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This is the second and final part of the Skinny Puppy interview. Ogre fills us in on how Skinny Puppy materialized again and?that a tour with Tool might be inevitable...

Now when your newest album came out, it was greeted with extremely opinionated reviews, in one way or another. There was no lukewarm??they either loved it or just didn?t feel it was right. Now, were there any specific reactions that you were surprised by or didn?t expect?

Ogre: I was surprised when the New York Daily News gave it three and a half stars, or four, or something. That freaked me out. The New York Daily News is a fairly Republican or right-wing newspaper. They gave us a pretty good review and a good write-up, so I think that?s more about the writer. I went and did some research on him and he?s supposed to be getting a lot of slack for some of the reviews he gives, so I was impressed that that existed. And overall, I was expecting there to be some dissent from even our fans based on the fact that we?re not going back and remaking something, that they would want us to make a Last Rights or Too Dark Park or something. I think we both consciously decided to move forward and just kind of be who we were instead of regenerating something that was more archetypal in an archaic way, or something that was going back to be more nostalgic. And so we made that choice and also worked on a few songs that were also a bit more song-friendly, in a sense, much in the same way we did at the beginning of our careers with Remission, with the hopes of the same way we did with that cycle, moving further and further away from the scope of the center and trying to become more and more experimental with what we?re doing. But in this day and age that?s a bit difficult because there?s so much electronic music and it?s harder and harder to find a face within the deluge of electronic music that?s assimilated into our culture. It?s all over the place. It?s been interesting, but I think the fun part about it is that we still have a lot of fans and we have a lot of younger fans that are kind of still on board for this. We?ve got generations of fans now, fathers and mothers turning their sons and daughters onto Skinny Puppy, so that?s pretty cool.

You guys are 10 years removed from The Process, and even longer since the last time you guys were a real live presence. Do you see two specific generations at your shows now, of just brand news fans and older fans?

Ogre: Yes. Like, I was in Dallas, and this guy was driving down the street in his pickup truck asking where the Skinny Puppy show was. He ended up being one of cEvin?s friends back from when we used to tour in the ?80s. He had an industrial band and released some records, and now he?s almost 50. So we have people like that and then we have young kids that are still completely amazed by the whole experience. So yeah, it?s interesting.

Does having new fans and people with a fresh perspective change your approach live or in any other way?

Ogre: There?s nothing that?s really changed live other than that I?m not as obsessed with getting people?s attention as I was in the past. I?m kind of letting a lot of the energy flow through me as opposed to generating a bunch of energy and just draining myself and doing whatever I did that was damaging to myself in the past. I think now, more so than at any other time, I have more responsibility in what I?m saying and how I?m saying it. I do kind of put a lot of thought into that with regards to lyrical samples and what direction we?re taking with this whole thing. I mean, the idea for Skinny Puppy at the onset was, you know, obviously, that we all wanted happiness. I think we are all searching for happiness in this band. One of us didn?t make it and the two remaining kind of through the epiphany of the loss, I guess, have found out that there can be some happiness after all of this and we?re trying to mine that shaft as opposed to just digging through the despair that was in both of our lives at the time. So it becomes a spin that we?ve always wanted, which is kind of through the glass darkly, or trying to find some light in all this darkness.

Now you?ve stated that Last Rights wasn?t an album you made, but that it was a product of your environment unlike so much of your past material. So the songwriting for you, for your solo material and The Greater Wrong of the Right?do you ever feel like it?s almost getting too calculated, like you?re putting too much thought into it? Do you ever overanalyze what you?re doing?

