FEAR FACTORY Frontman On DINO CAZARES: 'I've Always Considered Him To Be A Brother'

BeyondPaisley recently conducted an interview with vocalist Burton C. Bell of Los Angeles cyber metallers FEAR FACTORY. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

BeyondPaisley: First things first: How's the new album?

Burton: Man, it's great. I just completed the drawings that tell the backstory. It's a concept album.

BeyondPaisley: Of?

Burton: An automaton who becomes self aware. He starts experiencing memory and as a result develops emotions, like empathy and anger. He ends up being both industry's greatest creation and its ultimate destruction.

BeyondPaisley: Does it have an industrial sound?

Burton: We incorporate a lot of industrial elements into the music, a lot of texture and ambience. But Dino [Cazares, guitar] keeps it metal.

BeyondPaisley: I've gotta know, where did the inspiration for the concept come from?

Burton: I read. A lot. And I target specific things to read about or watch, like "The Venus Project" or "Zeitgeist". One thing I noticed about sci-fi writers is that they write about what they see and know, reimagined. Orwell took what he saw and lived and moved it forward and came up with 1984. So I looked at what was going on in the Occupy movement, and with Anonymous, and the religious right, and this is one way I pictured them all coming together. But you can find inspiration anywhere. I took the title for the song "God Eater" from the side of a box of an action figure I saw in Japan.

BeyondPaisley: So you do the lyrics and then Dino takes over the music?

Burton: Well, yeah, mostly. But Dino and I push each other. He'll make a suggestion about some lyrics, I'll recommend a different take on some music.

BeyondPaisley: It sounds like you're glad to be working with him again.

Burton: I've always considered him to be a brother. But now that we're a little older, we've finally learned to communicate. When we were younger, him telling me what to put into the lyrics would probably have resulted in a "Fuck you!" and a fight, and the same would go for me approaching him about the music. Now we still tell each other to fuck off but there's joking behind it, and we know enough to not take it to heart and listen to what we're trying to say.

BeyondPaisley: So this album is a collaborative effort?

Burton: Absolutely. Dino and I worked very closely with [producer] Rhys Fulber, who we've worked with for most of our projects since 1992. And since ours were the only hands at the controls, the album is more focused. What we wanted to make happen, what we needed to make happen, happened.

BeyondPaisley: You've had a pretty crazy couple of years. Was it important for you to feel more in control of your work?

Burton: Yeah. Now that the lawsuit (involving former FEAR FACTORY members Raymond Herrera and Christian Olde Wolbers) is over, we were able to put that stress behind us and just concentrate on the artistic side of what we're doing. And it came together pretty quickly.

BeyondPaisley: Is that how you prefer to write?

Burton: It depends on how you look at it. I spend a lot of time prepping, thinking about what I want to write, and walk in with a lot of ideas. For "The Industrialist", we just had to get in there to meet our delivery date. It was exciting, a fast and furious work. A lot of times I feel that the more time you spend working on an album, the more it loses its luster. You get tired of singing the same things over and over again, listening to the same riffs, and that comes across in the music. With this album time was short, but there's a spark of creative energy in everything. It's cool.

Read the entire interview from BeyondPaisley.