Factory Floor: 25 25

Popular dance music in the 21st century has become all about surface appeal, about maintaining fashionability and following strict formulas of success: big house beats, bigger pop hooks, and even bigger bass drops into the visceral thrust of a primordial musical breakdown. It’s all that cosmetic production value and neon flash that sustains its commercial audience, a shift which has seen mainstream EDM culture become a loud, colorful offshoot of the modern pop juggernaut in a way its progenitors never desired to be.

In this landscape full of fluff and bombast, minimalism can be subversive, even revolutionary. Reverting to the elementary rhythms and slow build-ups of classic house music is a direct disruption of the instant-gratification culture of certain sects of modern EDM.

This is where Factory Floor find themselves on 25 25, endlessly devoted to electronic’s retro roots and pushing their minimalist aesthetic to unbelievable new extremes. Each of the album’s eight tracks sits over five minutes long — half of them over seven — and the majority of them maintain their foundational drum beats and bass lines the entire time. The movement of the songs, rather than coming from big dynamic beat switches and mawkish pop vocals, comes from the slow progression of increasingly intensifying modulation. Few components ever appear in the middle of a song, and never does a track jump off the rails into the unexpected; you could start dancing from the very opening of 25 25 and never miss a beat until its close.

It starts to feel inflexible. “Dial Me In” takes a shot at erupting into a higher dynamic range, turning up the resonant frequency of its perpetual bassline for a few bars as hard-hitting percussion evolves over the driving kick drum, but the producers quell the rush moments later as if dousing a growing fire with a bucket of cold water. Factory Floor are nothing short of obstinate in their minimalism, refusing to overextend beyond their self-imposed limitations, preferring to ride the steady current than to veer off into territory outside of that repetitive range. There are two ways to look at it: deep commitment to the aesthetic, or stubborn complacency.

At other times the album seems more decorative than their 2013 debut, and it’s in these moments that Factory Floor’s vision comes alive. “Wave” is the most efficient and transformative of the cuts on 25 25, built up and dismantled at a frenetic pace, its hints of melodic and rhythmic character floating in and out of the mix on the vibrations of several layers of digital percussion. It’s the album’s best example of minimalism as a liberation force rather than a limiting one with fragments of sound that shift around each other in an effort to keep the immersion alive, never grasping onto a piece for longer than its worth. “Wave” manages nine minutes of semi-reliable freshness before it’s immediately followed by the crushing, funky beat of closer “Upper Left”, a track that’s run into the ground after just a third of its runtime when the producers can’t find much to match with it’s more unusual foundation. Suddenly, after six minutes of the same elemental rhythms, in the middle of a measure, the record’s relentless drive forward just cuts off. It runs out of steam feeling unfinished, enough though it never really went anywhere to begin with.

It’s worth pointing out that minimalism is still a firm stalwart in the EDM wheelhouse, and in today’s fractured, rapidly evolving climate, it’s often used to far more innovative effect. Though the style plays within wholly different sonic boundaries, 25 25 comes at a time when footwork artists like DJ Rashad, Jlin, DJ Paypal, and RP Boo are distilling elegant sampling, retro drum machines loops, and cerebral cut-up techniques into a radically unique style of minimalism based on elaborate, intricate layers of complicated grooves and rhythms. Factory Floor’s brand of nostalgic minimalism, in contrast, comes off as more regressive than subversive in its devastating adherence to electronic dogma. And footwork is just a single example; there are far too many artists using the same tools as Factory Floor to far more inventive results right now.

But even if that wasn’t the case, 25 25 is too dated and monotonous in its aesthetic to captivate those on contemporary dancefloors or mainstage festival grounds — where today’s EDM thrives most profoundly — and its lack of modernity and failure to iterate on dormant genre conventions will leave the cutting-edge electro-savvy intelligentsia shrugging their shoulders. If Factory Floor can be proud of one thing, though, it’s that they’ve styled themselves as an authentic throwback to a particular period of electronic music history when mainstream visibility was an unrealistic prospect. Few of Detroit and Chicago’s DJs and producers in the ‘80s had the money or the means to record an entire album of club-banging house and techno music, but we now live in an era when record-making is exponentially more efficient and inexpensive than when the electronic music community was first shaping itself. Factory Floor are taking advantage of that by realizing the dream of those formative years of the genre with incessant rhythms and the high-powered pulse that only austere, dancefloor-ready arrangements can bring alive.