Ogre: Well, with The Greater Wrong of the Right, I put probably the least amount of thought that I?ve put into any record, lyrically anyway. Lyrically, it was all very spontaneous and it was just a matter of having the television on sometimes or going on the Internet and downloading things that I shouldn?t have, like watching one of the beheadings. There?s just so much information that is flowing around right now that can almost be disseminated through the same stream of consciousness that I?ve always done, so I would go over things afterwards and see what I had done, but I didn?t really monitor them. I think the process of making this record was actually, number one, one of the fastest records we?ve ever made, to be honest with you, from start to finish, from doing the songs from the demo. The hardest thing was getting the deal because at that time the major labels were flushing the toilet on almost every act on their roster, and those acts were looking around in the alternative labels for a home, so it was very competitive, and we actually had to go out of the country to find a label that wanted to do it in the way that we wanted to do it, so that was the most difficult part of the process. The actual writing, because we were writing with Mark, and we all have our own studios, and we all were kind of sharing information in this day and age with broadband, you can do so much more without actually having to go to a studio and sludge through stuff. There?s so much more of an exchange of ideas that it became a really interesting process that I?m looking forward to on the next record to see where we can take that further.

I understand how albums mutate from the beginning of the songwriting process to the final product. Is there anything specific that you and cEvin have talked about wanting to accomplish with the next record? Is there any prevailing theme or direction that you might want?

Ogre: Well we?ve talked about making it quite a bit heavier in the sense of certain programming and, I think, letting the guns loose a bit on this next record. We?ve got Otto Von Schirach, and we?re probably going to get Justin, who is our drummer, to play on it and try and get that kind of cohesiveness on the record with the touring group as it is right now. We brought Otto along with us as an opener, but as I?ve come to learn, and cEvin always knew, Otto is an insanely incredible programmer and has some amazing ideas on creating dissonance in music, so we?ll probably utilize that and see what happens there. But we haven?t really given a thought to a theme or a real concept. We?re probably going to start thinking about that in March, when we?re done with all this touring.

There?s been talk about The Great Wrong of the Right being released on vinyl and an accompanying remix album, and there?s still yet a lot of touring to be done in support of the album. What does your schedule look like for all these projects?

Ogre: It?s been one of those kinds of ?what if? questions. But I think that the vinyl was supposed to come out on this leg of the tour, and I?m not sure if it?s going to or not. I really don?t know much about that. We?re in the process of dotting the I?s and crossing the T?s on the concept for a DVD, which we?re going to film on this leg of the tour. Bill has a crew that?s going to be coming up for two shows, and we?ll film that and then put together this DVD. Bill is going to do some traveling around the world to get some film and photography from some of the really weird places that we?ve been throughout our careers and add that into the DVD. And the remix album, I believe, is being worked on now, as far as I know. And that will probably be coming in spring or summer, especially if we do festivals again in summer. And then we will start recording the second record in late summer.

There?s been a rumor online that was apparently coming from your lighting designer on a Livejournal community that said that there is a chance that Skinny Puppy would be involved with either a Nine Inch Nails or Tool tour in 2005. Is there any truth to that?

Ogre: Not as of yet, no. The Nine Inch Nails thing, I think, arose from the fact that I had a nice evening out with Mark and William Morrison, and Trent came along, and my girlfriend came along, and Mark?s wife came along. We went and saw Air at the Hollywood Bowl with a full orchestra. We had a night out. It was the first time I?d seen Trent in years, and we had a very enjoyable night. I really think he?s a really great guy, and I never really spent time at this point in my life talking with him, so we had a nice evening, but totally left it at that. The Tool thing has always been kind of on the backburner with regards to us touring with Tool. We?ve never been ready before, in the sense that we were in kind of a period of reformation. There?s a chance for it this year, but we?ll have to wait to see on that. We?d love to do some dates with them. We?ve talked about it for a couple of years, and if it happens this year, and we?re in the right state to do it, we?ll gladly do it.

OK. On a side note, what happened to the proposed Ministry/Skinny Puppy tour that would?ve been going on currently?

Ogre: Well, I don?t know. I talked to Al and his wife Angie in New York, and they came to our show back in June and it seemed like that?s what they wanted to do. They wanted to do a co-headliner, and we?d be switching off headlining every night. It?s always in the works, and maybe in the last hour, Ministry decided they didn?t want to open for anybody. So that became one red flag that came up, I guess, business-wise. We took advice from our people, and I think a lot of people in our group who were not in the band, but in our crew, were a bit hesitant about joining up with that soft of a package just because of the complications of doing that. Frankly, I don?t know why Ministry would want us to open up for them anyway because the stage would be a fucking mess afterwards. I don?t know what really happened. I saw Al in Los Angeles when they started their tour, and there seemed to be no ill feelings, so I guess it was just something that they decided?that it was better for them tour on their own. And that?s fine, you know, that?s fine by us.

