Thursday, June 07, 2012

Fear Factory dump drummer; get wicked

Fear Factory seem to have missed an opportunity. Their new album, The Industrialist, is about a machine which becomes sentient, so you'd have thought when fans started complaining about the use of a drum machine, it would have given them a perfect explanation - a matching of form and function.

Instead, Burton C Bell launches into a dull defence:

"On the past records, we've always had a drummer to record, but when does a drummer stop being a drummer? Because everything that person records goes into Pro Tools and it's fixed perfectly and the sound that was recorded isn't even used. All the sound is sampled. It basically becomes the program. So we basically eliminated the drummer. And we thought, if we're gonna do that anyway, let's just use a drum program. So we did it."
I'm not entirely sure people who write music about how machines will take over have much credibility if they think "well, there's some post production work done on the drums, so we mug as well use a robot" and don't think through the logic of that position... Isn't all their work subjected to post-production? Do you really need any flesh to make a cyber rock record at all?


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