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by Jesse Capps
03/24/2004
from Rock Confidential
You guys got back from Australia not too long ago. How did that go?
It was amazing. We were over there in summertime. The weather is just like being in L.A. It was awesome. We've been there a lot of times before. The shows were amazing. We did some Big Day Out shows, which is like a festival they have there. We did some shows with Static-X and Korn. We were there for a month. In the middle of that we went to Korea for three days. We did a show there with Korn. We came back to Australia. It was a lot of fun. We had a great time.
So I guess you get Summer year round that way!
Exactly. Well, kind of. It's been rainy in L.A. the past couple of days so it's back to Summer today I guess.
The new record, Archetype, is coming out April 20. How would you describe it to your fans and to others that have never heard you before?
Wow. I describe it as the Fear Factory sound of Demanufacture and Obsolete updated and more polished. I guess that's the best way to describe it. That's what we were going for!
Did you do anything different with your drum set-up this time around?
I added a couple of more drums so my kit is actually a little bit bigger now. In terms of my style I just wanted to go back to being really extreme. There's a couple of songs that are very mellow on the drums but I wanted to keep the intense songs really intense. The songs that were a lot more open and epic I wanted to keep them simple and really easy. I kind of just set that idea and went with that.
You've never been afraid to use double bass either!
Hah! That's for sure!
You've also got a new record label, Liquid 8. What's it like working with them?
So far it's been amazing. They're so much easier to work with. We keep in contact a lot. We keep in contact with Liquid 8 a lot more than we ever did with Roadrunner. I've got no complaints whatsoever. Everything that we - the label and the band - have discussed six or seven months ago is all going as planned.
I think it's just easier to have that attitude today with smaller labels instead of the bigger labels that are just out to make a quick buck.
I totally agree. There's a lot of one-on-one and moreso than we ever had before. It's really good. A lot of the people at the label are really excited about the album. A lot of them are huge fans. It really means a lot. It makes it that much better for everybody. Working with them doesn't feel like a job at all.
You're doing something cool, too. The first pressing of the CD will come with a DVD. Are there going to be two different versions of the DVD randomly packaged with the disc?
Yep. What we're doing is putting out two different DVDs. They're both going to have different random footage. One isn't really set to be a live one and one isn't really set to be a behind the scenes one. It will all be mixed in. Some of it will be the video stuff we did in Australia, some behind the scenes footage. Some of it will be the shows we did in Australia, some will be just us talking about the band and things that are happening.
Will the packaging be different to let you know which DVD is included?
Nope. Not at all. Some people will get it with one and some will get it with the other. We're really doing that on purpose just to give them something extra.
And maybe get 'em to buy two copies instead of one...
Well, true, but they won't know if the next copy they buy will have the same DVD or not! I could kind of say yes to your question, but not really. We're not numbering them as #1 and #2, like you have to buy two. It's like a candy machine and you don't know what the prize is gonna be. It's interesting, that's all. It gives people something a little different instead of the same thing that they always get. That's what bands have to do. This whole downloading thing and the prices of CDs like they are...I think when this album hits the fans are going to be very happy with the price. The price alone with people being able to download it for free, we had to step up and give the fans something special. That's what we wanted to do.
I'm grateful that bands do that, but - don't let this come out the wrong way - it's a shame that bands have to do things like that to get people to buy CDs again.
