Pairing everything down to minimalist man-machine pulses, clattering beats and dehumanised spoken word vocals that sound like they’ve come out of a freezing Berlin locker room, Factory Floor return with new single Fall Back. Imagine all the robots getting angry, necking a load of drugs (kids don’t try this at home), turning up the strobes and losing it in some sort of huge post-industrial-motorik-techno-love binge; this is the soundtrack to that orgy. At eight and a half minutes long Fall Back has longer staying power than most teenage boys in the bedroom and it’s been on near constant rotation since it first hit our ears yesterday. This is the sound of our brain melting. This is the sound of the deadpan disco. Get dancing.
Released on January 15th you can pre-order the track from iTunes or on vinyl from Rough Trade.
For most bands practically clearing a venue of its audience whilst you play would be the stuff of nightmares. The music of Factory Floor is the stuff of nightmares, albeit the most glorious, rhythmic disco-din type of nightmare that, given the right headspace, you will really want to experience. Frankly we’d rather have exposure to this any evening than some pathetically romantic wet dream that leaves an apologetic stain afterwards. And so it was earlier this year when at Leicester’s Summer Sundae festival Factory Floor put the ‘rave’ in the word ‘grave’ and buried any hopes or aspirations of them connecting with a mainstream audience who were looking forward to the likes of Example or McFly. As sequenced layers of repetitive electronics aggressively flooded over the rapidly dwindling crowd, those who stayed witnessed one of the most hypnotic and hallucinogenic sets witnessed at any festival this summer.
Now here’s an example of Factory Floor's pulverising and stupendous sound. Two Different Ways is released on November 14 on DFA records. It’s a brain melting menagerie of post-industrial-post-acid-house rhythms that takes you into a dark strobe lit room, shoves its tongue hard down your throat and reaches straight for your groin. This isn’t the soundtrack to feeling good about yourself, this is the soundtrack to utterly losing yourself in the moment and to hell with the consequences. If you like it hard, rough and dirtily sexy this is for you.
Leicester’s Summer Sundae festival may not be a big hitter in terms of giant artists, riotous audiences, high budget aesthetically pleasing artistic direction or a line-up devised to appeal to one particular demographic, but what it does do it does incredibly well.
Summer Sundae appeals because it is an incredibly convenient festival to attend. If you’ve ever slogged your way around Glastonbury, or fought with Reading’s lack of sleep campsite-culture then Summer Sundae will come as a very pleasant easy-on-the-body surprise. Set in a park in a city centre location it still manages to convey a sense of being out in the countryside, even if the second stage is the permanent De Montford Hall and a ten minute stroll will bring you to a Costa Coffee shop with Wetherspoons pub five minutes further. But this city centre location provides many bonuses, none more so than a compact and well-designed site, a second campsite just across the road from the main festival for those who want a quiet night of sleep and excellent transport links which include a big on site cycle park, a train station nearby and car park and on street car parking within five minutes of the entrance. Top this off with excellent management and organisation where stages run on time, friendly and helpful security staff and you have something that Leicester can be really proud of.
Here’s our run down of all the good, with hardly any bad.
Tickets
Early Bird 3 day tickets were £100 with full price tickets being £115. If you wanted to camp in the more spacious quiet Regents campsite there was an additional charge of £12 a person.
The Site
A tree lined park in Leicester.The main stage was set on a natural slope that gave excellent viewing opportunities whatever your height and included a Punch and Judy stall set to the left of the stage which housed a giant bird and a crocodile who appeared to occasionally mime along to the bands as they played. The second stage was indoors in the permanent De Montford Hall, which again gave excellent viewing opportunities with a seated balcony as well as the standing stalls area. Three other stages were more traditional tented festival venues (one of which was for comedy and spoken word). The smaller Musician stage could have benefitted from being a bit higher – those beyond the front rows had difficulty seeing anything on stage when the audience was standing. New for 2011 was the Victorian Bandstand Stage, whose PA was powered by enthusiastic cycling punters and featured oddities such as a penny farthing and bone-shaker display and talk by local cycling historian Roger Lovell and Harp For Hangovers – cover versions played with harp accompaniment. For those with children or for anyone that wanted to get away from the main areas The Garden provided kids entertainment, information stalls and the festival famous Mashed Tea Tent for all your non-alcoholic and cake needs.
The Punters
A varied mix of old, young and everyone in between, many of whom were local to the Leicester area, giving the event a relaxed and less full-on vibe than many other festivals.
The Toilets
The standard festival portaloos were well provided for, cleaned regularly and well located. However for those whose idea of any sort of non-permanent loo is a malicious nightmare, the De Montford Hall permanent toilets provided a welcome alternative.
The Weather
Generally cloudy with patches of sun. Friday saw a small smattering of rain but nothing of any consequence.
The Food
An excellent selection of festival favourites such as Pieminister, Simply Thai and Iechyd Da, with prices ranging between £ 5-7.50. The bars were run by Orange Tree Bars meaning that there was a huge range of real ales to sample as well as a number of cocktails. There was also the more standard range of lagers, ciders and spirits. Festival goers were also allowed to bring their own food and drink onto all parts of the site with no restrictions as long as it was for their own personal consumption, although we understand that next year these rules may change and there may be limits on what you can bring in.
