Fear Factory’s Demanufacture: the future-metal classic that rewired the 90s
In the summer of ’95, Fear Factory unleashed Demanufacture – a futuristic masterpiece that would influence metal to come
When Fear Factory released second album Demanufacture in 1995, it pointedly and powerfully predicted both metal’s future and the runaway train of interactive technology and artificial intelligence. More importantly, it changed the way heavy music sounded forever.
In truth, Fear Factory were not the most likely candidates for widespread success. Their 1991 debut, Soul Of A New Machine, was an extraordinarily fresh and inventive extreme metal record that took its cues from death metal, grindcore and industrial music, with vocalist Burton C. Bell’s then-unprecedented method of switching from guttural growl to haunting croon proving the element that contributed most to the band’s perceived uniqueness. But it wasn’t until 1993’s similarly groundbreaking Fear Is The Mindkiller remix EP that Burton and guitarist Dino Cazares’s musical vision would be truly brought to life. Comprising new versions of songs from their debut, dismantled and rebuilt by Rhys Fulber of industrial heavyweights Frontline Assembly, the record’s joyous cross-pollination set Fear Factory on the right track and towards the album that would soon define their career.
“Fear Is The Mindkiller is what we wanted to be,” Dino says today. “We just didn’t have the technology to do that at first. We didn’t have the keyboard samples or the old-school computers that guys like Rhys were using. So we’d try to emulate the machine with guitars, bass, drums and vocals. If you listen to old industrial bands like KMFDM or Ministry, they’d sample a metal riff and then loop it so it was the same riff over and over. Well, we were trying to copy that.”