I?d like to go back to the parallels people draw with the new album and what else is going on. With the latest album, and even The Process, a number of people are convinced that Skinny Puppy is trying to be something they?re not. Some people drew parallels between what?s going on with the n?-metal scene and your new album, and even some people were comparing The Process to Nine Inch Nails after Broken was such a hit. Why are these people so convinced that you guys are trying to do something that you?re not?

Ogre: I don?t know, I guess in the same way that people want Santa Claus to look a certain way for the rest of their lives. It becomes archetypal in their minds. It?s hard for them to let go of perhaps Ogre being a heroin addict or not being a heroin addict, or whatever. I guess I understand to a certain degree, but, at the same time, I was always the type of person when I was listening to music that followed the path of a performer, and sometimes I enjoyed more the stuff that they did later and stuff that wasn?t as critically acclaimed by their fans than stuff they did when they were in their so-called prime, or whenever. And I think that?s what it comes down to, too. People unfortunately fall into the slot or the place of giving bands, performers or artistic endeavors a demographic and a timeline and once they pass that, there?s nothing they can do that will replace what was on that timeline. So I think there?s that and there?s, again, the idea that a lot of those bands that they cite are using elements and production treatments that we?ve used in the past, and so it?s a bit like whether we sound like them or they sound like us. I don?t know.

The return of Skinny Puppy has been a long time coming. There have been a lot of things that have had to work themselves out, and to finally bring it all together a lot of stuff had to happen. At what point did you fully realize that it was all going to work out, that Skinny Puppy had run its course and this was the best thing to do?

Ogre: Probably when we did the show in Dresden. We did a one-off show. We had these Germans doing the production and we basically just played to about 12,000 people in August of 2000. And that was the first time that cEvin and I actually got back together and played, and it was that experience in which I remember coming off stage and I was looking at him smiling and we gave each other a hug. That moment was kind of the moment of realization that this was not over. And when we got back, people had obligations to kind of finish up. I had to finish up the second OhGr record and cEvin was working on one of his solo records, and after that we just kept talking and, I guess, bonding in a lot of ways from not talking for almost five years. And that set the course. It was just a matter of trying to ascertain a deal and move forward. I mean, all the ideas were kind of there, and the group of people that were going to work on it were there, and we kind of agreed with how we were going to work on it from there. It was just much more of a conscientious way of going about it. We were conscious to each other?s role in it, and I think we were both a lot less competitive with what we thought was control. Power and control are two different things, and we both have a lot of power, but we just don?t need to exert that much control over the project because it tends to either fly away from us when we do that.? Or, if we don?t really exert that much control, it won?t come out with results that we?re a bit more content with what comes out of it at the end of the day.

Now, Skinny Puppy has set the bar for an entire scene in so many aspects? from the sound to the live performances to the imagery that?s connected with the band. What is left for the band to improve upon? I mean, where do you guys want to go from here?

Ogre: Well, I think we?d like to tighten up the lines a little bit, as anybody would, to try to say things without as much of the dressing, so to say, without as much of the kind of hyperbolized dressing. I think that would be someplace that I?d kind of like to take it, and, again, I think we both want to take the project, musically, I?m talking about performance-wise, trying to get tighter lines on things, become more focused, and deliver messages, either through a physical medium or a theatrical medium, or whatever, through a visual medium. And with regards to music, I think we are both are in agreement that we?d like to take it in the same way that we did the first time around up until Last Rights and perhaps The Process, taking something a bit farther and farther away from the norm each time we go and becoming more and more experimental with the sound, the direction, and the outlook, and things like that. If we can do that again, that would be a gift indeed.