Exclusive Interview With Ogre Of Skinny Puppy

When influential electronic/industrial metal overlords Skinny Puppy release a new album, it’s big news for the misunderstood, downtrodden and outcasts of society that make up much of the duo’s audience. For over three decades, Ogre and cEVIN Key have been churning out their intense brand of dance grooves fused with massive guitars, a wall of rhythm and more anger and angst than you can shake a stick at, and, unlike many of their peers, their fanbase keeps growing and growing.

With the recently released album Mythmaker (SPV America), the saga continues….as does the noise, pain, blood, and pummeling that is a constant in the Skinny Puppy experience. Produced by Mark Walk and The Scaremeister (which may or may not be Key’s production alias), at Key’s Subconcious studio, Mythmaker is the dynamic duo’s thirteenth effort and first since 2004’s The Greater Wrong Of The Right. On this one, the lyrics were inspired by Ogre doing “a very detailed post-mortem on several very important relationships in my life,” as he describes it. So, er, it’s a slightly more personal glimpse into the frontman’s world than one might expect…you know, from an Ogre.

TheFeed glimpsed the personal life of this feared beast when we sat to chat with him at his home in sunny Burbank, California (Ogre's in Burbank? Who knew?). He turns out to be a nice guy with a lot on his mind. A LOT.

Enjoy!

TheFeed: Howdy, Ogre. Where are you right now?

OGRE: I have lived here in Burbank for about 14 years now. It’s probably the longest place I have ever resided.

TheFeed: Where are you originally from?

OGRE: Calgary.

TheFeed: What was the scene like growing up in Calgary?

OGRE: I miss it. I moved to Vancouver when I was 18. I had a record distributing business and I was partnering with a friend of mine who was kind of a criminal. The scene was a mix of industrial and goth. We were just finding the whole idea of the music and where it was coming from, which was that post-punk scene a little bit. There were a lot of after-hours parties and a really great group of people that brought me into the fold and changed my direction of life.

TheFeed: You guys are considered one of the original industrial acts back when it was a new genre. How do you feel about the way that scene has played out?

OGRE: A lot of things get assimilated in modern culture, whether it’s music or how music is used in some familiar way that is more common. Industrial music at its core was something where it didn’t matter what instrument you used or how you recorded anything, it was totally free and open. I think that it got confined to a bunch of rules and fashion aesthetic to a certain degree. And as it played out, as the mainstream public got ahold of industrial music, it was a hybridization of metal music in the sense that it broke through into the mainstream with bands like Ministry. They kind of hybridized guitars and keyboards and that became “industrial” in a way. I think it lost a lot of its meaning when it became commonplace.

TheFeed: So only certain elements of it managed to seep through to pop culture?

OGRE: Yeah, much in the same way you are hearing a lot of musical trends that are abstract in car commercials these days. Sometimes it can break through with something that is melodic and a pop song. For instance, Nine Inch Nails did that very well in a lot of ways and were able to transcend the genre to a certain degree.

TheFeed: It’s weird to hear music that was once considered so dangerous -- like The Ramones or Iggy Pop-- in car commercials now.

OGRE: Or Led Zeppelin even. When I was growing up, Led Zeppelin was considered a dark band.

TheFeed: When this stuff finds it way into pop culture, does it inherently become less of a threat?

OGRE: What killed the ‘60s was that people ended up flooded with money and they assimilated and got off the boat a little bit. In that way it’s the same with the media culture in this country today, especially if it’s something that is all consuming and entertaining to a certain degree. Like, with soundtracks, music becomes something that is less of a genre sort of thing and more assimilated and part of the propaganda machine. Entertainment and the media in this country are very propagandized right now. As we get older we seem to see things a little more clearly and the affectation of things gets peeled away. You realize that these are ultimately people just going through their lives. I think we tend to idolize and use a good mythology when we are young and try to create these archetypes and icons, but then you get older and realize that your icons are ultimately just struggling through life as well.

