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An Interview with Nivek Ogre
Posted: Saturday, November 21, 2009
By: Ilker Yücel
Editor

An artist is often defined as one whose work shows exceptional creative ability or skill, and no term could be more appropriate for any one of the members of Skinny Puppy. Since the early '80s, Nivek Ogre and cEvin Key have left audiences spellbound, horrified, mystified, and utterly in awe with their vicious blend of caustic industrial soundscapes, nightmarish imagery and expansive lyrical subject matter. They have been the muddied reflection of a world gone insane for well over two decades, carrying their twisted visions into numerous projects over the years, the most successful of which has arguably been Ogre's project with producer and current Skinny Puppy member Mark Walk, ohGr. A year after the last ohGr release, Devils in My Details, and more than two years after the last Skinny Puppy album, Mythmaker, the artisans of industrial terror are back to their old ways in the studio, producing new albums for both projects. Now on the In Solvent See tour of North America, Skinny Puppy fall prey to the ills of the recording industry as the band currently faces disputes with record label SPV on the production of a new album whose future remains uncertain. Of course, such dilemmas have not kept ohGr down, with a new promotional Web site and marketing engine in the works to bring fan and artist ever closer together and increase audience participation, including a new song released for free over the Internet. Now, Nivek Ogre brings ReGen up to speed on the progress of both albums, discussing the music and the shifts in the bands' lyrical topics, from the stock market to real estate to health care to good old fashioned themes about war. He also touches on his thoughts on audience reaction and collaboration via the Internet and even gives us some insight into his latest cinematic excursion, once again teaming him with horror icon and sometimes partner Bill Moseley. Read on as ReGen and Ogre welcome you to the Collidoskope!

Skinny Puppy are currently on tour, but the new album hasn't been released yet. Do you have any plans for a release? When is the tentative date?

Ogre: I think it's really once all the smoke clears for us. We're still really confused as to where we stand with SPV in as far have they been bought by Sony, and are they just picking up our back catalog? What's going on? It's been so kind of vague and obtuse. We were supposed to all be resolved by August 2, and that went on to August 23, and September, and then October, and now there's still like this. They sent this letter yesterday or today having something to do with the In Solvent See 'company holding in place' and Sony having control over the back catalog but nothing about new material, so it's a lot of legal wording, and we're trying to keep our hand close to our chest, so to speak, and just kind of wait and see. We worked on some material and then went down the path when we first started: 'What do we need to do satisfy the contractual end of it and put the label into breach so we can go off and do our own thing?' which was kind of what we wanted to do. Because the label system, especially that label system, has gotten so convoluted that you wonder if they can put records out, some of them, and in this case, they couldn't, so we wrote a record that was originally supposed to be a throwaway record and we were going to do kind of more of a conceptual record based on debtors' poems, pages out of our contract or something like that, and submit that. We started on that path and were going to do five songs each. Mark and I were going to do five songs and cEvin was going to do five songs, cEvin and Ken 'Hiwatt' Marshall, and when we got the material, we kind of...it was right before I did the 2001 Maniacs movie, and we had a five day period, probably the most creative five days of my life, when we started doing this kind of more noisy throwaway record, and then we got on a more creative kick and wrote some amazing tracks and had a really good time doing it and put together what we called Paws End, which was going to be the album we were going to turn into SPV more just to get us out of the contract and go right on to the tracks we had been working on before that and release another record of our own further on down the year, once we were clear of all this 'breach of contract,' etc. When that album was done, we took a turn right before we started recording and got on this roll like I was telling you, a very creative roll, and created a record that when cEvin heard it – because cEvin was off doing his Download or his Vault series or something – really had kind of walked away from the whole process and had delivered us some music, and we went in another direction and made him aware of it, and when he heard it, he couldn't really get behind it. He could get behind it as an ohGr-produced record, which didn't really work for us because we thought if we're all going to get behind it, we should all get behind it. So we just decided at that point that would be an ohGr record, and within all that turmoil we pulled all those songs off, and at that point, SPV took another turn and it seemed like that whole thing was going to extend out even longer. So what we got out of it in a way was an almost finished ohGr record and this other Skinny Puppy record that was started, but we're holding off until we got clear of the label. It's a convoluted mess for us, and we're trying to deal with it from day to day. And of course information coming from Germany is sparse and spare in between and very 'surface-y.'

