Skinny Puppy genre electro-industrial
Style
Sound
Inspired by the music of Suicide, SPK, Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Cabaret Voltaire, Chrome, Throbbing Gristle, Bauhaus, Joy Division, New Order, Depeche Mode, Fad Gadget, Nocturnal Emissions, Portion Control, and The Legendary Pink Dots, music which had been accessible to the band primarily via tape exchange, Skinny Puppy experimented with analog and digital recording techniques, composing multi-layered music with synthesizers, drum machines, acoustic percussion, tape loops, samplers, and conventional rock music instruments to create what they called "audio sculpture". Their extensive use of sampling from horror films and radio broadcasts served to "clarify or obscure" song meanings, and they applied liberal amounts of distortion and other effects to Ogre's vocals, which are often delivered as a stream of consciousness. Lyrics commonly reference social and political subjects including animal rights, environmental degradation, drug addiction, suicide, war, privacy, and self-determination. They have also used their music to draw attention to events such as the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, the AIDS epidemic, and the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Skinny Puppy's often informal, improvisational approach to musical composition is indicated by use of the term "brap", coined by them and defined as a verb meaning "to get together, hook up electronic instruments, get high, and record".Initially a dark synth-pop group, Skinny Puppy took on a more industrial sound following the inclusion of Dwayne Goettel in 1986, and later came to be recognized as pioneers of the electro-industrial genre. Their music has been described as encompassing a range styles including ambient music, avant-funk, noise rock and industrial metal. The music that followed Goettel's death has been likened to genres such as glitch and intelligent dance music. The Village Voice described Skinny Puppy's early work as "dark electro-pop", while Billboard's Bill Coleman thought of them as a "moody techno-outfit" with an "aggravating" musical delivery. People magazine called Ogre's vocals "incomprehensible", and likened the group's use of sampling to noises heard on "a TV set in an adjoining hotel room". AllMusic referred to Skinny Puppy's music as "primal" and "Kraftwerk gone netherworld", going on to say that unlike the bands that followed in their wake, "Ogre and Key knew how to craft tunes and marry them to the most ingenious of sound patterns". Ogre told the Windsor Star in 1986 that "in some sense our music, or the feeling expressed by our music, is felt by a lot more people" than had been anticipated.Ogre said in an interview with Auxiliary Magazine in June 2013, "there is a very military side to Industrial music, and we are far more in the psychedelic side."
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