TheFeed: So who is in control then: the artists, the media, or the medium? Who are the puppets and who are the puppet masters? (By the way, I was pretty proud of the way I worked "puppetmaster" into that question – FM)

OGRE: I am sure there are some puppet masters; there are some very rich families, and there are different levels of society that we live in. Some of us never see those levels, like the National Futures Association, we never know the amount of freedom that they have or the amount of money that they have to do whatever they want. They can be this entire covert level of this society. But, ultimately, it's not people that are the puppet masters; it’s more of a personal conspiracy. It’s a choice you end up making to survive and to continue on. I think as Skinny Puppy we’ve had a bit of that, but we haven’t been offered a lot of ways to go in that direction either. So it’s kind of this looking from the outside in. On one hand, I’m like, “Why weren’t we included?” And on the other hand, I can kind of see it for what it is so I just keep going. It’s a personal choice within everything in this country and in the world. We are kind of conspiring against ourselves.

TheFeed: How has Skinny Puppy changed musically to adapt to the changing times?

OGRE: I think we both have gone through a lot of growth and maturity, and we’ve also gone through some trauma in the sense that we have lost a band member and certainly had a very acrimonious adolescence between all of us. So we’ve grown that way. Ultimately though, musically we have changed in the sense that the projects that we were doing when we weren’t doing Skinny Puppy are now included in the Skinny Puppy that we are doing now We all did side projects and as you kind of go through that process the way that you work changes. It’s hard to go back and recreate something in the past, so you continue to go forward, and Skinny Puppy has always been a band that tries to challenge its listeners.

We try not to make the same record twice, even if it’s shooting ourselves in the foot a little bit, which is challenging. Not only is it challenging to us, but our own inner-strife, as to which directions we want to go in and what we want to try. But ultimately the records end up being a surprise for us at the end. This record especially has some kind of cohesiveness that I have not seen in a long time for us, and that was the kind of the surprise at the end of it all.

TheFeed: What does the title Mythmaker refer to?

OGRE: Mythmaker: it’s the internalized, interpersonal and external world that is all coming together in the sense that we have been around for 25 years and there is a certain amount mythology that gets created for something that lasts that long. Much in the same way that ideals from a country or personal ideals, we tend to use mythology in our daily lives with things like Myspace. You tend to prop yourself up to paint a bigger picture of who you are. For the most part it is hard not to do that. It’s dealing with that idea and how those things ultimately control us and affect our decision making.

TheFeed: From Santa Clause to the Loch Ness Monster, are their any myths that have had an influence on you?

OGRE: The North American idea that we are the great liberator. I grew up thinking that we were altruistic and that was shaken as I got older. When I was young, I did not understand the Middle East at all, and when you go through life and you start to see the complexities of things and there are a lot of grey areas. Depending on what side you are looking in from, you build these constructs of belief. And some of them are really unshakeable. It’s such a conditioning process with propaganda, entertainment and media here. It’s amazing. I was reading a book by Yugoslavian philosopher Vizagor and he says that most Eastern European countries that have been through an era of heavy propaganda see very clearly what we don’t see. Most people don’t see all the subtle kinds of propaganda in the movies that are being shown.

TheFeed: On a completely different note, I am calling from G4tv and was wondering if you were a videogame fan?

OGRE: I am, but I’m not very good. I love to play though. I just got a PlayStation 3 and I love Resistance! I’m kind of hooked on that right now, but I am not very good. I am a low-level person with all that stuff. I played Halo. I like that games seem to be a little more immersive now.

TheFeed: The difference now is that they seem to be a lot more cinematic and they give you all this plot and back story now.

OGRE: And that is kind of insane. They give you so much more detail and background now, which I really enjoy. I am looking forward to it being a completely immersive experience where you have the freedom to choose where and how things are in your world.

TheFeed: Well, now you can play online games where you play with all these other people in the world.

OGRE: Yeah, like with World of Warcraft. I don’t really get that either. It seems like you go to areas where you are just standing around with a bunch of other people I think the games are pretty cool, but ultimately you are still walking through a pattern.

TheFeed: What about when you were kid? Were there any games that you played at the arcade when you were younger?

OGRE: I loved Donkey Kong and Tempest. I also liked some of the zombie shooter games that came out. But I even remember playing Pong. I thought that was one of the coolest games.

TheFeed: Totally. That was a breakout game.

OGRE: Yeah, I loved it. I remember Duck Hunt too, and that was kind of kooky.

TheFeed: It sure was. It suuure was.