Zeuhl 5

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   This seems to be the best place for this one. Have just taken this one out for a first date, seems interesting so far. 

Factrix

					Scheintot				

				Released 1981 on Adolescent Records

Reviewed by Julian Cope

Side One:Eerie Lights (4.05)
Heavy Breathing (4.58)
Center of the Doll (4.56)
Thin Line (2.20)
Anemone Housing (2.21)
Side Two:Over My Shoulder (And Out Of My Life) (3.10)
Ballad of the Grim Rider (4.17)
Snuff Box (4.43)
Phantom Pain (5.05)

Gothedelick K.O.

Travelling through the USA with The Teardrop Explodes during 1980-82,
and always in a psychedelic condition, I was strongly aware through my
meetings with umpteen kohl-eyed LSD-informed edge-of-towners that the
more extreme elements of the W. Coast American Underground were in the
process of appropriating many facets (both musically fundamental and
sartorial stylistic) of the equivalent English and New York scenes; but
subsuming them all into a uniquely ‘Gothadelick’ melage of their very
own. And so it was that on the terrifically heatful American Pacific
coast, incongruous long macs and the Germanic funk of the English
Northern scene came to be conflated into the more obviously
Banshee/Cureified darkness and dyed black hair of the post-punk south
of England, and the wailing wall-eyed immediately-post-Blank Generation
stares of arch NY so-jazz smackies, to manifest in San Francisco as
groups such as Patrick Miller’s disturbing Minimal Man and Messrs.
Bergland, Jacobs & Palme’s even more disturbing Factrix. Alongside
such artists as Monte Cazazza and Boyd Rice, the aforementioned were
responsible for creating unearthly and unexpectedly vampiric blends of
A Certain Ratio’s “All Night Party” 45, Throbbing Gristle’s ‘Slugbait’,
Cabaret Voltaire’s canon of Krautdub, the Detroit
rock-through-an-ERASERHEAD filter of Chrome, the NO NEW YORK Do-Nuthing
distorto-epic that was Mars circa “Hairwaves”, the micro-orbiting
dirges of 1977/78 Pere Ubu’s “My Dark Ages”/“Chinese
Radiation”/”Laughing”, etc. If the EDWARD SCISSORHANDS soundtrack had
been supplied by Hollywood musos using Factrix’s SCHEINTOT LP as their
blueprint, it would have created a perfect snapshot of the hairbrushed
post-punk twilight zone that was the 70s/80s gateway. 

Huddled in concertUnfortunately,
however, Factrix’s wonderfully greedy metaphor was undermined by their
sheer extremeness. Despite opening their career with the amazing
industrial funk assault of their debut single “Empire of Passion”,
Factrix wasn’t ever gonna be a singles band. Coming across like English
post-punks playing an all-night Final Solution gig at the Acklam Hall,
they really shoulda been treading the same stages as Clock DVA, Prag
Vec, early Manicured Noise (pre-Steve Walsh version) and their ilk in
order to get anywhere. From my own experiences from late ’78 onwards -
those were days when Fast Product-style bands made three or four
singles before they started to make a dent in anyone’s consciousness.
The intense rivalry spurred people on, whereas Factrix was 6,000 miles
from where the boys were. True, Bergland and Palme had begun life as
part of Patrick Miller’s Minimal Man project, playing four shows in
that configuration. But even the rivalry generated between their split
was never gonna be enough fuel for their flames. From the gathered
evidence, even after supporting such illuminati as Sheffield’s Cabaret
Voltaire, Arto Lindsay’s screechy DNA, and Australian ur-primitives SPK
(SoliPsisticK), the overall Factrix career was apparently such a downer
that it temporarily destroyed the mind of each member and saw them
return from their only tour homeless and (it is said) destitute.
Unfathomable and unlistenable to all but the most ardent adepts (and
subscribers to SORDIDE SENTIMENTALE, natch!) at a time when almost
everyone in the real underground had a least opened their ears to
accommodate the coming Industrial sounds, the Factrix trio’s miniscule
output and often almost rhythmless take on all of the above-mentioned
artists made the group virtually unreachable; so much so indeed that
they have become forgotten over the past decades and not even been
celebrated with a CD re-release until very recently1 – and even then
not in their original musical sequences. 

