This cassette, now a treasured rarity amongst S.P. fans, drew the attention of Nettwerk Productions to the band. Skinny Puppy eventually agreed to record two albums upon the Nettwerk label.
Soon after this, Skinny Puppy's Remission EP, produced by Cevin Key and David Ogilvie, was released by Nettwerk, and the band jumped out of the dungeon shadows and into enigmatic notoriety.
The crushing combination of percussive keyboard and rhythm work and malignant, cryptic vocals, have surprised and disturbed ears throughout North America. With Remission now licensed to Play it Again Sam Records in Brussels, listeners in Europe are being exposed to the same treatment.
Skinny Puppy was joined by synth-man Wilhelm Schroeder shortly after the release of Remission.
In October 1985, with synthesist Wilhelm Schroeder in the ranks, Skinny Puppy released their debut LP, Bites. Production was once again handled by Cevin Key and Dave Ogilvie, with the exception of Assimilate, which was produced by Tom Ellard of Severed Heads. Bites quickly received critical acclaim in North America and Europe and charted higher than an other Canadian independent release in recent memory on charts like CMJ, Rockpool, and U.S. Rock. Songs like The Choke and Assimilate laid waste to dance floors on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the summer of 1986 Wilhelm Schroeder left the band to pursue solo work and was replaced by Dwayne Goettel, formerly of the band Psyche.
In September, 1986, Skinny Puppy's second LP, Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse was released. Boiling over with fresh sounds and rhythms, Mind: TPI remains an expedition into a nether world of sonic, seething emotion. The first single, Dig It, shot to the #10 position on the Rockpool/Rolling Stone dance chart and the LP reached #17 on CMJ's chart. Stairs and Flowers, remixed from Mind: TPI by New York DJ's Justin Strauss and Murray Elias, expanded on the mutant hip hop beat of Dig It. Combined with the new track, Chainsaw, the single summed up Skinny Puppy's psycho-dance strategy and it reached #8 on the Rockpool/Rolling Stone chart.
Cleanse, Fold and Manipulate, Skinny Puppy's third full length LP, was released worldwide in October, 1987. The LP contained some of their most coherent, powerful material to date. Tracks such as Anger, Tear or Beat, and Shadow Cast, with their heavy rhythms, balanced perfectly with the more atmospheric feel of The Mourn and Epilogue. The 12" single of Addiction and Deep Down Trauma Hounds, remixed by British noise-supremo Adrian Sherwood, was simply one of the most intense moments in Skinny Puppy's vinyl history.
Cleanse, Fold and Manipulate marked a crossover of sorts for Skinny Puppy. The public was finally coming around to Skinny Puppy's nightmarish world on a larger scale. They could no longer be dismissed as a cult phenomenon, and when People magazine reviewed the LP, their popularity was undeniably confirmed.
Said David Hildebrand (People): "Skinny Puppy craft what they call audio sculpture. Of course, listeners might have other names for it. Like insanity. Strange random sounds and echoes ricochet through the mix. Dialogue drifts in and out, like sounds from a TV set in an adjoining hotel room. The effect is like stepping into a nightmare being experienced by the Phantom of the Opera."
Even the ever-fickle British press succumbed to Skinny Puppy's aural onslaught:
Melody Maker: "Skinny Puppy are unspeakable. They hurt and they exhilarate. Skinny Puppy do what the greatest do--they determine mood."
New Musical Express: "Like the best horror books and films, Skinny Puppy take one into one's darkest dreams and never let up the pressure. The irony is the dream they are dealing with is the reality we experience everyday we wake up. Extraordinary in every way."
VIVIsectVI, released in October, 1988, was the long awaited follow up. The LP and the first single, Censor (alternately titled Dogshit), were characterized by both brutal, relentless rhythms and strangely accessible melodic lines. Testure, the next single, was the band's most approachable song since Dig It. To many people's surprise, it cracked the Billboard Dance Chart Top 20.
In support of the LP, Skinny Puppy undertook their most ambitious tour to date. The trademark mind-bending live show had evolved to more powerfully reflect the band's ongoing concerns for animal rights. Throughout the show, the audience witnessed a transformation. Ogre became the laboratory vivisectionist, the enlightened man, and finally the tortured test subject himself.
Skinny Puppy have become the premier practitioners of punishing, ultra-aggressive, no-holds-barred electronic music. Skinny Puppy create the ultimate sonic, aural goosing.
Deserted digging through Splinters from cracking boards Caught upon fingers dancing in darkness Pain shoots smack down any hole Creeps in subsides pushed back water waves.November 1989, marked the release of Rabies, Skinny Puppy's fifth full length recording project. Rabies has been described by the band as a thematic and musical continuation of 1985's Bites LP. From the first listen, it's obvious that Rabies is harder, heavier and more fully realized than anything that has come before it. No punches have been pulled and no effort has been spared in making it the definitive Skinny Puppy LP.Vomiting scream laugh through a closet hole. Work out whispers tuned towards nothing on earth. Without feeling burns never change Bad habits hard to break Last rights.
Massive guitars, relentless, armour-plated beats and vocals from the edge of madness all combine to create a collection of songs that are typified by the electro biker-grunge of the first single, Tin Omen. And for the first time, the team of Cevin Key and David Ogilvie shared the production duties; co-production on Rabies was handled by Chicago noise-terrorist Al Jourgensen (Ministry, Revolting Cocks, etc.). The result is an increased sense of intensity and urgency that hasn't been this evident since Bites.
