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| Pitchfork |
 What does dance music sound like when it's made by people who seem slightly worried about the whole idea of dancing? What about people who are totally passionate about dance music even if it's not their native language, who can tackle it with the fearlessness of musicians who love something but aren't of it? Stateside, the music of Talking Heads is one answer. Along with a host of American artists from the same time, they carved out a unique interstice between rock and dance-- not quite one or the other. Fac. Dance goes some way to answering those questions from the UK's perspective, and it's probably no coincidence that some of it mines the same vein as Talking Heads before they discovered M.O.R. A collection of singles from (mostly) the early days of Factory Records, it's a glimpse of world where former wallflowers, whether one-time punks, or one-man avant acts suddenly found the possibilities of disco and post-disco club music too enticing to ignore.For some, those possibilities were purely musical, a new set of compositional ideas to explore and formal rules to bend or break. On their 1985 single "Boss Toyota Trouble", Manchester post-punks Biting Tongues, featuring future members of Simply Red, Yargo, and 808 State, sound like an industrial band who got its wigs flipped by Middle Eastern music and Ethiopian jazz and gamelan, but who couldn't quite shake the perversity that leads people to form industrial bands in the first place. Two inclusions from the Durutti Column are just jittery and uptempo variations on Vini Reilly's usual plangent and gorgeous brand of guitar-based instrumental music, seeming to have wandered in from a completely different compilation. In each case, the communal qualities of dance music get short-circuited, in both interesting and "interesting" ways, by artists too individualist to join any club night that'd have them as a member. And sometimes this formalist fucking around just leads to jokes that burn themselves as quickly as you'd expect. Experimental jazz-rock group Blurt founded by poet/puppeteer Ted Milton, for example, certainly earn their name, their 1980 track "Puppeteer" featuring an early hip-hop groove where the MC is replaced by an imitation of a mentally ill ranter who owns a cheap saxophone. It's a curious artifact of one of those rare moments when bands felt the compulsion to experiment with whatever was in the cultural air around them, but ultimately that's all it is, like a lot of the stuff collected here to pad things out to two discs (the inclusion of such tracks when the comp has nothing by New Order doesn't help)....full text |
| Spin |
| Joy Division, New Order, and Happy Mondays: Manchester-based, Factory Records bands who built careers by asserting that post-punk's rigor and austerity was not altogether different from disco's. This comp presumes that you already have the essential stuff and are ready for the B-sides. The obscurity of Quando Quango's "Love Tempo" is unjust; the obscurity of a "nitromix" for a band that released one single on the label is probably just natural selection....full text |
| Recordstore |
| Strut present an essential new retrospective of Factory Records, the seminal Manchester club-turned-record label set up by Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus. Compiled by Bill Brewster of djhistory.com, the album places the spotlight on some of the label’s early dancefloor-based work across key 12” mixes and rarities, from the unmistakeable productions of Martin Hannett to more unheralded backroom work by New Order’s Bernard Sumner and A Certain Ratio drummer Donald Johnson, under their BeMusic and DoJo monikers. The album traces early experiments from Blurt’s avant garde mutant funk to the fertile post-Joy Division period as the label’s unique, coruscating post-punk sound took shape through seminal bands like A Certain Ratio and Section 25. The album also expressly documents Factory’s strong links and cross-pollination with New York’s 1980s club culture, as New Order joined forces with producer Arthur Baker, fresh from his pioneering electro work with Afrika Bambaataa, and acts like Quando Quango and Sweet Sensation’s Marcel King enlisted NY remixer Mark Kamins for tough-edged club treatments. Factory bands including Quando Quango would also play live at some of the city’s seminal nightspots, including the Paradise Garage. The compilation also touches on some of the wider directions explored by Factory during its early years – Durutti Column’s melancholic beauty, the latin jazz and jazz funk of Swamp Children, Kalima and Tony Henry’s 52nd Street and a track from the label’s only reggae single, the Dennis Bovell-produced ‘See Them A’Come’ by X-O-Dus. This is the music that would provide the blueprint for the Manchester scene of the late ‘80s and Factory’s heady later years – the Happy Mondays, James, Northside and the rest....full text |
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