Both sides of the portalHowever,
Time itself is the real judge of true art, and those NO NEW YORK ‘art
terrorists’ are now no more than the archaic fart feasts of yesteryear
– temporary jazz sneezes into an already too-damp snotrag. The
dismembered music of Factrix, on the other hand, grows more
contemporary by the year. And, as their sole LP SCHEINTOT is as
genuinely disturbing and richly disorientating a piece of
Death-warmed-up as you would ever wish to investigate, I figured now
was the time – in these post-Khanatean days – to heft some of its
drumbox deathray drool your way. And, whilst Factrix was a handsome
trio of black-clad Jim Morrison-on-a-Robert Smithtrip death post-punks
from inner space, playing bizarre subterranean cemetery non-blues, it
was an incredibly precise piece of genius to name their debut LP
SCHEINTOT, for this is the German equivalent of ‘suspended animation’
or a ‘state of apparent death’ – describing the muse-sick of Factrix
perfectly. Indeed, Factrix could never have been described as ‘drum
machine-driven’ in the early-Bunnymen/Sisters of Mercy manner, quite
the opposite in fact. For whilst the whilst the Scythian guitar of Bond
Bergland, the burbling electronic FX of Cole Palme, and bouncing octave
bass of Joseph Jacobs often created its own propulsion, the drumbox
itself often stuttered and spluttered against the beat like some
sweating office junior inappropriately and unconsciously plucking at
his boss’ Newton’s Cradle during an important office meeting. In the
midst of all this sonic catering, the interplay between the voices of
Bergland, Palme and Jacobs added another horizon of sound,
simultaneously human and inhuman, as one band member narrated from the
front line whilst the other two sung, droned, intoned and plainsong
(plainsung?) together. Like a scene from POLTERGEIST, Factrix music
conjures up the disjointed sounds of a haunted house with perpetually
bizarre goings-on, as increasingly bored TV journalists narrate the
previous day’s activities from the safety of the garden gate. It was
these simultaneously personal and impersonal perspectives that drove
the Factrix muse on and on.

But that weren’t nearly enough for these Poe faced kiddies, no, dear me
no. These druids had to go umpteen seven-league boot strides further,
and illustrate the back cover of their LP sleeve with a tomb rubbing
from the back of Ralph Hamsterly’s bizarre 16th century Oxfordshire
grave at the chillingly-named Doddington – ‘farm [ton] at the judgement
centre [ting] of the dead [dod]’. Then they had their sinister mate
Monte Cazazza (himself a twilighter supreme) set up a front cover
photograph that involved a naked female friend seemingly being disrobed
by a ancient skeletal hand so perished that wire was necessary to clamp
them drybones together. Obviously informed by Mik Mellen’s bizarrely
unfinished Cleveland industrial photographs of the mid/late 70s, this
half-scene-through-a-semi-closed-door vision of their world propels the
listener into a dreamlandscape somewhat akin to that sacred phantom
downland conjured up on The Residents’ NOT AVAILABLE. 

Pin-ups

“It Was Taking Us To Some Very Dark Places”

For the creation of the ultimate possible form of Rock’n’roll music,
I’ve always reckoned on needing a balance of about 65% Tradition to
about 35% Novelty. In this way, your song can still be propelled along
by a candy-assed cliché of a hookline that everyone reckons to have
heard a zillion times before (The Traditional element), because the
context in which that cliché finds itself is unbalanced enough to bring
something entirely new to the party (The Novelty element). The greatest
purveyors of Rock’n’roll always seem to have adhered to this formula,
Suicide, Prince, Outkast being great cases in point, but The Velvet
Underground still being ur-practitioners of the Ult.

