INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTIAN OLDE WOLBERS OF FEAR FACTORY

FEAR FACTORY has consistenly been putting out fist-pumping, head-bashing, aggressive music for the past ten years. Guitarist Christian Olde Wolbers has been with the band for all that time, originally as the band's bassist, but currenly as the band's guitarist after taking over for Dino Cazares. He's also a multi-talented programmer, engineer, producer, and DJ, and has collaborated with more artists in his career than many artists can work with in a lifetime. We got a hold of Christian for a short while to find out what he's up to...and to ask about Dino taking off his shirt on stage.

Paragon Rob: When I picked up the new album, I got it from Best Buy and I noticed it was a special “Best Buy only” version with an extra track. You guys aren’t the only ones I’ve seen do this; what is it about Best Buy that they get extra tracks?

Christian Olde Wolbers: Because they’re such a big corporation. They’re so big that they can guarantee you an amount of copies they’ll buy, so they want things that are exclusive to them, just to attract more consumers to their stores. And there’s a Best Buy pretty much in every city, so if you wanna go buy an album, Best Buy's always the one that has the most variety, because the “mom and pop” stores are gone, basically, they’re disappearing. So it’s just those big corporations. They compete with Tower Records and they compete with other big ones, but Best Buy just guarantees that when you put out your record, they’ll buy a [large] number of records for their stores.

Paragon Rob: The new album reminds me a lot of the stuff on Concrete, which is a pretty decent sized step in a different direction than where the last few albums seemed to be going. I also read something a while ago where the band said this album is more of an experiment. What exactly was the experimental part?

Christian Olde Wolbers: Well, the experimental part was getting another producer in there, like Toby Wright, and I just wrote the songs and played the guitars and bass, and then handed everything over to Toby. Usually I record vocals with Burton as well, and it was just kinda like, “Let’s see what Toby does with it.” So we kinda just took a step back, and wasn’t really involved from that point on, so that’s the experiment, because only we know how Fear Factory is to sound, but we were willing to see what Toby Wright would do with us. To be honest, I’m not 100% satisfied; I mean, there’s a good vibe on the album, but I would’ve made everything sound a lot more technical and a little more digital, maybe, maybe not so Rock-y. It is what it is, but that’s the chance you take when you have somebody come in and twist the knobs that’s not really that familiar with FEAR FACTORY. But sometimes, it’s a good thing, sometimes it’s not a good thing, always you gotta take that chance. ::laughs:: And I guess we took that chance! Some people love it, some people hate it.

Paragon Rob: Yeah, from what I’ve heard, it’s really one of those love-it-or-hate-it things with the fans.

Christian Olde Wolbers: Yeah, so our next record will be totally different, I can tell you that! ::laughs::


oh no...hair in front of face again...can't see...15th fret? Dammit! 13th! I need a haircut...

Paragon Rob: Would you be looking to go in a direction more like Archetype again…

Christian Olde Wolbers: I would probably make the next record as digital as I can, and as tight as I can.

Paragon Rob: Something like Digimortal?

Christian Olde Wolbers: No, probably something more like Demanufacture. I would probably write everything with Raymond maybe on a drum machine and make it really, really tight. I mean, we do that anyway, but then Raymond plays it live, and that loosens it a lot up. But the roughs of my guitar sound and stuff were way different from the end result, so when I heard the end result, I was kind of shocked too. ::laughs:: It’s just different.

Paragon Rob: Yeah, it’s a great album, it was just different from what a lot of people expected, so it threw them off.

Christian Olde Wolbers: Yeah, I definitely miss some of the keyboards. We had a lot more keyboards and they were all taken out by Toby in the end. He started weeding a lot of stuff and [going], “No, I don’t need it, I don’t need it.”

Paragon Rob: You are all over the place, as far as musical taste and talent. You play guitar, bass, keyboards, upright bass, and turntables. Your favorite albums range from some of the heaviest Metal to some of the funkiest Urban music. And your studio work is just as diverse. How do you explain the size of that diversity? Most guys playing the kind of Metal you play wouldn’t even admit to knowing who SNOOP DOGG is, and you’ve recorded with him!

