Enterting The Matrix

04/23/2001 5:00 PM, LAUNCH
David John Farinella

For the past 10 years, Fear Factory has been leading listeners through a graphic aural depiction of the battle between man and machine. The group's inspiration came from both environment and entertainment. "Los Angeles is a very sci-fi place," chuckles bassist Christian Olde Wolbers.

"Yeah, we were all inspired by sci-fi movies like Blade Runner," adds guitarist Dino Cazares. "But there's a lot of different machines that we talk about--corporate machines, government machines, technology," he reports. Take a song like the title track from 1995's Demanufacture, he says. "That's not necessarily about technology, but about the social machines."

"It could be about Bill Gates," Olde Wolbers interjects with a laugh.

Machines, sci-fi, Bill Gates--heady topics for Fear Factory, yet the band has never been shy about striking out. Born out of the backyard death-metal scene in East Los Angeles, Fear Factory has always been seen as an outsider. "That's where we started, and I remember all these other bands were jealous of us because we were getting popular really fast," Cazares recall. "There was a lot of sh-t talking. We played about 10 shows, did three demos, and got signed."

Signed doesn't necessarily mean the band, which also includes singer Burton C. Bell and drummer Raymond Herrera, hopscotched to stardom. Instead, Fear Factory has spent the last decade knocking down doors one at a time. Cazares, for one, feels it's about time the band becomes better known. "Yeah I want to blow up," he says. "Definitely, I want to blow up. I think it's time."

"Then we can do all the things we've been dreaming," Olde Wolbers adds. "We can make a nice video, make a Fear Factory movie, a Fear Factory video game. It's time we build the Fear Factory Empire. All kinds of sh-t. We can have our own Fear Factory rental car place and Dino can have his own Mexican food place next to El Compadre."

In part, the lads are planning their future based on Digimortal, their tightest and most cohesive work to date. "One of the things we really concentrated on was song arrangements," explains Cazares. "Over the years we've had amazing songs, but they were like, five to six minutes long. They were epic. This time we really concentrated on some really great songs and made 'em shorter."

This time around, instead of man and machine fighting, they've become one. "They realize they can't live without each other," Cazares says. "The song 'Linchpin' describes how one without the other wouldn't work, they wouldn't exist. So, Digimortal is short for 'digital mortality,' where we're able to live together in a Matrix-like world."

This is not a future the band is predicting. "It's already here," states Cazares. "We're only 15 percent away from figuring out the genetics of man--what makes us what we are."

"We used to talk about cloning, and now they've got all these sheep and monkeys running around," Olde Wolbers tosses in. "They probably have the human cloned already, but they haven't told us yet."