The Art(aud)-damaged FACTRIX hailed from San Francisco -- the major outpost, outside Britain, for industrial music.

Collaborating with local kindred spirits Mark Pauline (of Survival Research Laboratories) and Monte Cazazza (who inadvertently christened the genre with his "Industrial music for industrial people" wisecrack), FACTRIX provided the soundtrack for several multimedia shockfests. The most infamous involved dead animals grotesquely roboticized by Pauline (like his patented "Rabot" made out of metal, electrical wire, and rotting bunny).

This sort of audience-confronting Art/anti-Art can be traced through '60s outfits like the Vienna Aktionists (pig's blood, self-mutilation, pagan ritual), all the way back to Dada. Factrix's Cole Palme echoed the famous flinch-inducing image in Bunuel's "Un Chien Andalou", when he talked of the group's desire "to take a razor to the mind's eye,"...   more >>