Electro/industrial pioneers Skinny Puppy are assaulting the United States in support of their new album, “Weapon,” with The Alliance of Sound Tour, which hits the Trocadero Dec. 3, along with Front Line Assembly, Haujobb and Youth Code.
The tour was supposed to be a co-headlining tour with European EDM duo VNV Nation, an interesting sonic ying-yang pairing for anyone who is familiar with the two groups’ contrasting styles. But alas, VNV Nation dropped off the tour a month out under mercurial circumstances.
OhGr (birth name Kevin Graham Ogilvie), the group’s singer and lyricist said that the change in the lineup ended up fixing something what was shaping up to be a contentious tour.
“Not as much as one would think,” OhGr said about how much chaos changing the plan at the eleventh hour brought. “It’s the way it should have been in the first place as far as pragmatic things like poster art, which was utterly turned down by VNV in the beginning. It fit perfectly in the end. The writing was on the wall six months ago based on the interactions and some of the other responses we were getting.”
OhGr added that the group has respect for VNV Nation and their accomplishments, but the idea of touring with them worked better than the actual execution.
“That was the whole point, to get something that is in the same universe, just a few neighborhoods over,” he said. “We had seen them in Germany back in 2005. I remember pulling into [the] M’era Luna [Festival] and seeing 10,000 kids out in the audience with their fists up in the air and I was like ’What is this strange form of disco music?’ and it was VNV Nation. They have a big audience and a big following and we thought it would be a good idea. When you do packages like this, you want to be able to draw from each other’s fan bases and create a copasetic thing. But the internalized mechanisms in all that wasn’t functioning properly, even with the sales. When we announced Front Line Assembly was taking their place, our sales took a jump. You try and figure this stuff out. You can’t really predict people’s personalities. So we just calmly moved forward. Luckily for us, there were a few bands that were out there where our things overlapped. Front Line, we’ve toured with them before, so it’s a more familial fit in a way. So it will go a lot smoother.”
Skinny Puppy started in 1982 and their original and caustic take on electronic music pave the way for groups like Nine Inch Nails and Ministry that helped to define industrial music.
OhGr admits he never envisioned the group lasting as long as it has.
“In fact, it was quite the opposite,” he said. “I thought it would be an experience to put on the bucket list when I was 20. I thought it would be amazing thing to somehow utilize this obsessive-compulsive poetry thing and stream-of-consciousness babbling, and use it to some purpose. We went into a studio and made a discordant dissonant album thinking it would be a one-off and we would maybe get some play with it. That was not in the cards. We created this situation with me about to turn 52 and still getting up on stage. It’s pretty amazing.”
Back in the 1980s and early ’90s, electronic and rock groups had an artistic line drawn between them as the more traditional rock bands frowned upon groups that played to loops, tapes and backing tracks. Fast-forward to today and that kind of technical augmentation is standard across the board for touring artists from all kinds of genres.
OhGr said that change in attitudes in using technology in a live setting came from so much riding on concert tours these days.
“There’s two trains of thought on doing that,” he said. “That trickery is a safety net for a lot of these big shows. There’s a lot of money involved, so they are created and programmed to play on their own if need be. A lot of musicians in so-called live bands can switch between playing live or to what’s on tape. It’s a function of technology but it’s more of a charade than what we use it for, which is to play things that couldn’t be played live. You can do it that way and some bands do have banks of computers that are behind the stage playing everything. Initially, we were the ones using tape back in the 1980s. It was very well-known and accepted that there was stuff on tape because to create a lot of these sounds on a keyboard back then, with no presets or ways of storing sounds, became cost prohibitive to have that much gear on stage and also very difficult to pull off. That’s the reason why we were forced to do it. On the other side of the coin are these shows that are too big to fail.”
When asked about the group’s enduring popularity and influence, OhGr said that Skinny Puppy over the years has attracted a broader range of fans than the stereotypical black-clad “rivet-head” industrial fans.
“When we first started, we used to see a bunch of weirded-out rivet-head kids,” he said. “We always noticed in the back corners are these Pink Floyd psychedelic dudes older than us in their 40s kind of grooving to the music. That’s when we saw ourselves differentiating for the normal rivet-head mode or whatever that became, that dance-structure construct. We found a psychedelic wormhole in a way. When I look out now, we do these festivals in Europe where there are three generations of Skinny Puppy fans. They’re all gothed-out and camping at the festivals. I’m definitely seeing some new fans that are into the hipster-minimalist synth thing that has been turned around and resurfaced again, which is similar to what happened in the early 1980s. You pick up from that, and it’s an amazing trip. There’s old and new. I don’t see as well as I used to so I don’t recognize faces. I just see sizes and shapes.”
It probably doesn’t help that OhGr spends most of his time on stage wearing elaborate costumes and surrounded by a blinding light show.
“I’m wearing these masks that have globes for eyes,” he said. “I’ve got projections scrambled inside my head reflecting back and forth inside these orbs. It can be difficult. We’re constantly getting strobed. It feels like being Alex in ‘A Clockwork Orange.’”
Skinny Puppy performs 7:30 p.m. Dec. 3 at the Trocadero Theatre, 1003 Arch St. For more information or tickets, call 215-922-6888 or visit www.skinnypuppy.com.