Genetic Factor

Full spectrum showcase of Richard Zeilstra’s cult dutch industrial experiments, culled from hens teeth archival tapes and racked up as a choice retrospective.

A prime entry portal to Genetic Factor’s non-musical, DIY approach to industrial paradigms, ‘In Deadly Wet Dreams’ sluices cuts recorded at different times, in different parts of the world, to frame the early industrial spirit at its most virulent and variegated. Enabled by then newly available, cheap equipment and gear he could find at work on radio (Radionome & Spleen, a.o.), and drawing from sounds he heard while working at Boudisque and running Barcelona’s first compact disc store, the results speak to a burning creative mind making do and making it sound great, full of uneasy, restless character and swagger familiar o early industrial music.

Across the dozen cuts expect to hear Genetic Factor bending circuitry between the frazzled noirish sludge of ‘The Lizard King, Empty Highways’ and more languid strings tweaked with on-point nasal drip-off tones in ‘Rain Over Quicksand’. There’s spidery webs of avon-synth-folk in ‘My Name Is Rain’, and choppier industrial psych-funk squirm on the killer title tune, with a nagging prototype of stepping bleep techno on ‘Precession’, and a wiry EBM-adjacent ace in ‘Warum Lachen Sie (With Hans Meyer)’, plus an outstanding sort of Lynchian industrial sleaze on ‘Virus In The Blood’, and the sort of thing that could only have slithered out of the circuits during that pivotal era in ‘Flowers in Disguise’, with an unmissable oddity of slippery tablas and squirrelly synths on ‘Lichtekooi’.