Pop Music Reviews : Skinny Puppy Screeches Beyond the Sonic Limits

Ever since the pioneering work of England’s Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire in the late ‘70s, all sorts of underground outfits have attempted to see how far they could stretch the boundaries of perception and noise in performance art/rock. On Sunday at the Variety Arts Center, Canada’s preeminent industrial noise terrorists Skinny Puppy went for the breaking point, perpetrating a techno-media Grand Guignol show for L.A.’s perpetual gloom-for-lunch bunch.

For these sonic pain devotees, Skinny Puppy’s hard, harsh wash of atonal electronics, spook-house organ chords, guttural wailings and screeching pronouncements from singer Nivek Ogre--often set to the mechanized boom of a disco-perfect beat--provided a suitably hellish experience.

For those who have already investigated the parameters of this kind of shock-rock therapy, Skinny Puppy offers few true innovations. The blend of white noise, motorized rhythms and atmospherics has little on its mind beyond the sheer intensity of its antagonistic charge. Equally static were the projected stills and films, which dwelt on the same theme during Puppy’s dogmatic set: that the killing of animals through scientific experimentation is comparable to the Holocaust of Nazi Germany.

An interesting premise, but after a while the relentless animal abuse films, not to mention Ogre’s vivisection of a model dog, became rather like flogging a dead horse.