Fear Factory provided that voice. By combining death metal precision and brutality with a gothic sense of melody and an industrial approach to rhythm and atmospherics, Fear Factory created a sound that stood apart from all of that. The crisp production was a world away from the stripped down, blunted rock of the era, and by being a Fear Factory fan you felt like you were signing on to be a part of something: like you’d found that you weren’t alone in filling your head with a postmodern mix of metal, art, literature and film. Being a Fear Factory fan meant you got it.
It was probably one of the most difficult records to make, explains guitarist Dino Cazares, although not because of the writing process. All of the songs were written, and the sessions were originally booked for Chicago Tracks, “A very famous place where bands like Ministry and Skinny Puppy recorded. We wanted to get that industrial sound, so we wanted to go to the famous industrial studio.” But the sessions weren’t quite the direct line into industrial history that Cazares and co hoped for. The console started to fall apart, the channels were messed up and the computer wasn’t saving anything. And on top of that, drugs were being sold inside the studio. “Drug deals were going down and we were like, ‘Okay, we’ve gotta get out of here,'” Cazares says. “So we left there, and the second studio was a place called Bearsville. And of course the record label, Roadrunner, had to keep putting up money for us. And then we tracked most of everything there, and then we kinda didn’t see eye-to-eye with the producer, a guy named Colin Richardson. We just thought he didn’t see the picture. He didn’t see what we were trying to create.” The band felt that the sounds Richardson was getting for the them were too typical, too generic. So they fired him. Then they had to go back to the label and ask for more money to work on the album in LA, where they felt they should have started from the get-go. “So we had to fly back to LA with all the tapes, and we asked the record label for more money.”
And we got two guys: Greg Reely – a mixer/producer – and Rhys Fulber, a mixer as well who also did all the keyboards for the record. Once those two guys were brought on board and they saw the vision Fear Factory had, it all just gelled. “It was like butter after that,” says Cazares. “Burt went and did some of the vocal tracks over and everything started to really gel together. And when we were mixing it, we’d rented a place in Los Angeles down the street from where I live now, and it was a place where they did film scores, so they had a gigantic film screen in front of the console. So we’re mixing the record and putting Terminator and Blade Runner on, and we were like ‘Wow, that fits!’ Because those were the movies that inspired the record and gave us the overall vision of what we wanted to sound like. We wanted to sound like the future. And that record was definitely ahead of its time.”
Vision is definitely a word that fits with Fear Factory: the band is an idea and an atmosphere as much as it is individual songs. “We had it in our heads, we just needed the right producer to help create it,” Cazares says. “And that’s where Rhys Fulber came in. He brought all the electronic elements and all the technology elements that we wanted into Fear Factory. We meshed a couple of styles together and it worked perfectly, which helped us to create the vision of how we wanted Demanufacture to sound. And unfortunately a guy named Colin Richardson wasn’t on that same page and he had to get fired. But because of all that drama, firing the producer, switching studios, begging the label for more money, we thought the record was never going to be created. Thank god it did!”