So now there's another ohGr record in there, too?

Ogre: It is really pretty convoluted. I'm just trying to give you a running time line as to what came out of the recording we were trying to do to appease the label and ourselves, and it ended up turning into something else.

That's one of the facets about you and cEvin and pretty much anybody involved in the whole Skinny Puppy camp: just how many projects tend to come out of it.

Ogre: I only have two, really. I only have two projects. cEvin has a lot more projects, and a lot of what happens is a lot of the demos that he may write end up going to other projects. You tend to find a lot of tracks from Skinny Puppy being recycled into other projects. Whereas in this case we went on from a Paws End project and that ended up being the ohGr record now, and we worked on 'Welcome to Collidoskope' and that was something we just kind of wrote as we were kind of developing the Web site. And this is all going along while we're trying to deal with SPV, and there's just very little coherent information coming from them as to what will happen to the record once it actually gets turned in. We are just trying to move forward, and I think with the material that we did write for that record that ended up being an ohGr record, I was really happy with how that turned out, so it's all a win-win situation for me.

Since Mythmaker, you had your role on the Repo! soundtrack and in the film, and the Devils in My Details record; you've been obviously been very productive. Also, with cEvin releasing the new Vault series, you guys have certainly been busy. How does the new Skinny Puppy material correlate from there, since each album the band has done always takes things in a new direction and tries to do new things?

Ogre: I think that it's trying to capture a certain polarization in a lot of ways. If you listen to the different directions the band's kind of going in, in a lot of ways, I think that...I can't speak for cEvin's Vault series. cEvin is writing music in a slightly different way now and it's a little glitchier, he's gotten in with a lot of this style. The glitch kids like that stuff. And ohGr is a little more song-based and structured in a lot of ways, and not at the same time; we can be noisy, too, but there's a lot more emphasis on the vocalist being central to the whole sound, to the story. I tend to see Skinny Puppy as based on tracks of music, and ohGr is a lot more kind of writing songs around the vocal. The new Skinny Puppy is...the one song that is going to be coming out on the In Solvent See tour that we are going to release very soon in a unique way is a combination of both styles of music coming from both of us. I mean, I can't really compare it to anything, because it is kind of a new hybrid, in a way. It is driving and it is hard, for the most part, and there's bits of melody interspersed with it, but I can't really describe it as any one thing other than the subject matter is trying to deal with things that are more or less going on in the world right now. The one song we just wrote, just finished for this tour anyway, that we're going to try and market in a way that won't involve SPV is based around the stock market and the esoteric idea of finance in a lot of ways.

It's interesting to hear that, considering past material like 'VX Gas Attack,' to name one example. It's funny how still pertinent that song is, considering the political and military climate, and now you're tackling the stock market. It definitely moves in cycles and seems to repeat itself quite a bit.

Ogre: All those themes, like war, you know? They always keep coming back around. War, money losses, you know? It all doubles.

You've been talking about your issues now with SPV and how it seems to be a convoluted mess, and you guys have obviously had trouble with labels in the past. You were on Nettwerk throughout the '80s and early part of the '90s, and then you had your troubles with The Process record, and Capitol then re-released the back catalog and so on. Considering the climate now with people starting their own labels and old models of record labels kind of falling apart, how do you view that now in terms of your own situation?