Christian Olde Wolbers: Well, I have a lot of friends in this industry that are producers, and I work with all these people, so it’s just a big circle of musicians and friends, and they sometimes call me up and say, “Hey can you come over here and play a little bass part? We need some bass on this.” So I’ll go down to the studio and hang with those people. And it definitely makes you a different musician when you get to work with all these different people outside of Metal, and just learn how they work and what their mentality and the studio vibe is and how they conceive songs and write songs and just the way they go about things and they way they use the equipment. You learn a lot, and I think it just opens my spectrum of ability to play and I’m becoming a session player a lot more, so I’m more familiar with that world now, and I make beats also, I do a lot of Hip-Hop beats for people. It’s just fun because of the different styles of music you can create. Somebody I really admire is somebody like Ben Moody, who can just go from EVANESCENCE, being somebody who grew up with a lot of Metal, and just go off and write songs for LINDSAY LOHAN and KELLY CLARKSON and shit like that. So that’s pretty amazing because, you know, in the end, he’s not trying to stand on stage with them, he’s just writing songs behind the screen, making a living for himself off that. I think that’s awesome. But at the same time, he can do Metal. It’s better than just sticking to one thing. You have to be able to do a lot of things in music, so people can go, “Oh, he’s worked on this, maybe he can do this,” and it just kinda sets up more work because if people see that you’re pretty involved in a lot of different projects and different music styles, it’s easier sometimes to get a gig. Like, “He understands Metal, but he also understands this, so that has worked perfectly for us.” GZA from the WU-TANG CLAN just did an album with DJ Muggs from CYPRESS [Hill] and it’s coming out on DJ Muggs’ label and they want me to mash up (in Hip-Hop radio, there’s a lot of mash-ups going on) Metal and Rock songs with Hip-Hop, and they want me to do the first mash-up album for GZA and basically, it’ll be GZA’s album completely redone into a Rock version. That’s something I’m going to try to do, could be kinda fun, it’s easy.


it's awfully RED in here. Can't we do PINK one night?

Paragon Rob: Have you ever written something for Fear Factory that was so inspired by your Hip-Hop side that the other guys would see right through it and tell you to go take a hike?

Christian Olde Wolbers: No, ::laughs:: never. I know what I need to write for Fear Factory. I don’t sit there and experiment; I know that’s not gonna work. I mean, we had B. Real come in one time and do a b-side and all of a sudden I get a call from the record label, “We love that song, we wanna put it on the album!” And I get all the grief for it because they want to put it on the record and I wanted to keep it as a b-side, “Back the Fuck Up,” so of course, “Oh, Christian with this Hip-Hop shit!” It wasn’t even me that put it on the record! I just did it for fun, for a b-side, for a movie or something or a video game. And then, “We’re gonna put this on the record,” and I’m the bad guy.

Paragon Rob: Speaking of diversity, you list your favorite foods as Sushi, Mexican, and Italian. We all know Raymond loves all kinds of food, so how often does he get you to try something that you normally wouldn’t order on your own?

Christian Olde Wolbers: No, never, never. Raymond’s not really a wacky food kinda guy. He just likes his meat, his beef, and his steak, and the less vegetables or fruit the better because it just fills up valuable space to fill up with meat. He likes his baby-back ribs for sure. He’s definitely the rib guy.

Paragon Rob: I did an interview with Raymond a year and a half ago, and I asked him a question that got him laughing pretty hard, so I figured, what the hell, why not ask you too? When Dino was in the band, he was known for taking his shirt off when playing outdoor shows in warm climates. This is not something that hefty men usually do.

Christian Olde Wolbers: No!

Paragon Rob: Was there ever a time when you felt like saying, “Hey man, cover up, we’re all getting a little grossed out here!”

Christian Olde Wolbers: There were a lot of times, yes. ::laughs:: I never understood why he did that.

Paragon Rob: Maybe it was for the sex appeal, you know?

Christian Olde Wolbers: Ah, maybe, yeah. I dunno, I dunno what it was about that. It’s funny that you actually kinda still visualize that. ::laughs:: We used to see it after the show all the time! ::laughs::


I don't take my shirt off and Dino shouldn't have either.

Paragon Rob: You’ve really shown yourself to be a hell of a guitar player since you switched instruments in the band. You’re faster, tighter, and you have more of your own styles, but I want you to be honest, are there, or were there, any guitar parts that Dino would play that you had a hard time picking up on at first?

Christian Olde Wolbers: Not one. [For] songs like “Digimortal” or “Linchpin” Burton told me, “We should start playing this song maybe.” I’m like, “Okay.” And I’m like, “Goddamn, there’s a lot of melodic picking! I’ll have to take some time to learn this shit again!” And I picked up the guitar, turned the song on, I went through it once, and said, “This shit is fuckin’ easy.” I had no problems with any of the songs. It was either songs I’d never played on guitar that I played for the first time when I rehearsed it, it was flawless. The only thing I had a hard time with was, sometimes we’d go into a guitar break and the bass stopped and I stopped, and I’m like, “Oh fuck, I’m the guitarist, I need to keep playing!”

Paragon Rob: ::Laughs:: You forgot which instrument you were playing.

Christian Olde Wolbers: Yeah, ::laughs:: I’m used to the stops on the bass, but I’m the guitarist, I need to keep going! For instance, in “Pisschrist,” I think I did that. And Ray would be laughing at me.

