Luminous Machines

UK electro artist Emile Facey, aka Plant43, has built a discography totalling 10 albums and a slew of 12"s on respected scene mainstays CPU, Frustrated Funk, Semantica, Shipwrec, Cultivated Electronics and Trust. Emile is admired by his peers for his unwavering support of electronic music as an artist, DJ and promoter. His productions have been supported by luminaries like DJ Stingray, Helena Hauff, Dave Clarke, Surgeon, Rødhåd, Jane Fitz and Solid Blake and have been aired on BBC Radio 1's flagship Essential Mix, BBC Radio 6, Rinse FM, Threads, NTS and the Resident Advisor Podcast. Journalist Ben Murphy has called his style "Intricate, melodic and bewitching" while giving him a 9/10 review in DJ Mag. He is a regular guest at Berlin's renowned techno club, Tresor, who released a recording of his live performance at their 34th anniversary event in March 2025, London's FOLD and festivals across Europe.

Luminous Machines, the eighth album by UK based Emile Facey recording under his Plant43 alias, is made up of eight dancefloor tracks and eight cinematic interludes all of which are inspired by visits overseas to play live in 2023.

Emile: "The eight dancefloor tracks were all written just before gigs at Tresor in Berlin, for their new electro focussed event, Aquabahn, and the Drift Festival in Nijmegen, which happened on a very hot, sunny day in June. For some reason I'm always inspired to write new material immediately before a gig. I find it's a good way to capture how I'm feeling in that moment and there's something both cathartic and inspiring about playing a new track live, knowing it didn't exist a few days beforehand. Once home in the studio, I completed eight of these new tracks to form the core of the album.

The cinematic interludes which make up the rest of the album came about during the same trip to Berlin In April 2023. I arrived for a gig at Tresor with a whole day to spare and there was an atmosphere in the city that I felt compelled to capture. It was a warm but grey and rainy day, the neon lights glowing faintly in the mist as people rushed from door-to-door under umbrellas, trams were quietly gliding in and out of an elevated station platform while various other smaller vehicles busily scurried around the entrance to a giant shopping mall just outside the window of my compact hotel room. I opened my laptop and began writing a series of short tracks while I was waiting to go to the club for sound check, soundtracking the scene. While I was doing this it occurred to me just how much different forms of transport are interwoven with our lives. In so many ways vehicles are empowering for humans and we rely on transportation for so much and yet we urgently need to change our relationship with fossil fuels. Surely, I thought, human ingenuity can create new machines which transport us around without polluting our planet?

When I was back home I realised that I had 16 tracks that worked together as a whole. I'd experimented before with putting short beatless tracks on my electro records, adding a bit more atmosphere, and my instinct was to put them all on the double vinyl edition. However, having just played at some events where DJs were playing vinyl, I wanted these records to be DJ friendly. The solution I landed on was to create two different versions of the album, the eight dancefloor tracks on the vinyl and the cinematic interludes completing the sixteen track digital, cinematic edition. Clocking in at an hour long, together they form my soundtrack to those Luminous Machines I was dreaming of in Berlin."