Ogre: We're going straight for conceptual stuff with the ohGgr project, with the Oliver typewriter, with Morse code, and the Morse code leading into a number of puzzles to something like a phone number where you can leave a message, and then the message gets incorporated into a song that we've written and that we've given away for free in order to get maybe people's e-mails and addresses and try to develop a fan base. I think the whole thing is going back. What we're trying to develop is a kind of a communal collective of artists that are doing things that people will or will not want to buy, and I think using the idea of packaging things together so you can give people the option to download it with a PDF file for artwork if they want, which is quite inexpensive, and then everything moves up from as far as how you want to package things and market and it goes back to, again, conceptualizing and bringing people into the idea of being part of something. I mean, that's the important thing to us, anyway. The ohGr camp is not so much trying to move product so much as develop a concept and build on that concept, so we're using the Oliver typewriter, using a character that is developing that slowly and wants to get away from technology and leave clues around, whether it be through using technology, but in an odd way like geo-caching odd items with weird puzzles in them, and people have to figure it out to get whatever the clue is inside the box or whatever it is that's left behind. I think that's the way we're looking at trying to develop a fan base and develop a group of people who want to participate as well as enjoy the music. I think that's where it's heading. It doesn't necessarily mean we have to be online 24/7 talking to people like technical support, but you can still interact in a cool and artistic way, and you know, we've got a bunch of people within the ohGr camp that are contributing a lot of their time. We've got Sarah, who's a photographer and is doing video work on developing this character and this idea. She comes from a craft family, so they have a little craft store. She's able to set up these sets that are just incredible; I mean, the detail and using things like coffee for dirty water under a soap bar, little things like that just to give it a texture, and she's created these amazing sets that we've gone and filmed. We've done a lot of filming downtown, and we're trying to develop things that way, and again, it's developing a presence in order to bring the point of purchase back to the artist, you know? And make people feel comfortable about that and feel like they're getting something more than just...we could just slap up a CD with some artwork and a poster and make the same amount of money, but we're trying to do something that's both fulfilling for us and will hopefully develop into something that will become bigger than us. As far as labels go, it almost seems like they're more of a hindrance, other than getting over the psychological boundaries that still exist within a lot of people that if it isn't on a label, it's not good. It's trying to bridge that gap, and we're trying to do it through art, through bringing people into it through the concept, and I've always been more driven by concept anyway. You get down to the selling of units and trying to push people to buy something because it seems like it's collectable doesn't fly for me so much. After selling a bunch of things at a really inflated price that aren't really worth it, it doesn't seem to be a good experience, and I guess anybody can do that. Again, I think it's trying to create something conceptually that people will gravitate towards and participate in and enjoy.

One of the new things you should check out is Who-Do-I-Have-to-Fuck-dot-com. It's www.wdihtf.com. That's for the new record, and you can get the download there for 'Welcome to Collidoskope.' I'm very excited about the new ohGr record, man. Like I said, it started as something that was going to be for Skinny Puppy and ended up that cEvin didn't feel like he could get behind it as that, and we accepted that and went with it. It's just getting back to a much bigger style, like the old ohGr records, with the same sort of dissonance in a way. I'm really excited about it. You can download the song off of the Web site so you can hear a taste of where it's going.

Devils in My Details came about as an accident, or not an accident. You had said an event happened that switched the focus away from what was supposed to be Blurry Dotted I's. Before we get into the new album, did any of the material from Burry Dotted I's survive in any way? Is that finding its way into the new material?

Ogre: No, this is all stuff we had written...like I was saying, we had written in this period of time when we were going to do a throwaway Skinny Puppy record, and so it's all brand new stuff, and for us, honestly, we have all that stuff that's probably going to show up in B-sides and the Vault, but we're just moving forward. The one really great thing Mark and my relationship as far as writing goes is that we don't really go backwards. You know what I mean?

Once it's done, it's done, and you just move on.

Ogre: Just like Devils in My Details. There's no way we could go back and make another record like that again. It's off to the next thing. That's the one thing I love about working with him is that it's not about retreading a lot of ideas, or if something's not working, we can abandon it, we can move forward. It's really liberating in that way. Like I was saying with the song 'Welcome to Collidoskope,' it was literally written within four days of having kids figure out this phone number through a bunch of puzzles and calling this phone number and getting this message with this wide voice saying, 'At the end of the message leave "Welcome to the Collidoskope,''' and they would leave the message 'Welcome to the Collidoskope,' 'Welcome to the Collidoskope,' and we used all these in the song and then posted it within five days of that. So you start seeing how technology can work for you then, you know what I mean?

