Burton C. Bell is taking the story of "Obsolete" into three small rooms this October, and the restrictions are the whole idea: fifty people, no microphone, no phones, no recording.
The former FEAR FACTORY singer has announced "Obsolete By Word Of Mouth", a spoken-word presentation the announcement is careful to call a social experiment rather than a concert. Across an hour Bell will tell stories from the making of the album, read the original synopsis he wrote while it was being developed, and deliver the story of "Obsolete" as a performative piece without amplification. He will also spend time with every guest before and after, which with a fifty-person cap removes the usual distance between stage and floor entirely.
The audience is asked to silence their phones and put them away for the duration. No filming, no recording, nothing to post. The announcement frames this as a deliberate return to the years before the internet, phones and social media, when people were present for a thing and the account of it travelled from person to person — which is exactly how the organisers expect this one to travel. Whatever happens in the room stays with the fifty who were in it. Every guest takes home an autographed commemorative programme built for the run, reproducing handwritten and typed manuscripts from Bell's own collection.
| Date | City | Venue |
|---|---|---|
| October 6 | San Diego, CA | Scorpion Percussion |
| October 7 | Los Angeles, CA | The Crooked Path |
| October 9 | Las Vegas, NV | The Space |
Guests arrive at 7:00 p.m., the presentation runs 8:00 to 9:00 p.m., tickets are $50 and each night is capped at fifty people. Details are at burtoncbell.com.
One note on the framing: the announcement bills the run as a thirtieth anniversary. "Obsolete" was released in July 1998, so the round number does not quite line up with 2026 — but the album's standing does not depend on the arithmetic. It went gold in the United States, and together with 1995's "Demanufacture" it fixed the template FEAR FACTORY are still measured against.
Bell co-founded the band and sang on every release from 1992 until his exit in September 2020, when he said he could not align himself with people he did not trust and described four years of litigation over the rights to the name as emotionally exhausting. He has since released the solo tracks "Anti-Droid", "Technical Exorcism" and "Savages".
His view of the band's last album with his vocals on it has not softened. Speaking on the Scandalous podcast in February, Bell said of "Aggression Continuum" — finished in 2017 under the title "Monolith", released in 2021 after he had been out of the band for almost a year — that "to me that was the last record, 'Monolith'. To me it was the tombstone and 'Monolith' was the epitaph." He added that he held no grudge about his vocals being used, but that the changes made afterwards left a mark: "They went and changed everything. So, that's the one record I won't sign."