Bands could have better packaging. Give people a better product, better artwork. The complete package has to be more than what they've been used to in the past. The other thing is the price of the music. I think that's the main reason for the downloading. If music was cheaper I think people would think twice about wanting to download it because you'd get better quality if you bought it. Most downloading is MP3. I don't have anything against MP3s because it's an easy way to move music across the internet. The quality is just not there. Why spend $2-3-400,000 on a record if at the end of the day people are just going to download the MP3s? It's an insult as well. I think it's cool if you can go online and get music that you can't buy, like a lot of really old music that you can't get any more. That's a really great reason to have it on the internet. New music that's not even out yet - to have it available on the internet to people for free, that's bad. Especially for the bands. That's what is killing the industry. It's not the other way around. I don't have a problem with people downloading music. People can do it all day long if that want. If it's not even out yet, that's what is killing bands. All of that makes us give the people a better product when it hits the stores. All we can do is create a better product at a better price. If people still don't want to go for that the next step will be just to sell music song by song. At that point you're getting rid of record labels, record stores. Ultimately bands could sell new songs online for one or two dollars. That's a whole different thing now. Maybe that's the way it will have to go down. I'm curious to see how it's going to pan out. The movie industry is freaking out as well because the same thing is happening to them as well. It's good and bad. It's good because it shows our technology. The bad thing is it hurts the people that are creating the product.
If that above scenario happens, what will be the bands motivation to go out and play live? Sure, they'll say the love of their music, but it's harder to pull it off without the support of a record label. Will they tour and release new CDs?
They can't. The only real winner for bands will be touring. You can't really pirate that. People will still want to see the shows. They want to be there live to see the shows. That's something the record labels are missing out on. Labels don't get money from that. They get money from the record sales. Bands will have a touring avenue but that will only benefit bands that are already established. For new bands it will be tougher if this continues.
What has changed for you in this business since the first Fear Factory record?
A lot has changed. It's a lot easier to make records now than it was before. The technology that's out there is amazing. You can pretty much have no knowledge of music and write a song with the current technology. At the end of the day it's always been about how good your songs are. That has never changed. The whole downloading thing didn't even exist when we started. Windows wasn't even available when we first started. Computers just were not what they are now. The amount of money record labels give bands has amazingly changed for the worse. Bands are getting less than $100,000 to do records. Before that was totally unheard of. You don't even have to go into a recording studio anymore. You can do everything out of your bedroom if you really wanted to. That's the biggest change because before so much money went into recording studios. It doesn't sound the same but it gets you the same result. I think that's one of the reasons why so many bands have the same sound. Now you don't have all the different studios and mics and producers. They're all using the same five or six programs. The only difference is the actual musicians, which could be a big difference. Once you throw it into Pro Tools everybody sounds the same. All the time you spent to get the perfect take has just been demolished because you can just throw it into Pro Tools and fix everything. It's getting a little crazy. As long as you have good songs that people want to hear and good albums, you should be fine.
You briefly talked about Roadrunner before. There might be some things you can't or don't want to talk about, but lately it seems a lot of their artists have been unhappy with their contracts and they're just throwing out crappy records to get out of their contract. What happened to Roadrunner?
I think Roadrunner, we were with them for a really long time, we were with them when they were the pinnacle metal label. Roadrunner signed a couple of acts that got really huge that were different from their main core audience. The label started hiring a lot of people. It went from a smaller label that really cared about their bands to a label that all of a sudden had a lot of overhead and started banking on their bigger artists and started neglecting a lot of their metal artists. It became a different label. Now, the people that made that label before bands like Nickelback came in, have neglected their core bands. It's not a metal label. It's not what it used to be. The whole idea of a lot of bands not being happy with their contract is the same case with a lot of other labels. A few bands left Roadrunner around the same time so a lot of focus is on Roadrunner. Roadrunners focus was on some bands and it shouldn't have been that way. I don't want to pinpoint it on Roadrunner. I think most labels are feeling the same affect. They have all these bands that have been helping them along and making the label and then they start to neglect those bands. You've got a bunch of good bands. What happened with Machine Head was the same thing. Machine Head has done a lot for that label, we have, too. For them to turn their back on Machine Head and us and a couple of other bands was not a good thing. We were ready to leave the label anyway. We didn't want to be with Roadrunner anymore. We realized that too many things had changed. We didn't have the type of pull that we used to have. We have a lot of ideas that we want to do with this band and we were limited to just doing some of it because the label didn't share the same vision we did anymore. You learn something from every mistake you make. We're a stronger, tighter, healthier band than we've ever been before.