And then we gave the song away again. It's not for a large number of people yet. It's not like we're doing it...we don't have a label behind it. We got some people excited enough that they're doing remixes of it, and we've given them samples on this Oliver computer, so if you look at the computer screen, you'll see the old Oliver typewriter there, and if you hit the keys on your computer keyboard, they correspond with the keys on the Oliver, and they play samples off the song and off of another project that we're working on. We're working on a DVD as well for this; we did a party downtown, kind of a furry party that got out of hand that we photographed. That's been going, which is pretty exciting. But check out 'Welcome to Collidoskope' and you'll see kind of what we're doing within the context of trying to create, or at least make a little less opaque without the idea of being on chat rooms and having talks with people and having these convoluted chats with about 50 people where you're not talking to any of them, you know what I mean?

People talking and nobody has a clue what anybody is saying.

Ogre: Right, no one knows who's talking to who, and it just gets to be a cluster fuck, where this is something when people heard it, they're like, 'Oh my god, I'm on this!' and people start discussing, 'Which number voice are you? Which number voice are you?' So it's cool, and it's a good track. It's a good tune, too. We're really positive about that moving forward and just going with what's there and experimenting. It's a big unknown. The whole idea of marketing music in this day and age is a big unknown. Again, we're trying to bring in a collective of artists that you can actually see there's a hand-on approach. There's a report, and they might be selling things for us, but we've had hands on all these things. And then that expands the artist's audience who was working with us, and it helps us as well. We're trying to bring all of this together in some unique ways.

What are the plans for any sort of live shows for the new ohGgr release?

Ogre: Obviously we're really going to try as best we can within the climate of what's going on. It's a big unknown where we're working on finishing the album and getting that out, and then we're planning on doing some touring, hopefully. It all depends on how the big experiment works. I will say with my greatest desire and intention I want to come on tour, but again, I'm kind of in the same position as Skinny Puppy, in the sense that I'm selling to a label with In Solvent See, but I'm a smaller fish than even Skinny Puppy is, and that's a pile of shit; a big pile of artists have gone to somewhere else now.

Let's get back to Skinny Puppy. The new material for Skinny Puppy that is going to be the new album...how did you describe it again? 'It's a noise record? No, it's a throwaway record?'

Ogre: Well, the record was developed in sort of like a pseudo-structured way. There's a lot of noise within it. There is a track that we just finished that we're going to try to market. I'll be straight up with you what we're going to do with it. I don't know if you should tell people right now…

You've worked with Steven Gilmore for the bulk of your career, and there have been a lot of people who have kind of come and gone into the mix. Pat Sprawl is one, Dave Pleven, and now one who you seem to be working a lot with lately, Dre Robinson, a.k.a. Databomb. When all these other people are involved, how does that work?

Ogre: A lot of that just comes in when the tracks come in. It's not so much them overdubbing, per se, as just you have a ProTools session with 60 tracks laid or 32 tracks in it or 18 tracks in it or whatever. It's just picking through all of that stuff. It's pretty much what we do once we get cEvin's tracks, is basically put some structure, chord progressions and a vocal and an arrangement. That's a lot of stuff. It's not like I'm saying this is all we do. It's a lot of work. The nuances of the production come through Ken Marshall and Mark Walk. Everything else is pretty much done prior to the tracks coming in, so if anybody is contributing, those tracks are on there. The overdubs aren't done after the vocal for the most part in Skinny Puppy, whereas within ohGr, we'll always continually do overdubs, although within Skinny Puppy, what we'll do afterwards is do our own overdubs if there's a need to reinforce the vocal through some sort of a chord change. It's hard for me to describe to you what it is. It's going to be a cacophony, and it's going to be a lot of really strange melodies, I know that for sure. As far as vocal melodies go, there is going to be odd stuff going on with some really odd approaches vocally.

