Gabe Gurnsey - Physical

If you want to know what Gabe Gurnsey’s debut album "Physical" sounds like, the first thing you should do is forget all about Factory Floor, the group he co-founded 13 years ago. Gone are the cold, lengthy, stripped back deconstructions of no wave electronica and industrial techno, abandoned in favour of something altogether warmer, torrid and… well, succinct.

Gurnsey started writing tracks in his downtime from the group early 2017 and by the start of that Summer he had 30 demos ready for work. He admits he worked very quickly initially but then gave the tracks 12 months to develop fully into a new sound.

And that new sound - a 21st Century take on muscular electro, Balearic synth pop, EBM, proto-Hacienda militant funk, early Chicago house and minimal, Neptunes-referencing beats - can be experienced in full on //Physical// the album released on Erol Alkan’s Phantasy label.

Encoded into the album is a seductive narrative, which recreates a night out. Gabe explains: “The record is a story. The way the 14 tracks are sequenced mirrors a night out from start to finish. “So even though it’s electronic dance music, it’s a record about clubbing even more than it’s a record to be played in clubs. It’s everything about the clubbing experience reflected in sound. Getting ready to go out, driving into town, arriving at the club, being on the dancefloor, how you get home afterwards early the next morning… even when you step outside to get some air, when you’re outside at 3am having a cigarette… even that is represented here. It’s about the whole experience.” The theme for the record also concerned how we can shed our real selves when going out, how we can almost adopt a new personality. This was an idea that helped him get used to a new part of the process and one he wasn’t initially comfortable with - stepping behind the mic. He didn’t want to be the singer, so in order to do it, he simply became someone else… or, to be precise, he became a number of different people. For all of the multitudes of different sounding male voices on //Physical// are all Gabe thanks to the wonders of vocal processing. (All of the female voices belong to his partner, the Manchester musician Tilly Morris of Grimm Twins, who also helped him co-author some of the lyrics on tracks such as the Miss Nicky Trax and Missy Elliott-referencing clipped electro funk of ‘Heavy Rubber’.) He explains how the theme of changing one’s persona helped him crack the approach to introducing vocals: “It’s similar to how our online selves or avatars differ from our actual selves and that was key to some of the vocal pitching on the record. All of the deeper vocal stuff on there is actually me.”

It’s time to take a trip into a fantasy world where nothing is quite as it seems. It’s time to get real.

TRACK LISTING

1. Ultra Clear Sound
2. You Can
3. Temazzy
4. Harder Rhythm
5. Sweet Heat
6. New Kind
7. Heavy Rubber
8. In States
9. I Get
10. Version
11. Eyes Over
12. AM Crystal
13. Night Track
14. The Last Channel

PRODUCT DETAILS

Artist:  Gabe Gurnsey
Label:  Phantasy
Condition:  New 
Genre:  Electronic
Format:  Vinyl LP
Cat Number:  PHLP10
Released:  3 August 2018