Fear Factory

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Fear Factory first went by the name Ulceration in 1989, which was a song on their supposed first release, Concrete. Later, they went by the name Fear the Factory (named after a factory near the band's rehearsal place, which was guarded by people carrying machine guns), but then decided to shorten it to Fear Factory on October 31st, 1990. Later that night, Dino Cazares and Raymond Herrera wrote Fear Factory's first song "Sufferage" for their 1st demo, which appears as "Suffer Age" on the 1st full-length.

Co-founding member of Fear Factory Dino Cazares left the group in 2002 due to personal problems with Burton C. Bell. Dino was accused of allowing ego to get in the way of Fear Factory by taking credit for everything they did. Fear Factory had a hard time finding a replacement guitar player, so Christian Olde Wolbers took over guitar duties. Byron Stroud was hired as the new bass player.

The band was on hiatus from 2006 to 2009. On April 7th, 2009, Burton C. Bell and Dino Cazares announced the formation of a new project with Stroud on bass and drummer Gene Hoglan. On April 28th, this project was revealed to be a new version of Fear Factory minus long-time members Wolbers and Herrera. Bell, when asked why Herrera and Wolbers were not included, stated that "[Fear Factory]'s like a business and I'm just reorganizing...we won't talk about [their exclusion]". According to Herrera and Wolbers in a later interview, they had no idea of the "reformation" of Fear Factory and that an ensuing legal battle over the rights to the name was happening since Fear Factory Incorporated is split between the four: Bell, Cazares, Wolbers, and Herrera.

Between 2017 and mid-2020, the band was on hold while lawsuits were playing out with Burton C. Bell and Dino Cazares on one side against Raymond Herrera, and Christian Olde Wolbers on the other. In September 2020, Dino Cazares declared that he won the band's lawsuits. Following personal and business tensions during this period, Burton C. Bell announced his departure from the band the same month.

All members of Fear Factory have worked on side projects. One that has stood out, in particular, is Raymond Herrera's and Christian Olde Wolbers' side project with B-Real of Cypress Hill and members of Deftones. It's even been rumored that Christian would be a full-time bassist of Cypress Hill, but this has yet to be revealed as true.

While Fear Factory was broken up, Burton C. Bell started a progressive folk/ambient side-project called Ascension of the Watchers with former Fear Factory keyboardist John Bechdel. In the early '90s, Dino and Burton took part in a much-forgotten side project during their death metal days called Hated... And Proud!, which was a punk rock band in the vein of groups such as Bad Religion.

Christian has been known to work as a producer with numerous rap acts like Cypress Hill, Snoop Dogg, Kurupt, Ludacris, and Everlast, and has also collaborated with Soulfly and Devin Townsend, among others. In 2020, he joined Vio-lence on bass as a live member, and soon after became a full-time member.

Although keyboardists are labeled in the band's information as former members, they were never really members of the band. They did the session, studio, and live keyboards, but were never mentioned in CD booklets or on the band's official website as official members.

Trivia:
When Dino Cazares and Raymond Herrera were looking for band members to recruit for Fear Factory, they met Christian Wolbers through Evan Seinfeld of Biohazard. The band originally was going in and out with bassists, but finally stuck with Christian. He was on vacation in America from his country, Belgium, at the time; then, once Christian was recruited, he decided to live in America. The reputed situation in which Raymond and Dino recruited Burton was quite strange for a death metal band: while staying in a hotel, they heard Burton singing a U2 song aloud in the showers and right away went up to his door and got him into the band on the spot.

Former bassist Andrew Shives never played on any actual studio records (he was cited as being the bassist for the Soul of a New Machine album, but Dino Cazares played all bass on the album). Andrew only played live and did only one studio session, which was a 7" single called Sangre De Ninos. He was later kicked out because of inner disputes with the rest of the band.

Every Fear Factory album released shows a change in their famous "FF" logo. Every Fear Factory logo change represents the era of Fear Factory at that time.

Christian Olde Wolbers was the first artist ever allowed to use Dimebag's (Pantera, Damageplan) prototype signature head called the "Krankenstein".

Although the band is from the US, Fear Factory members (past and present) have diverse backgrounds: Burton is American (Texan), Christian is originally from Belgium, Dino and Raymond are both Mexican-Americans, and Byron is Canadian.