Paragon Rob: Now, just the opposite, have you ever found yourself listening to the band live or at a rehearsal, and you hear something Byron does on bass and say to yourself, “That’s not what I do there!”

Christian Olde Wolbers: Yeah. ::laughs:: Byron’s never going to be able to play it exactly the way that I played it. I guess it’s just the nature of the animal I was. I don’t mind if he puts his own style into it, I just need him to pick everything that me and Raymond lock in on, that’s the most important. But I mean, he did a pretty good job. He had to come in and learn all the songs right before we went on tour. He’s kind of a different player than I originally thought he was. Originally I thought that Byron was the type of guy that could pick all these really super-fast songs because of STRAPPING YOUNG LAD, but in Strapping, he’s more of a half-time type of player. He plays with the drums in half-time, he doesn’t really follow everything. So once Byron came into rehearsal, I noticed that he didn’t really play like that, I was like, “Ugh, we’re gonna have a problem.” But then, he just had to work and play it more like a guitar than a bass, start picking everything, and now he’s doing good.

Paragon Rob: You chose to use the Krankenstein Amps that Dimebag had helped to design right before his death. What made you choose those particular amps at the time that you chose them?

Christian Olde Wolbers: Well, I was at the NAMM show and I bumped into Pat Lachman and he was telling me, “I’m going to the Krank booth. What are you doing? You should come and check out Dime’s shit.” So I went with him and talked to one of the owners over there and he goes, “Hey, you should try one of the amps, I’d love to see what you think,” so I went to another booth where they had it set up and plugged in, and everybody came to check it out, and I plugged in and I was amazed by the amount of crunch and punch that those heads and the cabinet had. I’m like, “Wow, this is good, just playing through a head like this.” They’re all tube but they feel like solid state. They’re still warm, and I was like, “Man, this is a good head!” So then a week went by and I kept thinking about it like, “Fuckin head sounded good, I should try that for the album or something,” so I called the Krank guys and they’re like, “Yeah man, what do you need?” And they sent me a head, a cab, and I started playing around with it, and it’s kind of like a girlfriend, you start falling in love with it more and more every day to the point where I was like, “Man, I’m actually gonna make the switch,” because I liked it better, it had more power. Marshalls sound nice and warm and sweet, it has a good mid-range, but the Kranks had more things that I was missing in the Marshalls. So far, everything has been running fine, I haven’t had any problems.

Paragon Lisa: Tell me something, you do backup vocals for a few songs, what would you ever do if you got a case of the hiccups right as you were walking up to the mic to belt out a few lines?

Christian Olde Wolbers: Burp, ::laughs:: try to burp. I dunno, never really had that problem. One time, though, I had one of my front teeth knocked out by a bass switch, actually, I knocked the bass in my fuckin tooth and it broke off, so I had to get the tooth removed. And we’re on tour and I have to wait 6 months before they can put an implant in, so I had this flipper, that plastic thing they put in your mouth with a tooth on. ::laughs:: I have that, and I’m walking up to the mic to do “Shock,” and you have to put that dental glue on there so it sticks against the roof of your mouth, and I forgot to do that before the show, and I walk up to the mic and I start singing and the thing kinda falls out and I think I spit it on the floor. And one time I almost swallowed it, I almost choked on it. I was like, “Oh man, I gotta glue this fucker in here.” ::laughs:: But it’s all fixed now.

Paragon Lisa: How alive is the whole groupie scene these days?

Christian Olde Wolbers: It’s there, but it’s not like everybody thinks it is. It’s not like in the ‘80s when, you know, it was just everywhere. It’s not really like that, but then again, we’re a Metal band, and the groupie phenomenon was more of an ‘80s Glam Rock thing. You don’t see any hot women at Death Metal shows, I’ll tell you that much. ::laughs:: Especially not the girls that I would like, or I would be interested in. I just do my show and that’s it. We have a lot of friends all over the world that we know that come and hang out and stuff. But no, not really with this band at all. I mean, some bands, that’s what they live for, that’s what they tour for, that’s what they play music for, but not in this case. I have a beautiful girlfriend that I really love, so I would never do that to her.

Paragon Rob: Anything you’d like to say to our readers?

Christian Olde Wolbers: Well, for the people that don’t know, I have a signature guitar out on Jackson Guitars. They made a 6- and 7-string signature. That has been floating around the market just recently.

Check out FEAR FACTORY on the web: Fearfactory.com

Fear Factory's latest disc, Transgression is on sale now!

This interview will also be featured in print in Paragon Music Magazine. To get your copy of Paragon Music Magazine, email your name and address to ParagonMM@hotmail.com and include $2 per copy by cash, money order, or Paypal (email them for payment info)

All photos courtesty of Lisa S. of Paragon Music Magazine