The first time I heard Facta’s second album, I thought the download hadn’t finished properly. Twenty-seven minutes long, yet it felt like it had just started playing a few moments before. GULP packs a lot of ideas into its seven tracks, but surely that couldn’t be it? In the world of dance music LPs, individual tracks usually run between six and eight minutes. GULP felt different, lasting about as long as fizzy water stays bubbly and fresh in the glass. But after a few more listens, that turned out to be its strength. There are no moments wasted, no tracks that wear out their welcome with one too many loops, no flab to speak of. GULP is bite-sized house music, making a statement with memorable hooks and bold basslines, and then making way for the next idea to take over.
GULP lands on Wisdom Teeth, the label Facta runs with fellow Londoner K-LONE. Over time, the imprint has developed a cozy style that’s as colorful as a lovingly handmade patchwork quilt. Their sound encompasses UK garage, drum’n’bass, post-dubstep and, increasingly, the kind of twitchy, detail-oriented minimal dance music that’s part of an ongoing global revival. Pattern Gardening, the label’s most recent compilation, fashioned itself as the manifesto for this movement. Wisdom Teeth gathered producers from France to Japan to put their spin on the label’s homey, sometimes cutesy minimal sound, and came out with something era-defining in the process.
Facta’s LP pulls back a little—or a lot. Pattern Gardening was over two hours long, while GULP is barely longer than an episode of Seinfeld. It’s built with the same DNA as Pattern Gardening, but comes out in spurts of inspiration rather than luxuriating in intricate grooves. After the requisite one-minute intro track, “BDB” comes barreling out with an obnoxious vocal hook over a track that splits the difference between early Perlon and modern Afro house. The bass is tidal, the drums huge—and the vocal as belligerently insistent as some of the biggest hits of the original minimal era, but with more charm this time around.
Each track on GULP has some kind of outsized hook. These are big shiny tunes that stick in the mind. “Skyline” is all dreamy beats and dewy FM synthesis, the melody landing and fading like condensation on glass. “SLoPE” is a topsy-turvy jam built on jazzy samples—like a drum’n’bass track disassembled and put back together incorrectly—while “Jets,” the highlight, combines twitchy minimal house with an enormous bassline that almost upends the otherwise supple groove. And with that, I’ve mentioned almost all the tracks. But they’re moreish enough to warrant going back again and again.
GULP is a lot livelier than Facta’s previous full-length, Blush, which was written during a break from gigging. This one was made during a busy summer touring schedule, which explains why it feels like it begins and ends in medias res, the result of spontaneous inspiration delivered as quickly and abruptly as it was produced. But more importantly, GULP feels human, replacing the cold and technical framework of German minimal techno with something sanguine. The bass feels like it has warm blood flowing through its veins. That’s not a prerequisite for good electronic music, but in the case of GULP, it makes these 27 minutes feel vital. It’s not something you put on while you’re pregaming or diving into Excel; it’s as brief and intense as a conversation with a good friend, and almost as nourishing—emotional qualities that have made Wisdom Teeth one of dance music’s most essential labels in less than a decade.
