The Albums of 2013 (#1): Fuck Buttons – Slow Focus (ATP)
Benjamin Power and Andrew Hung’s third record saw them ascend to the very top of Space Mountain
‘Expectation,’ is a word that crops up a lot in Benjamin Power’s syntax these days. One half of Fuck Buttons, alongside his close friend Andrew Hung, Power hadn’t, for the bulk of his time creating music, had to think too much about expectation. Yet Slow Focus, the duo’s brilliantly discordant third album, was perhaps the first material in their history that they knew would be picked apart by the eyes of the world, following the critical success of their second album Tarot Sport in 2009 and the arguably even greater exposure they gained when their music was used by Danny Boyle during London’s Olympic opening ceremony in 2012.
Variations of an answer of ‘we don’t like to pigeonhole ourselves’ are a dime-a-dozen among artists, often ringing hollow amidst the sheer weight of history’s back catalogue that we’re now almost irresistibly exposed to in 2013; but when Power tells us “we never had any preconceptions about how a track was going to sound” you really believe him. For one, amidst Slow Focus’s competing layers of hardware dissonance, industrial tropes and – on The Red Wing in particular – break beat experimentation, lurks an almost alien DNA; it is a record that slips between guises before the listener can even attempt to peg it down; each track is laced with a foreboding menace, yet with an intention that’s never made clear – tracks in effect blank slates for the listener to map their own interpretation on them.
“When we were making Slow Focus – like usual – I wasn’t listening to anything else that was going on,” Power explains. “I’d hear all these new names being thrown around on the internet but I’d never listen. Even something like that can subconsciously worm its way into the creation process. I genuinely listen to my own music more than anyone else’s. That’s not egotistical, it’s to try and ensure creative purity.”
"When we first started out we were just jamming out in each other’s bedrooms for our own entertainment, and that’s not really changed" – Benjamin Power
Fuck Buttons strive more than most to maintain singularity within their work. “The Olympic thing was a nice interlude for us,” Power recalls, “but we were already in a very separate place and well into the album. We didn’t have any expectations for it and we still don’t. It gets dangerous anticipating it and thinking about its reception because you start to pander to these outside external forces and that can be detrimental.”
The pair revelled in putting the album together – the first solely produced by themselves (“it was a step into the unknown which we always try to do, otherwise we’d be living in a very contained world”) – at their own Space Mountain studios which, in another indicator of their keenness to remain mentally pure, contrasted hugely with its bustling Dalston surroundings. “It was an amazing little hub. It was crazy; on the other side of the building’s shutters was Shacklewell Lane, and yet we felt totally secluded from all of that. We've never really had a sense towards any kind of geographical location within our sound so we created a world that was in our heads first and is now being visualised in however many different ways in the heads of the people listening to it.”
Released in July, some 11 months on from the Olympic exposure of being played to 900 million people worldwide (“something that I’ve not noticed the physical benefit of,” Andrew Hung told us when we spoke to him around its release,) Slow Focus managed to broach the UK Top 40 – clocking in at 36 – as well as topping the Record Store Charts; that’s no mean feat for an album that comes from a duo so abrasive and stubbornly individualistic in a time where saturation of choice has perhaps led to a retreat to the safety of the crowd in the upper echelons of the charts. “But I think its success is testament to the kind of times we live in and the speed at which culture can be shared now,” argues Power of their relatively outré music going far beyond where similar acts might’ve in the previous decade. “I think it’s amazing that when we first started out we were just jamming out in each other’s bedrooms for our own entertainment, and that’s not really changed. To get to this point without any external influence coming in to try and shape what we do is a really beautiful feeling.”
Power admits that he hasn’t disconnected from the record yet, like other artists so often do. “Andy doesn’t so much; he likes to take a step back and leaves things to breathe for a while. I tend to obsess over little intricacies, so it’s a nice balance between us, but I don’t really stop even after it’s been released.
“But then,” he adds, “we wouldn’t be making this music if we couldn’t see ourselves listening to it anyway, would we?”