In October, 1990, Too Dark Park continued in that direction, taking their sound to ends of pure claustrophobia offering frightful lyrical visions of a diseased, decayed planet. Too Dark Park is a tense seething, urgency that grabs hold of your gut with no intention of letting go. You realize at once that this is a living, breathing entity.
It surpasses and redefines what the ignorant still term as "Industrial".
Since then, the band's three members have all gotten up their taste for blood by working with other bands and side projects, including Cevin and Dwayne's rockier Hilt, the film score outfit Doubting Thomas and a collaboration with The Legendary Pink Dots' Edward Ka-Spel called The Tear Garden; and Ogre's stints with Ministry, the Revolting Cocks and Pigface, plus an upcoming project with ex-Killing Joke bassist Raven, called Welt. "Doing other projects has put me in contact with a lot of people that are pretty cool and have been helpful to me in various ways," says Ogre. "It's created an atmosphere where I can do things that I've always wanted to do. In a lot of ways, it gives me a lot more focus in Skinny Puppy.Within the tiny space afforded by myself, "Too Dark Park" looms, as if beckoned, over a lost child madly scraping the earth all around it. Old skin beak prances through red neck zombie fields prying poppies from the eyelids of those to follow.. Without the insight proven before the earthy facts bore a hole straight through the living carcass shell, "Too Dark Park" was lush, green, a veritable toyland of smoggy highs. Old skin beak grows bigger only in size and now rules the park closed in by wicker, brittle, dull, lifeless. Each season follows the next with the hope of rebellion The nauseating masses churning to rehashed rhythmic metal weapons positioned with idiotic rock stances pointed in the past. Rest assured there is plenty of room in "Too Dark Park".Ogre, 1990
Last Rights Skinny Puppy's eighth album, is the shudder of total collapse. The sound of dark, unmanageable horrors and one man's breakdown on all levels. "It's a document of delusion," says Ogre, the malignant growl behind Skinny Puppy's crush of relentless techno-core rhythms and unforgiving synth snarls. "Basically, it's a version of Rimbaud's Season In Hell. The end of a certain period in my life seen smack dab in the middle of a lot of pain and confusion."
Produced by longtime Puppy cohort David Ogilvie and percussionist Cevin Key, Last Rights is a seething, enigmatic work. The most harrowing aural sculpture the group has wrought to date and a pivotal release in Skinny Puppy's nine years of audio-exorcisms and exercises in severe discomfort. Word has it that it may be the Puppy's last wretched gasp. A eulogy to their years of lurking beyond the shadows and dreams and nightmare. Is it the last Skinny Puppy album? At this juncture, that's a question even Ogre himself would find impossible to answer. As one listen to the dense, claustrophobic noisescape that is Last Rights will tell, this isn't some collection of "songs" where the answers are clean-cut. This is a living, breathing entity.
Most of all, it's a confession.
"There's always a new beginning after something dies," declares Ogre. "It's too early to tell yet what shape things will take. If this is the last record and the beginning of a new direction for all three members, I can't yet say." In calling the album Last Rights, it's not the burial of the band that the horror-wracked frontman is getting at. This is something a lot more personal. "It's the product of being near death, of being read those 'last rites.' This was my reality," declares Ogre. "In retrospect, it wasn't so much reality as it was partial delusion with bits and pieces of reality thrown in. That reality I can't really even talk about. It's just too 'out there'.
Now, with Last Rights, Skinny Puppy's intense, mutant dirge of dark moods has only grown more powerful, more undeniable. Their brand of electronic body music remains miles removed from the standard dance floor techno/industrial fare. "It's still just as unforgiving and not really too interested in giving people the hits they want," insists Dwayne. "I'm pretty proud of how uncompromising it really is."
Skinny Puppy remains as rabidly tenacious in all aspects of their art. Their video for the Rabies track Worlock has been repeatedly banned for its high-speed montage of violent imagery. They've even been banned and, on one occasion in Cincinnati, arrested for their on-stage extremities. Still, this is no gore-for-gore's sake affair. Skinny Puppy is bent on attacking the chinks in your mental armor not merely to shock, but to challenge and provoke.
Why the use of such violent imagery? Such painful shock theatre? "Because nothing else really drives itself home," Ogre believes. "The sick thing is that violence really is a big part of our lives, and all we do is suppress it, not deal with it. It completely motivates our behaviour, yet we never seem to admit that to ourselves. You know the world's not good to drink but you keep drinking it anyway. I'm not at all a violent person, but I think it's important to confront people and shock them into dealing with the truths they're too afraid to deal with."
Lyrically, a track like Love In Vein speaks for itself while Inquisition, Last Rights' first single, deals in themes of persecution, delusion and intense paranoia. The "lost" tenth track, Left Hand Shake confronts the war inside--and as mysterious as its absence from the record, it does exist with text from Timothy Leary. Killing Game, the album's first planned video, Ogre describes as "a Cocteau fantasy gone bad. It delves into people's fantasies vs. their realities and the demons that we can all summon up that are very, very real." The video culminates in two alien characters--whose veins are on the outside of their bodies and whose eyes are sewn shut--ripping each other's eyes open. "There's a lot of emphasis on themes of voyeurism and sadism," waxes Ogre on the socio-political theme that will also be the crux of the band's upcoming visceral live show. "It's got a lot to do with the way control is subtly used over people to make them seem more admirable to themselves--the cancers that creep in us our whole lives."
Last Rights is the punctuation on Skinny Puppy's nine-year legacy in exhilarating pain: it's the end of one ugly chapter and a leap into a new chamber of horrors.
Says Ogre on his current frame of mind, "I'm like a child staring at the monster at the end of a book. Who knows what the next chapter will bring?"