Rip It Up and Start Again by Simon Reynolds

Author:Simon Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2005-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

“TUXEDOMOON WERE KIND OF MENTORS to us,” says Joseph Jacobs of Factrix. “Not musically, but in the sense of, ‘You can actually do this—be in a band with no drummer and have audiences.’ When we started Factrix, we didn’t even talk about having a drummer. We knew we wanted to do something different, so we removed one of the key components of rhythm and blues.”

Excited by PiL’s and Throbbing Gristle’s adventures in sonic mutation, Factrix built their own modified instruments (“glaxobass,” “radioguitar,” “amputated bass”) with Tommy Tadlock’s assistance. They also experimented with bizarre protosynths called Optigans that Tadlock had acquired. “‘Optigan’ stood for optical organ,” says Bond Bergland. “They were instruments for the family to play songs on, with the songs stored on these clear plastic acetates, which the Optigan read through some kind of light-reading device.” Factrix quickly realized that “you could put the acetates in upside down and backward, play them the wrong way. That was what was really inspiring to us at the time, ‘Let’s see what happens if we do this wrong.’”

Factrix tried anything and everything that wasn’t standard rock instrumentation—whistling tea kettles, an inexpensive early sequencer called the Mutron—“but really the main instrument was Joseph’s tape recorder,” says Bergland. Along with technology, Factrix were equally interested in premodern and non-Western sounds, ethnic instruments like the doumbek and saz. “Even the drum machine rhythms were trying to mimic African drumming in a very loose way, inspired by field recordings,” Bergland explains. “This was years before ‘world music’ existed. My thinking was, ‘If something sticks around for thousands of years, it probably has some meaning, something real about it.’” In this fascination for ecstatic ritual music, Factrix were a couple of steps ahead of Throbbing Gristle.

With its picturesque hills and quaint cable cars, its foggy bay and idyllic Golden Gate Park, San Francisco doesn’t immediately seem like an “industrial” city. Yet the downtown area south of Market Street was full of inexpensive lofts formerly used for light manufacturing, and the “industrial element” of repurposing these spaces for artistic activity was “a big part of San Francisco culture,” says Jacobs. San Francisco ranked alongside Sheffield and London as a bastion of industrial music, too. Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle performed to huge crowds in San Francisco. TG even played their last gig at Kezar Pavilion in 1981.

The city was home to the unofficial fifth member of TG, Monte Cazazza, a performance artist and renegade researcher of all things aberrant and unwholesome. He describes himself as an “outcast historian, a cultural mortician.” Cazazza, Factrix, and Mark Pauline from Survival Research Laboratories formed “a little scene,” according to Bergland. Together they staged a series of mixed-media extravaganzas that left audiences reeling. Instead of playing punk clubs like Mabuhay, Bergland says, “we wanted to make spectacles so people were aware this was an unusual event. The first one we did together was at the Kezar Pavilion. Monte made a big stainless-steel swastika spinning on an axis, handcuffed himself to it, and hung upside down.

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