Santiago Durango, the founding member of Arsenal, was born in 1957 in Columbia, but immigrated to the United States with the rest of his immediate family when he was about ten years old. Intelligent and creative as a youngster, he was deeply influenced musically by bands like The Ramones, The Misfits and Gang of Four. When Durango started taking guitar more seriously in high school, punk rock was the sound he wanted to imitate. In his native Chicago, Santiago Durango joined a band called Naked Raygun, which was notable for its incendiary and controversial subject matter. Naked Raygun achieved a sizeable amount of critical acclaim as a forbearer for noise rock and industrial rock after they disbanded in 1990, but their releases (which were mostly EPs) never sold well. Before Naked Raygun was completely spent Santiago Durango and fellow Raygun band mate Jeff Pezzati jumped ship and hooked up with Steve Albini's new punk band, Big Black.More commercially successful than Naked Raygun, Big Black was another self-professed punk band that was really a noise/industrial rock band with their hooks still clinging onto the past. Santiago provided the band with pulsing, grinding, drilling guitar rhythms that blew the lid off of local Chicago rock shows for years. Big Black released two studio albums, Atomizer and Songs About F-----g, as well as a couple of live albums, as live shows were really their specialty. When Big Black broke up in 1987, Santiago Durango left to pursue a law degree, eventually graduating and working as an appellate defender in Ottawa, Illinois. Of course, before he gave up the guitar picks for the bar exam, he started up his own rock band, Arsenal, originally with bassist Malachi Ritscher on bass.Arsenal released their first EP, Manipulator, in 1988 under Touch and Go Records, the same label as Big Black. The group changed band members to include Pierre Kedzy on bass, and then released Factory Smog Is A Sign of Progress in 1990, also on Touch and Go.