In 2015,
Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart and experimental artist
Lawrence English (collectively known as
HEXA) provided audio for a retrospective exhibition of
David Lynch's visual art, sculptures, and photography. The exhibition took place at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia. English released an LP of
HEXA's work via his own Room40 label in 2016.
Factory Photographs, as expected, is full of dark industrial clanging, scattered by echo and punctuated with screeching noises and eerie, motor-like humming. Some tracks feature sporadic, shuffling rhythms, but overall it seems to split the difference between sounding like properly composed music and a field recording from a haunted assembly line. On a few occasions, it seems like there are doom metal chords faintly resounding in the background. Particularly during the last few cuts, there are disarming bursts of harsh feedback buried in the back of the mix. As
Lynch himself states, there's a certain beauty to factories, as desolate as they may seem, and this album perfectly encapsulates that fascinating sense of bleakness. ~ Paul Simpson