FEAR FACTORY – Reverse-Engineered Hostility
Words by: Tom Wilson @thetomwilsonexperiment - Sense Music Media | Monday 14th November 2022
Dino’s Least Favourite FEAR FACTORY Songs Revealed
Dino joins us today from his couch at home in L.A., as rare but much-needed California rain buckets down outside. The latest FEAR FACTORY remix album, Recode, has been out for a week, in keeping with a tradition established early in the genre-bending band’s career where DJs of various backgrounds break apart and reassemble the cyber-metal crew’s material. Last year’s Aggression Continuum was an absolutely stunning album made in quite dramatic circumstances, and its punishing grooves have been remixed by both FEAR FACTORY veterans and new talent. As the metal world waits to see who will fill the very big shoes of Burton C. Bell, Dino took me through the album’s creation … and his least favourite FF songs …
I know it’s been kept secret for a long time, but I feel like it’s time that we can reveal that I am actually the new singer of FEAR FACTORY.
[Laughs] Yes, exactly, with your Australian accent and everything. I look forward to when you get onstage, and go, “Hey mate! Fuckin’ we’re fuckin’ FEAR FACTORY, mate! Get fucked!” [Laughs] I look forward to hearing that when you get up onstage.
I’ve had a crack at Recoded, and there’s this amazing part … you can probably sympathise. You’ll be listening to an album, and you’ll hit a track that hits you so hard that you find yourself listening to it on repeat over and over again, to the point where I barely remember the album that comes after it, because I’ve only listened to it once. That song is Empires Fall. Holy shit, dude.
Yeah. That’s a guy named TYRANT OF DEATH – he’s based out of Canada … I reached out to guys [where] I really liked the stuff that they do. I’ve been a fan of his, but I never spoke to him up until a year ago when I reached out to him to do this track. Same thing with some of the other guys – ZARDONIC, I was a fan of his music, and I just reached out to him on Instagram, really. These guys, I got in touch with them on Instagram and told them I was a big fan of their stuff, and if they would like to be a part of this. Now Rhys Fulber, he’s worked with the band forever. He’s basically our fifth member. He’s helped develop our sound over the years. He’s produced records. He’s collaborated on a million tracks, and it’s been great working with him. Him, I already knew. He was the first person, of course, that I reached out to. And then we have Rob Gee, who was a guy who I have known for quite some time. He’s got this hardcore gabba style based out of Holland … so that was really cool that I finally got to collaborate with him. And BLUSH RESPONSE is a guy we’ve known for quite some time. He’s also worked with Rhys Fulber on a lot of stuff before on separate things, and Rhys has also reached out to him to add elements of sounds to our FEAR FACTORY records, going way back to The Industrialist and even Mechanize, going way back to 2010. So he’s been doing stuff for us for a while. Those guys are like my go-to guys when it comes to certain things, you know? But the two newcomers were a guy called DUALIZED, and a guy named ZARDONIC, and, of course, TYRANT OF DEATH. Those are the newcomers.
I’m glad you mentioned ZARDONIC, because Worthless is quite a stylistic curveball, to the point where I was like, “Am I still listening to the same album? Has it switched to something else?”
Yeah, yeah. I wanted to try to get all these different elements of styles that I liked, you know? Worthless is very synthwave – 80s throwback retro synthwave, you know what I mean? So I wanted to get that element in there. If you look at Manufactured Hope, which was mixed by Rob Gee, that’s definitely a throwback to the Remanufactured days, when we were putting gabba hardcore into our remixes, you know what I mean? And of course, Rhys and ZARDONIC probably did the majority of the remixes, and you can definitely hear their styles. Rhys has got multiple different styles, you know? Path to Salvation is very much a goth-y, industrial dance club mix, you know what I mean? … It’s very much in that vein, and Rhys also worked on the Cyberpunk soundtrack, for the video game, so he brought some of those elements into those tracks. He’s multi-talented when it comes to different styles. On Worthless, I really wanted to go left-field and do that synthwave track, yeah. Completely different. I decided to take all the guitars out. Like, no guitars, just all synth, and part of the melody is actually the melody from the actual album – you know, the guitar riffs – so yeah, we just took all the guitars out.
It’s interesting how you’ve reconstructed this. I’ll use, for example, my favourite track from this. Empires Fall … that line … it’s a throwaway line in Collapse. It’s literally, I think, mentioned once. Whose idea was it to grab that one little throwaway line and build an entire chorus out of it?
Yeah, that’s one of the beauties of working with different artists, is that they envision the song differently than you do. They’re able to pick a little line. Even Worthless … the song Worthless, and the line “Worthless”, you know what I mean? It’s just a little line in the regular song, but they take these sort of words, and they highlight them and they make them into a chorus … or the hook in the song. Same thing with I Am the Nightrider. ZARDONIC took the midsection vocal hook and made that the chorus, and that’s really cool, completely different. I love it when they do that.
Did you handle the guitars on Empires Fall – particularly that progression behind the chorus? Because that sets it off like [chef’s kiss]
What it is, it’s the actual guitar tracks from the album. What he did is he pitched them down two octaves lower, so it made it even heavier, right? And then, obviously, he chopped them up and made them into almost new riffs. That’s the beauty of it, man. That’s the really cool creative process of somebody remixing your songs, making them sound different.
Speaking of riffs, if I had to ask what your five favourite riffs that you’ve written are …
Ooof!
Yeah, I know. [Laughs] I’d hate to get these questions. I’d hate to be on the receiving end of them.
[Laughs] It’s like having five kids, and somebody goes, “Who’s your favourite child?” … They’re all your favourites, you know? I probably have least favourite songs … All those songs are like your babies. You build them and you watch them grow.
That could be an interesting angle. What are the ones that you think are least deserving of being under the FEAR FACTORY moniker? That you wrote … let’s not trash-talk stuff that you weren’t a part of.
[Laughs] I don’t really trash-talk that stuff, because it’s still part of the catalogue, you know what I mean? Sure, I might not like certain parts of those records, but whatever, it doesn’t matter. Of the stuff that I’ve created – well, the stuff that I helped create – one of the songs was called Back the Fuck Up … It’s not that it’s a bad track, I just thought it was a bad track for the album. It should’ve been put as a B-side or, you know, an extra track or a bonus track or something like that. Another track, which is going to be kind of odd for me to say, and it’s the reason why the song is so far back in the record, is the title track to Obsolete. The actual song called Obsolete. It’s probably one of my least favourite. The riff is pretty cool, the beat’s pretty cool, but I just think overall the song is not that great. Those are probably my two, out of the songs that I’ve wrote, that are probably my least favourite. Don’t get me wrong, it could be somebody’s favourite track. For instance, I got into a conversation with TYRANT – his name, actually, is Alex … That’s his favourite song, Obsolete, the title track. He was just going on to me about how great it was, and what he liked about it, and blah blah blah, and I was like, “Wow, I am so not that much into that song.” [Laughs]
Recode is out now. Dino will be touring Australia with SOULFLY as part of the GOOD THINGS Festival in December.