The Music
Summer Sundae is sometimes too heavily judged on its often very average and inconsistent headliners and to a certain extent this year was no different with The Maccabees, Newton Faulkner and McFly topping the bill. The Maccabees may be a decent mid-level indie band, but with a large stage and PA to fill the bands surprisingly subdued performance found them lacking a little, with Orlando’s voice not being strong enough to give the songs weight and their choice of lots of new tunes testing the patience of anything but the most hardcore of fans. However where Summer Sundae wins hands down is with the other cards in the pack, bringing a whole host of new, diverse and talented musicians to the stage on the lower reaches of the bill.
Friday saw the debut UK performance of Other Lives, whose audience size was helped by a momentary rain shower outside the Rising Stage tent, their subtle yet majestic blend of orchestral folk and rock stirring the soul with its note perfect warm execution. More natural beauty was on display just a short while later when Admiral Fallow’s songs lifted spirits even further – with poetic tenderness that felt like your best friend. Yet it wasn’t all organic singer-songwriter traditionalism. For those of a sturdy constitution the intense pummelling electronics of Factory Floor (streaming below) were a ride to the future ghost (g)rave of Giorgio Moroder. Hard hitting, hypnotic and droning the three-piece managed to scare off a number of the small crowd who watched them play, but those who remained were challenged with repetitive beats and stabs that made some sort of glorious noise. On the main stage early on Saturday evening Bellowhead got bums off the grass and feet dancing with their brassy burlesque folk music that gave easy justification to a claim by the Independent that they were the best live act in the country. And as the festival began to wind down on the final night and McFly entertained the screaming girls who had camped out against the barrier all day to see their heroes, Kitty Daisy & Lewis brought a magically nostalgic take on old fashioned 50’s rock n roll, flavoured with ska, disco and the blues to a jiving and smiling crowd.
The Conclusion
Summer Sundae is one of the most under-rated festivals in the UK. Forget about the headliners and enjoy everything else it has to offer.
“That that don’t kill me can only make me stronger,” is the slogan that greets visitors to this years In The City website – a positive message for a music industry whose traditions are being attacked from all sides. The internet revolution may not have killed the industry, but it certainly has given a good kicking to certain sectors.
Yet whatever the state the industry is in, artists continue to create – and once industry types are away from the daily conferences and keynote speeches that form the daily backbone of this event that has been running in Manchester since 1992, they can immerse themselves in that creation alongside the public at a number of live gigs and showcases that run into the night. In some quarters In The City has a reputation for being populated by industry types more interested in where their next line of coke is coming from than music, but day one saw no evidence of this – only people who are passionate about music were in attendance; maybe recession and the wireless web attempted knockout have been beneficial in slimming down and focussing the industry on what it should be concentrating on, or maybe it was just the events repositioning in the market as a more public event similar to its now bigger cousins such as Great Escape in Brighton and Camden Crawl in London.
In the past In The City has always been heralded as an opportunity to discover new and unsigned music. However as this year’s programme acknowledges, “the phrase ‘unsigned’ is becoming less and less of an issue in the mind of today’s bands, fans and the industry.” In 2010 the possibility of random discovery is much less, with the advance opportunities via blogs, websites and aggregators such as Hype Machine to find out about up and coming artists. Now In The City is more about showcasing these bands that the internet has been buzzing with than pushing something completely new into your face. To use that old cliché – you can’t beat the live experience
There are a variety of approaches to take with multi-gig multi venue urban festivals. You can zigzag between venues with a programmed or haphazard agenda of bands to see or you can take a more sedate approach and remain in one venue consuming whatever is served. Day one saw Breaking More Waves firmly ensconce itself in The Ruby Lounge, for a varied and sometimes intense evening.
It must be somewhat dispiriting to play to less than twenty people in a near four hundred capacity venue but that is the fate that befell the two girls one boy three piece Pocketknife. Coming on like a kindergarten Hole or early PJ Harvey their throaty, rasping, smashed glass vocals, guttural guitar and bass messily grunged the night up a bit. Brody Dalle would have probably enjoyed herself.
A hype laden geek-lad knob twiddling electronica duo with a pretentious band name does not on paper inspire confidence but with their chest thumping bass beats and cohesive, intelligent compositions that recall the blissed out spirit of rave, D/R/U/G/S (pictured) were mesmerizing. Every time they triggered a sample their hands shot back as if hit by an electric shock, the music chiming throughout the filling venue. Believe the hype, and take some D/R/U/G/S. As their Myspace suggests, drugs do good things.
Three piece Factory Floor bombarded the audience with Post-industrial hypnotic electronic pulses, layered with snatches of ghostly reverb laden vocal, live drumming, noises wrenched from guitar with a bow and an unsettling loudness. Their throbbing uneasy Moroder intensity seemed to want to destroy the sound system as well as heads. They finished their set in total darkness, their nightmare dance sound having created both pleasure and pain at the same time.
The darkness continued with O Children. Graveyard vocals and guitar noise set them firmly in the Sisters of Mercy meets Joy Division meets Interpol camp, yet the songs they played never ascended to those lofty heights in terms of songcraft. Lead singer Tobi’s vocal had resonance with its weight, but for now they remain as a band with potential rather than one to yet become vastly excited about.
It was left to Still Corners to bring the remaining members of the audience out of the gloom. Like a rainy autumnal Thursday or a sixties film-noir Parisian café, Still Corners created a beautiful, ethereal soundtrack. They washed away the dirt with a dreamy slow motion wipe constructed out of intricate guitar work, swirling organ and the sighing tender caress of singer Tessa, who produced a floating in fog vocal, coaxing the audience deep inside, to be lost in its haze. Still Corners set was the perfect comedown – intoxicatingly sleepy, in the best possible way.
