Portland, OR
2 March 2014
Rise Of The Mutants
I had the strongest sensation of living in the future, as I bussed past the emerald green glass towers of the Oregon Convention Center on my way to the Wonder Ballroom on a drizzly Sunday evening, the trancey binaural beat construction of Thug Entrancer‘s Death After Life lulling me into a theta wave slo burn. The RTD bus seemed to glide over pockmarked asphalt, as we detoured through the garish neon LCD displays of Portland’s downtown. There was a feeling of having arrived, and there was a feeling of no time having passed at all.
I started listening to Skinny Puppy when I was 15, on the prowl for ever-harsher sounds, seeking the trve underground, looking for the inspirations of my inspirations. I’ve always been a crumbtrail sniffer. I remember hearing Too Dark Park on a pair of borrowed headphones at a record store called Evil Clown on Halsted Street in Chicago, and it legitimately scared me – Nivek Ogre‘s alien waspbuzz, the crashing industrial symphonies of Cevin Key‘s synths and guitars. In the right mood, Too Dark Park and Skinny Puppy in general scares me still.
One can not overstate the influence of Skinny Puppy on the progression of industrial and aggressive electronic music from subterranean to huge outdoor arenas, for better or worse. They were a direct, formative influence on the fusion of metal and electro, polished to perfection by Nine Inch Nails, and would become the archetypal idea of industrial music for most people in the ’90s and early ’00s.
This sold-out show, a wall-to-wall sea of black trenchcoats and half-shaved heads would serve as a piece of revisionist history, a chance to re-remember what industrial music was all about, before it was polished into a pop format.
Because for all the similarities (and there aren’t as many as you would imagine with a cursory listen), Skinny Puppy is a very different animal from the testerone-driven electro-rock of the ’90s. Skinny Puppy are abrasive. Skinny Puppy are experimental. Skinny Puppy are weird, and edgy, and arty, all while remaining satisfyingly danceable. They seem intent on reactivating industrial music’s original goal of subversion and infection. Information warfare; a ghost in the machine.I arrived right on time to a line wrapped around the block, a feeling which also threw me back to the old days when people looked forward to shows, sometimes queueing all day. Those lines are always fun; smoking cigarettes and rapping with other weirdoes and enthusiasts. There was a feeling of anticipation and camaraderie alive this evening, that I didn’t realize how much I missed until I saw this field of grim blackness. My people…
I saw a group of three young blokes standing around, with the appearance of People Who Do Not Yet Have Tickets But Want Tickets. There was a fellow with white spiked hair who looked a lot like the fellow who turned me on to music in the first place, when I was 13. I happened to have a vacant +1 spot, as I could not find a solitary soul to accompany me on this pilgrimage (yr loss), so it was this fellow’s lucky day. Turned out he worked as a Santa Claus for a day job, and played Thomas Dolby and Kraftwerk covers. The Synthpop Santa bought me a Red Bull for my troubles, and showed me a picture of him in his red-n-whites, and I had a new friend. We had a very satisfying conversation about Yamahas and Casios and Junos, sine waves and oscillators and filters, as we waited for Skinny Puppy to take the stage. He told me about the deep tissue massage he’d had earlier that day.
Baal was up when me and Synthpop Santa entered, a Japanese industrial cyberpunk trio. I only caught the last couple of songs, but it was a satisfying blend of thrash metal, synthpunk and rave, and well worth a listen. I shall be investigating further; you’d be recommended to do the same, ‘specially if you like things like Skinny Puppy, NIN, Ministry, et al.After a satisfyingly short break, Skinny Puppy took the stage in a blaze of white strobes against a backdrop of true industrial footage; that is, an assembly line churning out microchips. It was a large-scale production, which is 300% more impressive, after a decade of funky, lo-fi DIY basement shows (which I love, mind you). I didn’t really know what to expect, but I would’ve been surprised, even if I had.
Skinny Puppy was a live industrial cabaret; it was as if Alfred Jarry had choreographed a musical version of Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Ogre came dressed as a post-fallout black priest, wearing a blank no-face mask, a voluminous cloak, wielding an enormous yellow umbrella with a spraypainted radioactivity symbol and a machete. He progressed through a series of personas throughout the show: the black priest, the coyote shaman, the lab technician, while a roadie in a gasmask gradually built and morphed the stage setup, pulling out a genuinely disturbing coyote mannequin howling at the moon; unfolding a projection screen in the middle of the stage; producing a radioactive roadcase that glowed like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle prop, while Cevin Key produced a series of electronic beats, a bevy of synths and basslines and Mark Walk held it all together with solid, heavy live drums. The trio kicked out an impressively loud and full sound for just three people, and there was not a stringed instrument in sight.It all flowed like a surreal ballet, and there seemed to be a story at work. The overall feeling I was left with was a house band for a post-apocalyptic dance party, in some subterranean parking garage after the end of the world. This is music made for hundreds of stomping combat boots, for those that like to rave, to dance ’til the nuclear sunrise.
Watching Skinny Puppy live, particularly Ogre, I was glad to see the post-punk trajectory alive in their music. Ogre’s a proper provocateur frontman and post-industrial shaman, reminding me of John Lydon‘s abrasive deathdisco rasp in PiL, and Genesis P Orridge from Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV. He sings in a guttural murmur that explains why Skinny Puppy never left the underground, but is way more adventurous than the alternative radio that got packaged as industrial in the ’90s.Most of the material they played, none of which I knew by name (except the track “illisiT”, from their newest album Weapon), could’ve come from any period in Skinny Puppy’s history: classic pulsing basslines and weightless synth chorus pads being properly anachronistic as to not break the spell; until near the end of the show, when things started to sound a bit more 2014, with the briefest hints of bass wobble, some club bass and hip-hop beats that made me think of Dr Dre producing Suicide. Rather than trying to updating Skinny Puppy for the kids, they are touring to show they’ve never gone anywhere and perhaps the slipstream has finally caught up or regressed enough to understand them, maybe even love them.
With the proliferation of live analogue techno that has been coming out of the underground lately, and with greater attention and validity being given to the archives these day; with greater respect being given to influential and formative bands, the time is right for a new generation to discover/rediscover SP. Let a new dark age of dark club music commence!I left the show a few minutes early to catch my transportation back to deep SE Portland, and got held up downtown when a Whacked Out Party Bro attempted to steal a Navy Guy’s Coors Lite, and would not get off the bus, despite every single person on the bus screaming obscenities at him and the imminent arrival of the Boys In Blue. I sat there calmly, listening to Vessel‘s Misery Is A Communicable Disease and contemplated the best way to stab somebody with a pen, until a Girl From Detroit pushed WOPB out the backdoor with the admonition, “I’m From Detroit, Motherfucker!”
There’s a lot of Radioactive Children out there. It is the time of the mutants, and Skinny Puppy’s early to the party.
-J Simpson-