Obviously you have a kind of recognizable style, whether it's the classic distorted or gritty style in the '80s or the cleaner more singing style, and last year when you did Repo! there was yet another side to your singing voice that not a lot of people expected.

Ogre: My falsetto, a female falsetto, yeah.

You didn't happen to explore that any further with ohGr or Skinny Puppy this time around, did you? We aren't going to hear Pavi on there?

Ogre: No, I think Pavi is such a character onto his own that it really is...it let me explore all the worst parts of my voice, and at the same time, out of it came a really interesting character. So no, it's a bit too foppish and a bit too…

…too isolated to that character?

Ogre: Yeah, it really is. It was a voice that was created just for Pavi, and I can't see it reaching beyond that. All that stuff helped me in going on in doing ohGr and going on even within Skinny Puppy and the theatrical side of it; I think developing that character really helped me in doing that and going through the process of working out of my own little cocoon where I'm comfortable and going into a different place with different people and kind of pulling your pants down. It pushed me on one hand, and it made me more confident. But the voice coming through some more? No, I don't think so. Maybe a little bit. You'll hear it. There's a song that was supposed to be on the Skinny Puppy record, it was called 'Brownstone,' and it was one of the collaborative songs. Actually, it was cEvin's noise track, and I did a free form vocal on it that was very much in the spirit of 'The Gift' by Velvet Underground, and it was talking about people being removed from their houses regarding foreclosure, and Brownstone was one of the characters. Mrs. Temple and Mr. Brownstone and then Mr. and Mrs. Jones come in and move in after they've been foreclosed upon with all their history and find this spot on the floor, which is Mrs. Purple, or what's left of Mrs. Purple. And I did a one-take vocal to that that was very much kind of the Pavi character, but it will probably never hear the light of day.

Between the stock market and now real estate, these are some interesting topics that you are tackling nowadays. You haven't been reading the Wall Street Journal a lot, have you?

Ogre: I've been following every second of it with glee. Well, not with glee. For me, I've spent all of my adult years so far beating myself up for having done everything wrong, like not put money in the stock market, you know what I mean? Again, it's like it's twofold for me because on one hand, I was always kicking myself for not doing it from tax year to tax year, and now I'm glad I didn't. I wouldn't be any farther ahead. And on top of that, too, with regards to health care down here, one of the most profound things I thought about health care was that all of the adjustments in the peoples' 401Ks, in their equity, and all the things that make America such an amazing thing, all of that money lost during this last kind of invisible hand scoop would have paid for health care for most people. For years and years, too. Then it goes back to people complain in Canada that you pay 35 percent taxes, but in a way when you look at the money lost, it equals out in a lot of ways. I don't go, or I didn't; I do now because I don't have health care down here, but when I was growing up in Canada, no matter where I was in my life, I never worried about having to go to the doctor, and that's a huge thing psychologically. What if something happens to me? What that can do to people financially, that doesn't happen in different countries. And yet people look at that as socialism because it's being misrepresented to them by the yellow socialism that takes place in this country, where big corporations are saved by government bailouts, and so people see it as that not as socialism that can actually help them, and the biggest sleight of hand in this country to me right now is how the people who really need socialized Medicare and medicine the most are the ones fighting the most adamantly against it for the people that profit the most off the people. You know, Mark and I were talking about this too, and if everybody paid $50 a month for health insurance for a year, if everybody did that, if it was mandatory, think how much money there would be. Probably trillions of dollars.

It's simply because nobody wants to pay more than they're supposed to.

Ogre: Right, but then they'll happily go on with what's happened over the last year without blood running in the streets. It's shocking to me.

This is Skinny Puppy you're touring for now. Without giving too much away, how do you think this tour is going to compare to previous tours? Obviously you guys have different kinds of theatrical presentations for each tour. What can people expect to see?

