Fuck Buttons & Factory Floor Club Academy, Manchester 22/4/10
4/5
By: Alex Hibbert
Two guys hunched low over trestle tables, the wood topped with electronics, fidgeting with effects and bobbing in time to a scream of distorted feedback, unveiling itself slowly from the speakers stacked around the stage. Not your usual ingredients for a gig, but Fuck Buttons are never a band to do things conventionally. Having reassembled the caustic lurches that made debut Street Horrrsing so alluring into something altogether more melodic on last year’s Tarot Sport, there’s a palpable buzz in the air in the Union’s basement that Factory Floor sate with a truly brutal aplomb.
Having been exposed to them through a combination of friends never-shutting-up and a greedy hunt for available tracks, tonight only single ‘Lying’ actually resonates as something we might have heard before; we know they play songs we’ve heard previously, it’s just that in a live environment they pulsate differently, and sounding far more ferocious.
Their arrangement’s constant is Gabriel Gurnsey’s Never Anything But Relentless drumming, as Dom Butler conjures up an industrial maelstrom of arpeggiated synths and effects whilst Nik Void shreds her guitar with a violin bow, then a drumstick. Crashing against her instrument, she leaves the ensuing scree to dissipate; pulling out of the distortion only to repeat again. Just when you think they’ve reached a peak of discord, they go one further as the set descends into all out squalor. They leave the stage whilst the sound eddies around the room until you’re left wondering whether the ringing in your head‘s the act or the aftermath. Somehow it feels like the only logical conclusion.
Fuck Buttons almost have a harder job. To hear them on record suggests a group of Gaggle-esque proportions, so great the complexity and execution of ideas found within their white noise, distortion and droning. That they can recreate something like opener ‘Surf Solar’ live so evocatively speaks volumes for the duo. Filtering its echoed stutters into strains of glowing hot noise, revealing itself in strip tease stages, then adding layers of dissonance ‘til it seems like it might break, it’s a dizzying head rush of an opening. Like any euphoria it’s hard to maintain, though ‘New Crossbow’ straight after has a good go. Hung screams into his Fisher Price gear unrestrainedly, piercing its bubbling rhythms with his unnatural calls, the band hunch lower over their equipment, as if the more serious they need to be the more bent the back becomes.
Concentration etched into their faces, between songs they break into extended electronic jams that sound almost flat against their set pieces, and act as a reminder that what you’re watching is essentially two guys twiddling knobs. If aurally they’re (mainly) spot on, aesthetically there’s definitely something lacking. Lights display fans swirling candescent oranges and reds onto the ceiling and walls around the band for the first few tracks, then luminous colours strobe the walls later, but really there’s not much to keep your eyes from wondering around the room, rather than fixed on the front.
With a set all but culled from their newest album though (save for ‘Colours Move’ and encore ‘Sweet Love For Planet Earth’). there’s enough tonight to suggest that they’re trajectory upwards doesn’t have to stall here. Even if Fuck Buttons more natural habitat is intimate spaces (last year’s gig at Manchester’s Deaf Institute was positively deafening, and was all the better for it) they’re still Rave pops Googlewhack equivalent; only one band like this could emerge from the pairing of two genres so diverse. Music that emotes the same way pop can, mined from a swirling mass of buzzing electronics and synth’s distorted till they tear at the edges, no one’s doing it quite like Fuck Buttons, and it’s highly likely no one ever will.
Artists in this article: Fuck Buttons, Factory Floor
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