Skinny Puppy

Skinny Puppy is an influential industrial band, which formed in Vancouver, BC, Canada during the early 1980s.

Sound and Style

Inspired by the groundbreaking music of Kraftwerk, Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle and others, Skinny Puppy experimented with electronic recording techniques and methods. Skinny Puppy composed multi-layered music generally using keyboards, synthesizers, found sounds, drum machines, manual percussion, tape splices, and samplers. They were one of the first performers to use MIDI, but unlike most who used it, Skinny Puppy usually sequenced both analog machines and digital machines at the same time. Whereas many contemporary remixes and re-edits of songs were created in order to make a song more suitable for dancing or different radio formats, Skinny Puppy approached remixing and re-editing as an artistic process of reinterpreting compositions, often using remixes to push their sound into styles of ambient, dub and techno.

Related Topics:
Kraftwerk - Cabaret Voltaire - Throbbing Gristle - MIDI - Ambient - Dub - Techno

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With interests in filmmaking, they made a number of music videos, each attempting to further the theme and concept of the composition at hand. Most of these videos received little air play by major music video networks such as MTV (USA) and MuchMusic (Canada) and some were outright banned. For example the video for Worlock was universally banned because it is a "non stop gore fest" of clips from various horror movies. Because none of these clips were authorized for usage in the video it has never been commercially available.

Related Topics:
MTV - MuchMusic

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Their concerts have been marked by their bizarre and bloody conceptual performance art, which for every concert was planned with the intention of challenging the notions of all who observed. Their music had some acceptance in dance clubs because of its danceable beats, but had little play on commercial radio. Skinny Puppy had little commercial success outside of Canada, but their influence on industrial music is immense.

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