Ogre: I'm excited! I've finally gotten all my elements together. The concept… I hate saying what the concept is because I want people to hopefully find it out when they see it but, it has to do with very much so with what I see as kind of a faceless stream of racism running loose in this country in a lot of ways. It's very kind of a dark, corroded, sick idea that still permeates no matter how far ahead we've gotten. That that stuff still exists, to me, is appalling, and yet it's suddenly kind of a line drawn in the sand that's allowed to exist. At the same time, it's tolerated in a weird way. For such an intolerant thing, it is somewhat tolerated and almost fueled almost in a lot of ways, too, I think. It is about dealing with that faceless sort of idea of prejudice across the board, in a way. It's a very abstract idea, too. It's the imagery and the costuming that's going to bring that across, hopefully. I can only hope that it does. Other than that, it's an abstract mess, a Jackson Pollock painting, when it comes down to it. It's a bunch of stuff that will hopefully combine together to give people an idea of that without being too heavy-handed about it. I want to be very, very subtle with it, but I know it's a very striking thing that will be very obvious to people when they see it, and it will be obvious to you now that I've told you about it, but I'd rather keep it more of a mystery.

Bill Morrison has been doing videos for you guys quite a few years now, ever since 'Killing Game,' and you guys did a video for 'Pro-Test' off Greater Wrong of the Right. You also have one for 'Haze' off Mythmaker that Bill didn't do.

Ogre: I can't speak for the Skinny Puppy stuff, as that's up to the label and we don't know where we're at with the label. It all requires hordes of money in that respect, so it really comes down to if they feel, or if somebody that's putting that together feels, there's a single that's worthy of putting that much money down. It's what it all come down, as I'm sure you're aware. It all comes down to whether there's a return on that investment as far as a video goes. With the ohGr thing, because we have people who are dedicated to the project outside of the project who are contributing their time, we're making videos; we're making these stop-motion videos I'm excited about. But that's kind of more of a series type thing, and we're looking at it more like something that will have more segments. It becomes less of a video and more of a narrative, so in most cases with a video for a band, you have a song that's a hit song, but you need someone to pony up $30,000, or whatever the cost is to make a video. That's kind of where labels are an important thing, because you have those marketing budgets and those marketing dollars, and in this case, we're relying on people like you and anyone else I can talk to before and during this tour, and the fact that we have a fan base, or we probably wouldn't even be doing this.

With MTV not being what it was – not like Skinny Puppy got regular rotation on MTV – but with new avenues on the Internet like YouTube and Hulu, it's interesting how music videos have somehow not fallen out of style.

Ogre: I honestly think that music videos are an incredible way of presenting a three minute kind of visual message-based subject, if you want, that is really effective, especially when you're talking about YouTube and looking at some of the things on YouTube and some of the inventive people that are using YouTube. The amount of hits they get on some of those things is incredible. It's different, it's definitely a different marketing tool, and you have people looking at it. I think what it comes down to is like executives and people going, 'Well, we're doing a viral video that's going to go on YouTube. Why do we need to spend so much money?' and then it comes down to me, and I almost agree with that. It's not really about production, per se, as the idea, and everything comes back to that. It really comes down to what do you have to say and how are you going to say it? For me, with the idea of viral videos on YouTube, we'd almost downgrade to stuff like that. If we filmed everything in HD, we'd put it in grimy...fucking...some shitty compressed state, so it would lead people back to something they want to see in a different state. In a sense, you used to have to listen a song on a shitty cassette tape and go 'fuck' with tape hiss, and somebody recorded it too low, and there's a lot of flutter with too much tape hiss because someone didn't have the recording levels right, but...man, that must sound good on the vinyl! I can see utilizing things like that, but it's a hard sell to people and video directors who are going, 'OK, well, I need this much money to make this kind of production value,' and yet the production level craps on a viral level. It's not important anymore as much as the content.

That is where your approach with the ohGr website and everything does come in handy, to at least enforce a community of people who are actually artists who are interested in pushing it as an artistic medium, as opposed to a financial one.

