In the late 1980s and early 1990s the American continent saw its own variation on the burgeoning industrial and post-punk sounds that were then emerging from Europe, and the United Kingdom. The role that Chicago's Wax Trax! Records played in the development of the genre is now both historic and incontestable. Their legacy, beyond just releasing a body of music that bred or came to influence more commercially successful acts of the 1990s, like Nine Inch Nails and Prodigy, Wax Trax! were defined by a then-radical business model. Acting as more than just the setting of a retail record store, and label produced a cultural environment in which its founders generated a cultural locus of related aesthetics, sounds, values and lifestyles. This setting gave birth to the mid-to-late 1980s electro-industrial and EBM sounds of Ministry, Meat Beat Manifesto, KMFDM, Front 242, and My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult. Further north, there was an affinity to be had with the concurrent Canadian scene largely released by Nettwerk Records, which issued albums from the influential Vancouver trio, Skinny Puppy, Australia's SPK, Severed Heads, and Toronto's Front Line Assembly. The duo of cEvin Key and Nivek Ogre as Skinny Puppy stood out from this set of artists for its use of an array of live instruments, treated samples, concrete sounds and media collage, as well as incorporating the use of "B-grade horror movie visuals", including fake blood and gore props, into their live performance spectacles. In advance of their very first release they were signed to a label deal with Nettwerk, and were invited to Vancouver's Mushroom Studios to work on the material which would become "Back & Forth". It was here that the group recruited Front Line Assembly's Bill Leeb to co-produce the EP and perform bass synth and backing vocal tracks.
The darkly electro and synth-horror albums, "Bites" and "Remission" would follow, with Leeb leaving in 1986 to pursue his Front Line Assembly project, and his replacement Dwayne Goettel stepping into the fray with, "Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse". This album and its 1987 follow-up "Cleanse Fold and Manipulate" would be the works that would both elevate and cement the Skinny Puppy sound and aesthetic. With graphics created by Nettwerk's in-house photographer and designer, Steven R. Gilmore, the cover art and accompanying music videos featured distorted images from horror films and pornography, news media and television snippets and abstract swathes of degraded printing artifacts and muted, dark color fields. The music would mirror these treatments, with horror movie samples and news media and social commentary dialog, often addressing the band's own fixation on the dehumanizing effects of the military industrial complex, cruelty, and animal rights activism. It was around this time that they enlisted producers to do remixes such as On-U Sound's Adrian Sherwoood for the developing industrial, goth, fetish alternative and countercultural club music scene, many of which were featured on the "Twelve Inch Anthology". A set of more dissonant, socially aggressive, and literal politically-minded albums followed in 1988 and 1989, with the release of "VIVIsectVI", and "Rabies". With "Too Dark Park" and their final album of what is considered their classic electro-industrial era, 1992's "Last Rights", Skinny Puppy delivered two albums and a set of singles for "Tormentor", "Spasmolytic", and "Inquisition". Exhibiting such a refined and hard-hitting concentration of their sound set on the fringes of the genre, that there was seemingly no new territory left to explore.
After a thirteen year stretch, the band disbanded in 1996 with the release of "The Process" following Ogre's leaving on the eve of its release, and within a few months, Dwayne Goettel's death due to heroin use. Through their numerous side projects and collaborations of the 1990s, the remaining members continued to be active. Most notable among them was cEvin Key, Anthony Valcic, Phil Western, and Mark Spybey's Download project, which expanded their sound into the then thriving electronic music scene informed by labels like Rephlex and Warp Records. After nearly a decade, Skinny Puppy reformed in 2003 with producer Mark Walk and released their ninth album, "The Greater Wrong of the Right". This was followed by three albums in this new mode and configuration and numerous festival appearances, including Download Festival in France, Spain's Primavera Sound, and Leipzig's Wave-Gotik-Treffen. The first of which at the Doomsday festival in Germany, was detailed in, "Ain’t Dead Yet: An Interview with Skinny Puppy" on which Orge recalls; "Afterwards, we felt very energized and healed, putting water under the bridge, like it was a magical journey to get there. After we had done the show, we were sitting on a train to Prague and we said, “That was so much fun, we’ve gotta do some more. Maybe it would be more fun to not just do old, looking-backward shows, but make a new album and see where we would be now”. From this series of one-off festival shows, the current iteration of the band was born, with the albums “Mythmaker”, “hanDover”, and last year’s “Weapon”, to follow. They appear at Seattle's Showbox, on an extensive tour this winter, with early dates generating reviews like “Skinny Puppy Unleashes a Torture Session on Miami”, and ReGen Magazine's interview series followed by enthusiatic praise for the realization of numerous nights in the Live Shapes for Arms.
