This Halloween night will mark 25 years to the day that guitarist Dino Cazares and vocalist Burton C. Bell stepped into a South Central rehearsal space with then-drummer Raymond Herrera for their first jam session. The atmosphere of that evening set the mood for what Fear Factory would be in the years that have followed, reports Jason Roche of LA Weekly.

“The rehearsal studio was at Vermont and 70th,” Cazares says. “When we pulled up for the first time, there was a bunch of dudes running around dressed in costumes from The Warriors, with Dodger jackets on, their faces painted, and carrying baseball bats! We were standing there wondering, ‘Are we going to get jumped on our first night as a band?’”

Tales of man versus man and man versus machine have dominated Fear Factory’s output in the years since their formation, but on their newest album, Genexus, Bell and Cazares turn their focus to man and machine becoming one through the "Singularity," a concept popularized by futurist Ray Kurzweil in his 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near.

“We still have an antiestablishment mentality,” Bell says. “But the idea of the machine taking over... it is something I think about. Concepts of transhumanism and the Singularity; we’re seeing aspects of it happening all the time.”

Cazares and Bell endorse the pessimistic view that humanity is all too willing to let the machines take over, citing our current obsession with sharing personal information via social media as an example. “No one wants the NSA to be spying on them, but everyone’s gladly putting their whole lives on Facebook and Instagram,” Bell says.

Read more at this location.

Fear Factory will celebrate their 25th anniversary with three special west coast shows, as detailed in the poster below. Their complete tour itinerary can be viewed here.