If calling an album Soundtrack For A Film sounds like a deliberate piece of understatement, there’s a clear reason behind Factory Floor’s reticence; the film in question is Fritz Lang’s Ubermensch – of the science fiction genre, the visually definitive Metropolis – in many ways a piece of celluloid history that needs no introduction.
Commissioned as part of the London Science Museum’s Robots exhibition, FF – duo Gabriel Gurnsey and Nik Colk – were tasked with giving a unique interpretation to a silent classic which, amongst others, has already had treatments from the likes of Jeff Mills and Giorgio Moroder. Composed to accompany a two-and-a-half-hour live showcase, if there’s any hint of the pair being intimidated by the task, it’s almost impossible to spot.
Never a conventional proposition, a Factory Floor audio project with these dimensions was in its most literal sense likely to be one requiring perspective; Lang’s film is in of itself one of the most survivable relics of an era when the relatively new phenomenon of the movies lacked a requirement for nuance. The tone is set by opener Metropolis, a near eleven-minute sequence of pulses and repetitive drones that allows the listener to accustom themselves to an experience that relies on building a certain tension rather than scrambling desperately for brief unsustainable peaks.
This isn’t so much a recognisable FF landscape, but on Beneath the horrific ritualism of the fantasy world’s slave caste is captured by bass fuzz and a sense of claustrophobic dark and heat, while the ambient washes that introduce Identity Switch give way to a mekanik, rigid techno motif that seems to follow in your footsteps. With tension a constant companion on Father, the watery programming and throb gives the impression of standing next to a mains circuit cable whilst in paranoia watching the very edge of the lamplight’s glow for movement.
It’s easy to imagine this aural tapestry being played out in a completely dark room as the collages bleed out sounds at an oppressively high volume; without that sense of being locked in however, the longer pieces especially start to lose some weight and, in simultaneously lacking the work’s other visual counterpoints, patchy blank spaces emerge.
Despite the sympathetic stiff-back factor there are still some genuine thrills; Transform being superlative lo-fi house with a twisted, grey heart, while Become froths with a vintage IDM patter, more science than white noise or the hostile, uncaring theme of some giant inhuman console. This force, the power which drives everything, begins to drain away via the appropriately titled End, the kinetics finally discharging, entropy robbing the spinning discs of their life.
Making sense of all this means pulling together strands which are not usually so disparate in modern music’s increasingly smaller concentric circles; Soundtrack For A Film works as both art and extracted performance, but the journey is far from a straightforward one.
When we are all replaced, maybe the machines will make a film about us, with tunes that sounds like this.
