Factrix were San Francisco's contribution to the first wave of industrial music, formed in 1978 and active until 1982. The trio of Bond Bergland, Cole Palme and Joseph T. Jacobs worked the same ground as Throbbing Gristle and early Cabaret Voltaire were working in Britain, but out of the West Coast underground rather than the London art schools. The Bureau files them at Tier II as the American counterpart band of the first wave: small in catalogue, large in influence, and densely tied to figures already filed here.
The studio Factrix, heard best on the 1981 LP Scheintot, made bleak, droning, texture-led music from tape permutation, found percussion and treated guitar: morbid and subtle, an experimental rock that owed more to the early industrial records than to the punk it grew up beside. The live Factrix was harsher. California Babylon (1982, Subterranean Records), credited on the sleeve to Factrix-Cazazza, documents a collaboration with Monte Cazazza recorded at the Ed Mock Dance Studio in 1981. It is sparse and caustic where the studio album was moody, and it carries a treatment of the Brion Gysin permutation poem Kick That Habit Man with Z'ev backing the band on percussion. The record reaches the same violent, machine-noise register the London founders had reached on their early albums.
The band belonged to a recognisable scene: the San Francisco clubs around Mark Pauline's Survival Research Laboratories, around Cazazza, and around the Search & Destroy tabloid that became Re/Search. That network was the American mirror of the London founding circle, sharing its taste for ritual, transgression and multimedia staging (Factrix played to film projections by Ruby Ray). Their catalogue stayed small, a single and two LPs in period, with reissues following decades later through Storm Records and Superior Viaduct, and a partial reconvening in the 2010s. The Bureau's reading: not a footnote but a node, the West Coast point through which the American first wave connects to Cazazza, to Z'ev, and to the founding network.