Listen: Factory Star - Olympian

While the timing might suggest otherwise, Factory Star's new single 'Olympian' doesn't appear to be a  direct response to the Olympic Games currently underway in London. Good timing all the same though, the track is the first single from their new mini-album New Sacral being released here by Fishrider Records under a partnership with UK label Occultation Recordings who released Opposite Sex's debut album earlier in the year.

Formed by founding member of The Fall Martin Bramah, Factory Star have been around since 2008 and New Sacral follows their debut album Enter Castle Perilous released last year. Here is the new track...

Press Release:

When small Dunedin music label Fishrider Records teamed up with equally small English label Occultation Recordings earlier this year to make a UK release of the Opposite Sex album possible, the link-up was contemplated as more than a one-off. So, when some new recordings from a band called Factory Star were delivered to Occultation last month, Fishrider Records had no hesitation in offering to co-release the 10" vinyl mini-album and CD in New Zealand.

Factory Star was formed in December 2008 by Martin Bramah, founder member of both The Fall (1976-79 and rejoining for Extricate in 1990) and Blue Orchids, with whom he recorded the astonishing The Greatest Hit (Money Mountain) LP for Rough Trade. “Some of the most visionary music of its era” was how Simon Reynolds described Blue Orchids’ hallucinogen-fuelled pagan Celtic postpunk psych-pop in his book Rip it Up and Start Again – Postpunk 1978-1984.

New Sacral by Factory Star is a perfect fit with the Fishrider catalogue of“psych-pop & no wave from below the underground”, as Bramah is something of a kindred spirit to The Puddle’s George D. Henderson in his journey through and beyond the dark edges of music, life, literature and the arcane history of human ritual.

Factory Star's combination of Bramah’s distinctive guitar style and masterful lyrical flights, along with swirling, hypnotic keyboards, is reminiscent of Blue Orchids at their most potent. The new mini-album New Sacral follows the debut Factory Star album, Enter Castle Perilous, released Easter 2011 and followed in December 2011 by the unlikeliest of perfect Christmas singles, Lucybel.

New Sacral, Occultation MAB7DC019/Fishrider FISH009, will be available in New Zealand as a 10” mini-LP and a CD, and also as a 10"+CD bundle from Fishrider Records mailorder and from all good record shops from 27th August.

The Factory Star album Enter Castle Perilous is also available in New Zealand through Fishrider Records as a LP and a CD, and also as an LP+CD+7" single bundle.