an interview with nivek ogre

ogre's epitaph for skinny puppy:

Tasting the sound smokes open whenever lies there told lasting longer invention the heart or something grows cold DEAD PAN forward welt is... l a u g h i n g .

When I was about 10 years old, my mother made me watch a movie called "Rashomon", which is about an event recounted from the perspectives of everyone involved. She said it would have a profound influence on me someday. At the time, I wasn't sure how, but after doing interviews with Martin Atkins, Ogre and cEvin Key, the lesson from that experience - that a story can be viewed from points of view that are drastically at odds - has come into my reality. Sometimes what seems like the most insignificant bit of information can change the meaning of an entire event. And sometimes words spoken in haste may make a profound imprint on someone else, changing the course of events. Friendships are such fragile things to begin with, and long friendships can have their share of difficulties. What will come to light still has yet to unfold. Still, none of it can bring back Dwayne.

Did you just come back from Europe?

About a week and a half ago we did, yeah. We were just over there for - really quick - two cities, doing interviews. So I didn't see much of it - my girlfriend got to see a lot more of those two cities than I did.

Which cities?

London and Paris. I had a really good time in Paris. I actually got one night - we were out for dinner with BMG. Pierre, who is a manager with BMG, ended up being a real industrial fan from the early 80's and we were talking about Boyd Rice and all these fucking cool bands over dinner and then he took Jessika and I out for a cab ride at midnight, past Notre Dame and past all these places. It was such cool night. It was like little scattered clouds in the sky, the moon had come into the clouds, and so we drove by Notre Dame and it was just so incredible because there was light reflecting off the Seine and reflected back off the clouds and that church is just so beautiful. And then we got dropped off in this neighborhood which is kind of where a lot of young people hang out and we ended up leaving that place and just walking back. We found our way back to Notre Dame - about a half an hour, forty-five minutes walk at about 1:00 in the morning, and just really good memories of that. I don't know if you've ever seen any of the gargoyles that hang from it, but it's a really, really, really incredible place to be around and standing there, you can really get a sense of what people must have felt like at that time period and the fear that was put in them by these creatures being kept out of this building. It was really neat.

Well, the theatrical side of the live Skinny Puppy shows kind of goes back to some of that, doesn't it?

Oh, yeah - gothic romanticism, by the shovel-full.

Are you a big fan of that genre of literature as well?

Well, yeah - in a way. There's a couple of books I read - Mervyn Peake wrote a bunch of books called Titus Groan, Titus Alone and Gormenghast - it was this world created - it was a really incredible gothic trilogy of this kingdom, and this huge kingdom has a huge castle which is actually a huge city which is actually its own body and ilk of life - and outside, where all the artists, who had made things for all those people inside who actually had no heart or soul in a lot of ways. There was that series of books and there was another book called The Monk, and it was the story of this man, who had immortality and was able to cross time and space and he would tempt people who were absolutely wretched into taking his place, because he was wretched for having immortality. He went to a monk who had been put into a monastery by his family because he was a bastard son who they wanted to keep quiet, so they paid the church to keep him in, and then the church kept him in, and they'd feed him bread with hair in it, because he had no faith and this man would come to him and would also go to this island where he had his one blessed intervention in his own cursed life - immortality - with this woman who had been shipwrecked. Her name was Emily, and she had been shipwrecked on an island and she viewed life the same way as a rose that grows and opens its petals and they fall off and die because she literally watched her father decay when she was a young girl. And she is considered a goddess on this island - she is a white woman on this native island. And so he bounces back and forth in time to all these people, trying to in a way tempt somebody to take his place.

And does it work out?

(laughs) Nothing works out in gothic novels!

Why not?

Because gothic novels are tragedies.

So would you like to star in one of those?

No - not really. I just want to read about them. I just want to experience it cathartically through the author.

So, Ogre - are you as tortured and tormented as your lyrics?

I guess I am kind of tortured... I mean - think about this: when you go out and you do something that kind of expresses what, in an innate way, is very difficult to express, so you feel like you've expressed an emotion and then you have to go back and talk to hundreds of people about expressing that emotion - it's tragic! It just becomes tedious to have to go over that emotion over and over again. Because it's there and it's really real. On this new record there's points where I even tend to get bleary-eyed a bit over certain things, and it has to do with Dwayne and listening to fingers hitting keys on a keyboard and trademark signature sounds coming from this person and that freaks me out. No matter how hard you try, and whatever you do or whatever you could do, that person will never ever hit that keyboard again. That's a really profound thing to me with this record. It isn't as visible onother records, because we spent so much time making this record we really became glued in to all the bruises and all the hurt feelings and things that went into this pot that became The Process which became this biblical assumption and it's strange...

Let's talk about The Process... when did you feel it was done?

For all intents and purposes, this record was completed in May of '94. First things were done to it and there was certainly a lot of additional stuff done. Dwayne did a lot of work on it after with Rave, because cEvin didn't want to work on it anymore. So Dwayne was left, and it must have been tedious for him, because he'd want to get into other stuff. But for all intents and purposes, all the songs that were collected in Malibu were for the record, and that was kind of the one downfall of the record was that we didn't write as much as we could have together in Malibu because we were having so many problems personally.