Ogre: Yeah. What I'm hoping for is all these things will coalesce into something that the Internet was supposed to be when people had like Eggs.com, and people thought the Internet was the most amazing place in the world because everybody could have their little Web page that they'd sell things from and everybody'd be rich. To me, it's trying to get back to that ideal, but in the sense of it being a collective. In other words, you have people making products that are directly connected to the artist that aren't coming from some big fucking merchandiser, but are being hand-crafted, that are being fulfilled by other artists out there that are just people trying to do the same thing. And then actually it inspires people overall. Would it inspire me to buy something if I was a fan of that band? Would I feel like, 'Wow! That's a cool thing,' and they're actually...it's not three steps removed, where they're going through some merchandising company that's printing their brand on a condom wrapper. It might be a completely idealistic model, but for me, it's fucking fun, because I'm getting to work with some cool artists to make some things that are cool, and we can make things in small batches. We don't have to do big runs. We can experiment, and if this works, great! We'll keep selling it. If this doesn't work, we can shift. You can really kind of move with it. With the song even, we wrote the song based on peoples' involvement with leaving messages. But you can kind of shift and ebb and flow in almost a South Park way of being on top of current events, and that's great if you can do that. Then you have kind of an odd connection with people that I think is cool. It's not like you're on there every night talking to people or like replying to peoples' e-mails. I also want to be kind of removed, but at the same time, you have this point of interaction. It might be through a technological channel, but it's still is something that is connected through a number of artists and a number of products that aren't just corporate-based, per se, and not just being mass-produced.

You mentioned another film you worked on?

Ogre: 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams. Tim Sullivan remade Two Thousand Maniacs, which was a Herschell B. Gordan Lewis film from the '60s, which surprisingly enough deals with racism in the south. A small town called Pleasant Valley that's just going along its merry way with slaves and everything gets hit by the northerners coming down in the Civil War and this town gets slaughtered. So they rise every year, once a year, to take vengeance on the northerners, and for every one of their townspeople, which is 2000, they need to slaughter one northerner for each southerner that was killed in the town. So they rise up once a year in order to add to their total. So in this version, the maniacs, in which case I'm playing one Harper Alexander who's the evil and quite sadistic kind of killer to Mayor Buckman, who's played by Bill Moseley – his sidekick again – we're basically kicked out of Pleasant Valley because the sheriff thinks there's been too much murdering going on. So before we leave, we roll him down the hill in barrel full of nails and we head out and end up in Iowa and we set up a carnival there, and at the same time, we meet these kind of Paris Hilton, Nicole Ritchie kids that are on this show called Road Rascals, and they're going to do this thing where Beverly Hills meets the south, but they meet us in Iowa and they think they can save some production money by using us as their southern idiots to show on their show, and we end up teaching them a thing or two about cannibalism. That's the rub. It actually turned out really well. We filmed it in Iowa. It's going to AFM next month in November, and it should be in the new year release, I think, direct to video or direct to DVD.

Excellent. You're definitely making good on doing more film work.

Ogre: I'm trying, yeah. This was a great role for me, because again it was something where I got to do a lot of dialogue and I had a lot of fun with it, so we'll see where it goes from there. We'll see where this all goes because it's a slow process. It's a lot of hurry up and wait, but it's certainly been fun, and I had a great deal of fun doing it. I have a lot of fun doing those things. It's a lot different than music and it's so much fun for my imagination I can't even tell you. It's a tongue in cheek thing. It's got humor, tits, ass and every kind of politically incorrect thing possible thrown into it. And Ahmed Best is in it, who played Jar-Jar Binks.

No kidding?

Ogre: He's a super fucking cool guy. I was really impressed with him; just an over the top pro, a really good person, and he really went over the top in what he was doing. He did this thing where he started talking in tongues at one point that was just like awesome. It was funny. It was a lot of fun. There's gore, there's some definite good gore it, but you know. It's more of a black comedy in a way, exploitation black comedy. You'll chuckle your head off!