The weekly Bagging Area/ Spencer collaboration continues here today. The previous posts in this series have featured songs from Jon Spencer Blues Explosion remixed by DFA, La Funk Mob, I-f and Model 500, a run of gritty, innovative floor shaking body movers. This week's song flying in from Spencer over the internet is this from Factory Floor in 2011...
Last weekend there was a documentary celebrating forty years since the Hacienda opened its doors, an hour of stories, contributions from familiar faces/ survivors and from punters and employees, and some archive footage of the club in its heyday. It was OK but very much entry level Hacienda, there wasn't much new to be learned if you know your Hacienda and Factory history or ever attended the club. At one point one of the interviewees (talking about the acid house glory years when the Hot and Nude nights, Mike Pickering, house music and ecstasy combined in a perfect way) said that the thing with the music was that it was repetitive and the more and longer the parts repeated, the more it seemed to get inside you and the more you wanted to dance- I paraphrase but that was the gist- and it was possibly the most astute comment of the programme. In house music/ dance music, repetition is key.
In 2011 Factory Floor released a single for DFA. Prior to this they'd made music which was more industrial, more noise/ industrial based, infused with the chill of post- punk. On Two Different Ways they beamed themselves into the Hacienda or any number of British clubs from the '88- '93 period and set the drum machine, the synths and the arpegiator up, running in circular patterns, wheels within wheels. Thumping kick drum, squiggles, hi hats opening and closing like synapse connections between the music and your nervous system, distant woodblocks, snares rattling- meanwhile the synths continue ever on, round and round, in circles as Nic Colk's voice drops in and out over the top, half sung/ half spoken. Eight minutes of gloriously repetitive house/ techno.
2 comments:
I found the Hacienda doc extremely disappointing. Your comment about it being entry level was bang on. What I don't get is who are these things aimed at? If you were interested enough to tune in to watch it, surely you'd know all that kind of stuff already? It's a style of documentary making that can't actually please anybody.
Didn't Factory Floor do a New Order remix or two?
Agree Nick. I'd imagine the vast majority of people who watched it were well acquainted with the story. An expanded 2 hour edition on the iPlayer would surely be more satisfying. To be fair, they could have cut all of Noel Gallagher's contributions out and not lost anything either.
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