Factrix
Scheintot

Once, I spoke of a time when Manchester and Canterbury were closer than ever - the power of sounds, despite the geographical distance. Now I will speak of a time (practically the same one, then) when Sheffield and San Francisco almost reached each other.

Sheffield, indeed. Why?

In Sheffield - late '70s, early '80s - there wasn't even a punk band. Or rather: punk was present, spinning on turntables, read in magazines, but in Sheffield, it died before it could evolve. In fact, it wasn't even born. It passed without leaving a trace. London was burning, but in Sheffield, no one cared a fig about the Clash and Pistols, whether Joe Strummer was truly punk or just a former pub-rocker swept up by new impulses. Secondary matters, indifferent. London was burning, but no one in Sheffield would have bothered to piss to put out the flames. Sheffield, since the days of the industrial boom, had MADE the revolution: now that the revolution was elsewhere, it would not follow. The gray northern sky, the chimneys, the steel, the noise of factories: this was the reality in Sheffield. And in garages, they did not play "garage" rock (as per the definition), but brought in recorders and synthesizers. A studio apartment was enough, a minimal space for two people. Because they could do without a drum set. In the era of wild pogo to the uproar of cymbals, bass drum, and snare, Sheffield was the city - icy - without drummers. The city where rock as it had always been known no longer existed, while something else was being born...

...and in Frisco, a band was born, and the years were still those. FACTRIX was its name. When Bond Bergland, Cole Palmer, and Joseph Jacobs began their underground activity, the drum issue was not even raised. Something that was outdated by then. In the city of Tuxedomoon, after all. But the Factrix project was - from the beginning - one of the most extreme and absurd things ever to appear on the local scene. The arithmetic BASS + ELECTRONICS + (RADIO)GUITAR seemed to prefigure a war machine that would overturn every possible cliché. Factrix did not play "instruments," as they proclaimed - they played "industrial artifacts", gadgets constructed against all logic except that of experimenting with the "never tried." Bergland played a six-string treated and deformed by laboratory electronics: a thing that had the shape of a guitar but a sound more reminiscent of Manuel Gottsching than 95% of "canonical" rock. An even more extreme and erratic Helios Creed, a scientist of vibrations behind whom worked: 1) one of the greatest "engineers" young music ever had (Tommy Tadlock), the creator of the weapons with which - following the footsteps of PiL and other iconoclasts - "rock's death" was to be given; 2) a full-fledged inventor, a madman elevated to absolute theorist, the - sick - brain of the operation: Mark Pauline. A former student of the notorious Eckerd College in Florida, where other "disturbed" people like Arto Lindsay and Marc Cunningham seemed to have congregated. The mastermind of SRL (Survival Research Laboratories), he planned at the drawing board how the group should: astonish, terrorize, disgust the audience. Until vomiting or - better - fainting.

If the live version of Factrix was a tank (and the term is anything but casual), much of the credit goes to Pauline and his creations. What best sums up all the necrophiliac morbidity of the project is the RABOT ----> RABBIT + ROBOT. And what is it, you might say? An abomination. The monstrous synthesis (but also monstrously ingenious) of electrical cables, steel, and a decomposing rabbit carcass. The three of the band brought it on stage in their happenings (they affectionately called it "Piggly Wiggly," "waggling piglet"!!!), and at the right time, Pauline would activate it against the audience, with compressed air rifles accompanying the guest's entrance; and while the small automaton was dragged by a chain, arrows shot from rifles tore it to pieces, resulting in a rain of putrefied meat and various filth falling on the heads of those present. Imagine the scene, if you can. Imagine it while the band plays a 20-minute version of "Helter Skelter," and then you'll have a pretty accurate idea.

And after such a prelude (which takes up almost the entire page, but the CONTEXT here was critical...), it remains to say that: these grooves marked Subterranean are seminal, where psychotic/cHromatic deviations emanate from an eardrum-drilling guitar and from a slowed-accelerated bass/electronic symbiosis perfect for the most sullen post-punk and more POST (indeed!) ever heard. Demented thoughts inserted into subliminal messages of robotic voices - you listen to them from time to time, sliding above and below the "wall." The soundtrack of a futurible post-war reality, where only an endless piercing feedback remains - residual noise of an atomic explosion. Germany, the Velvet Underground (but more those of the SECOND album, mind you...), pure sadistic noise-making over tape games and skeletal - depressed - desperate ambient constructions.

An inextricable but sublime mosaic in its final realization, where you can even play at tracing here and there those influences of BULGARIAN choral music (???) that Bergland declared among his greatest inspirations. In light of this, I wouldn't disdain a fleeting inspection inside his head.

And now, excuse me if I wrote at length, or maybe it seems so to you, but I get passionate about certain things.