FACTORY FLOOR presents SIMON FISHER TURNER: ARCHLIVE

ICA, London | March 14th

As well as being one of the most exciting and original electronic acts to emerge from the UK in some years, Factory Floor have always looked to explore daring ways in which their music can be interpreted or reworked.

Tonight sees the band return for their third appearance as part of their ICA Associate Artist residency, which has provided a potent platform for some of their most thoughtful and wide-ranging experimentations to date. Tonight two of the London trio, Gabe Gurnsey and Dominic Butler, line up alongside progressive soundscape composer Simon Fisher Turner in a project entitled ArchLive. Fisher Turner has a colourful history as an artist and musician. He was a member of The Portsmouth Sinfonia Orchestra in the late 1970s alongside Brian Eno, before joining The The for a stint in the early 1980s. By this time he had already become Artist in Residence at tonight’s venue. He went on to compose soundtracks to the art-house films of Derek Jarman, and in 2011 produced an acclaimed score for Herbert Postings’ The Great White Silence. Tonight, Fisher Turner appears with a laptop before him as part of a trio, with Gurnsey and Butler in manipulating sound files from Factory Floor’s forthcoming album. Meanwhile, visuals are projected on to a giant screen courtesy of Factory Floor guitarist Nik Colk Void.

If this evening can be treated as a preview to Factory Floor’s long-awaited full-length, then all signs suggest the trio’s debut will be frankly huge. The ICA soundsystem is riddled with new, nasty and aggressive industrial beats. It slams, in fact, and would undoubtedly cause an early hours club crowd to lose their shit. That the zenith of tonight’s performance results in a collective wave of enthusiastic head-nodding is almost certainly down to the fact that it’s just after eight-thirty on a Thursday and we’re in an art gallery.

With the album tracks remaining closely guarded, it’s difficult to define exactly what additions come courtesy of Fisher Turner. Certainly the parts in which he manically yells things like “It was a hard slap!” or “Get out of the page!”, you’d imagine, come directly from his own imagination.

In a step away from their usual visceral live instrumentation, tonight Gurnsey and Butler work to Fisher Turner’s left on mixing desks and samplers. Meanwhile, the visuals from Void are fairly consistent throughout the hour; footage of a black man in white clothes dancing is slowed at varying speeds whilst the screen shade changes colour from time to time. It’s an evocative and exciting piece that compliments the unfolding drama of the sound.

The overall result of Factory Floor and Fisher Turner’s efforts is doubtless a further strong addition to the artists’ respective repertoires. And if these morphed and reshaped tasters of the album are a fair reflection, it’s going to be every inch as physical, powerful and satisfying as we’d hoped.

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ica.org.uk/Associate-Artists/Factory-Floor

Words: Jack Bolter

Photo: James Coates