Dino Cazares American Guitarist Born 1966 in El Centro

Early life

Dino Cazares was born on 2 September 1966 in El Centro. He is an American guitarist and composer, and his name is tied above all to heavy and industrial metal. Before he built the band that made his reputation, he spent a short stretch in the grindcore group Excruciating Terror and left it after about a month.

Career

Cazares met the singer Burton C. Bell in 1989, and the two started a band called Ulceration. The following year it was renamed Fear Factory, with Raymond Herrera on drums. The group's first album, Soul of a New Machine, came out in 1992 and was dedicated to Cazares's mother, Natividad, and his older brother, Joey. A series of studio albums followed, among them Demanufacture in 1995, Obsolete in 1998 and Digimortal in 2001.

In parallel he co-founded Brujeria, a Mexican death and grind side project that took shape in 1989 with members of several well-known bands. He appears on its albums Matando Güeros (1993), Raza Odiada (1995) and Brujerizmo (2000), as well as on several of its EPs.

When Fear Factory broke up for a time in 2002, Cazares returned to Brujeria and formed Asesino the same year. The lineup paired him with Tony Campos of Static-X, who played bass and sang, and the drummer Emilio Marquez. Asesino released Corridos de Muerte in 2002 and Cristo Satanico in 2006. Fear Factory reformed later in 2002 without him.

In 2005 the Roadrunner Records executive Monte Conner chose Cazares as a team captain for the Roadrunner United project, and he wrote four songs for that album. In the same year he formed Divine Heresy. The band signed with Roadrunner Records and Century Media, and its early lineup included the drummer Tim Yeung and the vocalist Thomas Cummings. Its debut, Bleed the Fifth, appeared in August 2007. Cummings left in 2008 and Travis Neal took his place, and the second album, Bringer of Plagues, was released on 28 July 2009.

On 7 April 2009, Cazares and Bell announced that they had made peace and were starting a new project with the bassist Byron Stroud and the drummer Gene Hoglan. On 28 April the project was revealed to be a new version of Fear Factory, without Herrera and the longtime member Christian Olde Wolbers. Since returning he has played on four albums with the band: Mechanize (2010), The Industrialist (2012), Genexus (2015) and Aggression Continuum (2021). Divine Heresy has been inactive since, because of his commitment to Fear Factory and several departures from its lineup.

His other credits are varied. He voiced a minor character in the Adult Swim series Metalocalypse, and his discography also includes appearances with Nailbomb, Atari Teenage Riot, Strife, Junkie XL and Cypress Hill. From August 2021 he toured as the guitarist of Soulfly, including a run of 35 dates in February and March 2022, and he is listed on the group's 2025 album Chama.

Cazares is known for a fast alternate-picking style on rhythm guitar, with palm-muted triplets and syncopated sixteenth notes timed against double-bass drumming. In 2022 he said the idea for this approach came when he first heard the machine-gun riffs of Metallica's "One". He is credited with popularising digital amp modelling processors and the use of seven- and eight-string guitars in metal. For many years he played Ibanez instruments, and in January 2015 the company announced a signature model for him, the DCM100. In February 2020 he said he had ended a 22-year endorsement with Ibanez and started a partnership with Ormsby Guitars, a company based in Perth, Australia, which also produces a line of signature models for him.