However, such simplistic rules go right out of the window when
addressing the so-called Experimental Music scene. Indeed, I’d probably
have to go simultaneously in both of the other directions if asked to
make the case for presenting The Alchemical Instruction Book for the
Optymum Methodes of Reachyng Most Effectyve Experimental Musics, and
say that travelling ‘all the way to 100% cliché’ is possibly even more
effective than the route that follows the signpost reading ‘100%
novelty’. In other words, just as Kimmy the Fowl’s OUTRAGEOUS was a
spoof psychedelic Death & Resurrection Trip that still functioned
as the real thing, so in the same way can true psychedelic
disorientation be genuinely achieved simply by putting together a
rigorous assortment of such obvious ingredients as Sabbath doom chord
changes and Hammer Horror sound FX, weaksh*t bubbling drumboxes,
portentous Lizard King proclamations, squirrly analogue ARP-ness, Brion
Gysin-style early cut-up doomalogues about rotten and drowned muses;
and all done whilst wearing white face, black clothes and hairstyles a
la Tristan Tzara. Which is why Factrix, a trip forged entirely of slugs
and snails and puppy-dogs tails can be so successful artistically AND
useful psychically. Yup, even if it’s ultimately just a Pyrrhic Victory
for Rock’n’roll, listening to “Horse Latitudes” as performed by
autistic adolescents in Charles Manson’s boxroom is always gonna be a
worthwhile exercise to your most seasoned Inner Space Traveller. Taking
a look at the Factrix trio’s instrument list (and the manner in which
it is described) is itself a journey through their own prolapsing minds:

BOND BERGLAND: guitars, vocals, tape treatments, viola, radioguitar, percussion, drum machine, processing, zither, teakettle

COLE PALME: vocals, glaxobass, multimoog, tape treatments, drum machine, processing, amputated bass

JOSEPH JACOBS: bass guitar, fretless bass, drum machine, vocals, tape
treatments, pennywhistle, migh-wiz, saz, doumbek, flute, percussion

Concert PosterLike
the early Chrome experiments, to which guitarists John Lambdin and Gary
Spain often added disconnected droning electric violins, the many
defocusing elements offered by this floating Factrix line-up disabled
the listeners’ ability to judge the music on any other level than the
FX of the overall sound. Indeed, so disconnected was the Factrix sonic
stew that sometimes the only graspable and protruding reference point
(perhaps a doomy guitar hook, or maybe a repeated yet still-unearthly
vocal) instantly became massive and almost poppy to the listener,
purely because it was being made by something from within the realms of
their own experiences. It’s a bit like those Residents-produced
Snakefinger records that came out on Ralph Records around 1978, insofar
as we all imagined his phantom backing band to be ghostly unreachable
Alien Muppets, but at least Snakefinger himself was a guitarist/singer,
albeit one who inhabited cartoon landscapes. 

Admittedly, SCHEINTOT is hardly the kind of LP that should be given a
song-by-song description, save to say that, in context, “Ballad of the
Grim Rider” sounds like a Top 10 hit merely because it has a graspable
form (and don’t get me started on the Odinist imagery that pervades
their entire oeuvre). But SCHEINTOT is a record that deserves to be
experienced several times, preferably in the darkness and in a state of
near exhaustion (and/or informed by psychoactive chemicals). Its only
failure in the dark light of the early 21st century is to be a
half-hour to short – and even that could be remedied by several
back-to-back playings without overly wearing out the (what) hooklines.
Sitting some way between Germany’s ultra playful Der Plan and Throbbing
Gristle’s Gen-driven death music, the underlying heartbeating
non-groove that informs all Factrix music is always a truly human one,
a beeping crab skank that takes you forever two steps forward and three
steps back. But if you accept the Factrix metaphor of suspended
animation and give yourself to SCHEINTOT’s unyielding form, listeners
will soon reach below the incurably arch vocals into a
pre-temple-building nomadic (and still-glacial) nether world somewhere
close to that archaic place where the Frost Giants played and the
nomadic Trickster kept his prick stuffed into a box that he carried
around on his back. Let me take you down, ‘cause I’m going too!

FOOTNOTES:Released at the
beginning of 2003 by Germany’s Storm Records, the double-CD set
ARTIFACT includes the whole of the SCHEINTOT LP on the first disc,
commencing with their 45RPM debut ‘Empire of Passion’ and its B-side
‘Spice of Life’. Terminally disorientating and zoned out of its tiny
mind, this package reveals many of the tricks that those few SCHEINTOT
fans could have only guessed at down the years. The photographic
sequence that led Monte Cazazza to his final LP cover shot is
particularly arresting. This FACTRIX release is available for $22 from tesco-distro.com or €17 from tesco-germany.com

Zeuhl 5

Factrix Scheintot

Factrix
Scheintot