machine using an ordinary regular drum kit. That’s really important to what we do – we want to create the same energy that you get with live instruments but use them to create dance music.

Would you say that you’re mostly about bringing proper percussion back into dance music then?

Yeah potentially. It’s tricky, we don’t just want to tread the same path as everyone else. All three of us are interested in rhythmical things so we just explore different ways of making sounds. On “Turn It Up” some of the percussion sounds we used were made by Dom on his synthesiser. I think ultimately we just want to explore those hypnotic sounds that allow people to lose themselves in the music and get carried away by it.

How exactly would you normally go about composing a track then? Is there a normal way that you work?

It’s a mixture really. A lot of tracks on this album came from improvised stuff that we did at our live shows – that’s something that we do quite often actually. We perform as the mood take us, then recreate it in the studio later working it up into a proper track. We like to see how the audience reacts to what we’re doing, and the music that gets the best response, we turn into something bigger.

Do you see your live shows as a process of co-creation to some extent?

Yeah! I think all three of us are so in tune with what we’re doing that when both the crowd and us are all in it as one, you think, fuck, we’ve got something here. I suppose you could think of them like big happy accidents. Bands like New Order and Throbbing Gristle, they always used to make music by just seeing what happened, they didn’t stick to a strict formula. For us it’s a very liberating process – very spontaneous. When we do play tracks live, you can push them to their limits and tweak them depending on how we’re feeling. I think it’s a really good way of developing further ideas, it’s like a constant loop of creativity.

Do you think that makes it difficult when performing alongside other live acts?

Definitely. It’s quite nerve racking for us as well, you sort of walk on stage with the backbones of tracks that you want to play but then you’ve got this huge element of, shit we could fuck this up at any moment. You find yourself on edge quite a lot!

There must have been times when you’ve come off stage and thought – “Christ, what happened there”?

Totally. It happens more often than you’d think! It can take a bit of time for us to warm up sometimes, but by the end of it we’ve built up this amazing intensity where the crowd gets whipped up into a complete frenzy with us.

It feels like that’s quite a brave creative process, especially for when you were starting out. Do you think you’ve gotten bolder over the years?

For sure. The fact that we were doing so many shows both last year and this year just shows how much we’ve grown in confidence. It’s like we’ve developed this language between one another, where we can communicate just by looking at each other. It doesn’t work all the time, especially when I’ve practically got my eyes on the floor, drumming like some crazed bastard. It is difficult sometimes, but like I said our confidence has grown a lot. We’d get bored otherwise, just playing the same track again and again. It’s useful have the backbones of tracks that we can use as a basis to experiment with.

Talking of backbones, it feels like there’s this unifying aesthetic that runs through everything that you guys do. Is imagery consciously part of the whole package?

We’re all really interested in visual art – Nic and Dom went to art school, I spent a stint there too, before dropping out to join a band. I’d say we’re all very aware of how we want to come across and we want to use this simple minimalism as a recognisable display for our music. We don’t have a really complex agenda that we’re trying to push, we just want to have an identity that people can recognise us by.

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So how does the name, Factory Floor, fit with that?

The name is a difficult one, it’s been around for a long time. I mean aesthetically I just love the way it looks written down. A lot of people have said, you know, it references Factory Records, and maybe it did in the early days, but now we’ve grown into it and it’s just ours. I suppose if you think about it, we’re a our own kind of production line, we all put in an equal amount and produce these sounds as a result of it all.

So could you say Factory Floor is almost your answer to Donnie Darko’s Cellar Door?

Visually yeah, I think it is! I just like the words, they look good together and the alliteration sounds nice.

I read that the whole album was mixed on the same vintage desk that was used by Dave Stewart to produce some of the early Eurythmics hits?

It is! It’s just in the next room, it’s fucking huge! It must have taken seven men just to lift it into the warehouse. It’s mad. If I’m honest I treat it like shit at the moment, it’s got crap all over it, I’m not respecting it like I should!

Is the heritage of your instruments quite important to you then? Do you think it influences how you make music?

Perhaps. Stephen Morris’ insane collection of drum machines is definitely inspiring. The 80s was a big time for dance music, so we like to use a lot of instruments from around that time. Don’t get me wrong, we use modern stuff too – we’re not stuck in the past or anything – but sometimes I think you need to use the original instruments, otherwise you just wont be able to produce that kind of sound from anything else. I love how raw and primitive those machines are and that’s what we try to get across in our music.

What about places? A lot of people talk about music as sounding very ‘Berlin’, do you think that’s a useful label?

I think that’s maybe quite a British thing – referencing back to where bands are from. For us I feel like it’s quite hard to pinpoint what we are – not in a big headed way, but we just have a lot of influences and a lot of cross overs.

Who are you looking forward to seeing at Club to Club?

To be honest I think we’re all just really looking forward to going back to Italy. We did a few dates over there last year and the crowd response was so incredible. They got lost in it straight away. That and the food is great too! Fuck Buttons will be good to see, I’ve not watched them play since we did a tour with them in the UK. Holly Herndon is another one I’m really looking forward to. She manipulates her vocals to give it this really ethereal sound, but her tracks also have this big kick of bass as well. It’s very bizarre but very impressive – she’s like the Laurie Anderson of 2013. It’s got a good atmosphere with just the right kind of people – I think we’re playing to a crowd of 3,000 so fingers crossed we don’t fuck it up!

Do you have a favourite track from the album?

It kept changing but I think “Work Out” – it’s not so song based, its just dance orientated. It translates really well live.

What other interesting plans do you have moving forward?

I think we’re going to be back in the studio by January to start work on another single or EP which’ll be really interesting. We’ve also got a few personal side projects, so Nic should have a few more shows coming up with CTV next year and I’m working on a solo project at the moment but I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing just yet! I’m just enjoying mucking about in the studio again. We should also be releasing an archive from our residency at the Institute of Contemporary Arts – I think we’ve got about 10 hours of video and live recordings to get through as a bit of a back catalogue.

Factory Floor play as part of Alfa Mito Club to Club festival this weekend. Their self-titled debut record is out now on DFA.