So were the problems more on a personal level or on a business level?

It was entirely personal, because the business involved in it was the label gave us a shitload of money to make a record - the tap was left on until well after May when we left Malibu. There's a lot of things that could be said about how the money was spent, but certainly that was again our own problem, in a way - how we spent the money, in the sense that we got a digital recording studio that we didn't really know how to operate quickly. We didn't know all the key commands to make that thing run really fast so when it comes time to doing takes on music or vocals, it just became a really tedious process, where it'd be like, "Well hold on a second!" You know, and you're in this little room going, "Well I want to speak now!" and they're going, "Oh no - wait a sec! You've got to wait for the computer!" There's things like that, and there's all sorts of breakdowns at a personal level, regarding the direction of the album, for one thing. Dwayne was obviously involved in this heavy breakbeat thing and I'm not that into that, although some of the songs on the album, upon hindsight, when a lot of the things I didn't like about them were taken out, like "Mortar", for example, it became a really interesting track. I mean, "Hardset Head" started out as being a very very heavy techno song in a lot of ways, and a lot of bits were pulled out, guitar was added, so through all that fighting, which has been always the case with Skinny Puppy, good things did happen - but at what cost? You know, I think by the end of the record you look and you evaluate and you see this fucking hideous side of the whole thing and it's just really ugly. I've been talking to Dwayne's family because I'm kind of the one who has been left to help and deal with Dwayne's estate and with his position with cEvin. And I've been put in this position by his family, not by choice, but because I care about Dwayne's family - first and foremost I care about Dwayne - but his family as well, because Dwayne really cared about his family. I want to be able to help them get over all this stuff.

But you weren't at the funeral, were you?

No.

But cEvin was, wasn't he?

Yeah. cEvin was. I talked to Rave and had a plane ticket booked - I scammed a plane ticket, saying it was a family member - so I had a plane ticket, so then I talked to Rave and said, "Are you going?" and he goes, "Why?" And that kind of answered all of my inside questions. I talked to his father the day of the funeral - it wasn't a happy talk at all. His father was dealing with all of this shit. And Dwayne had talked to his father about a lot of the problems that he was having with his relationship with cEvin - all this shit. There's so much to this story that will probably remain closed, because I certainly don't want to drag it through the mud any more than I already have, in order to explain the fragile state of Dwayne, well before the record started, along the way and then after the fact. And kind of the hideous ugliness of a lot of the stuff that hasn't even come to the surface and in a lot of ways, probably never will, but certain people will have to live with it for the rest of their lives, because they know. There's people involved that know what happened. I was prepared to let a lot of it lie, and I still am letting it lie, but I know in my heart and I know in my head, because of what information I was given by Dwayne's sister, of certain letters that were about to be sent to certain people, right before he accidentally overdosed. The contents of those letters paints an entirely different picture than I was even aware of. And so be it. I can't speak for cEvin, and I certainly don't want to speak out against cEvin, because cEvin's got a lot of stuff to deal with, and that's apparent, because he's aware of all this just as much as anyone else. I certainly don't want to speak about this in any kind of foul light, or in any sort of finger-pointing, you know - "Here's the shit - go with it!" at all, but his friendship with Dwayne wasn't what he makes it out to be and what he's projected, from the very beginning of this whole fiasco, in a lot of ways. And that's the only thing that, for Dwayne's sake, needs to be known. Dwayne's and cEvin's relationship wasn't all that peachy and keen. All the way along there was strife between them as well. And that kind of bothers me in the sense that cEvin, in a way, is writing off that, in a really subtle way.

And with Dwayne unable to speak from the grave, we are only left with the impressions of those closest to him.

Just the idea of a person who is dead and who can't speak for themself, is one of the issues I've had to deal with with Dwayne's sister, because they don't really want Dwayne's material coming out on Subconscious. They want all of Dwayne's data back, and cEvin's not willing to give it back to them. So they're asking me for help, and I can point them in the proper direction, but they're very adamant about this, so I have to go, "Well, where does this come from?" And it comes from somewhere. And again, cEvin just has a lot of things that he has to deal with - I mean, we all do. I'm not holding myself on the clean end of the stick here. For all intents and purposes, my and Dwayne's relationship at the end of his life, which will bother me for the rest of my life, wasn't that good. We had major disagreements on direction. He didn't want me to turn this band into a rock band, which I wasn't. I didn't want him to turn it into a techno band, which I'm sure he wasn't going to either...

So you had musical differences.

We had musical differences. But underneath all that, we had great fucking talks. We had full, looking-into-each-other's-souls talks, at times. And we always made up - we were able to hold each other, we were able to bypass a lot of the shit that would maybe hold me more towards feeling really bad about that situation now that he's gone, and we've had those moments, and so I can only hold onto that. For a while after, the first conversation I had with cEvin was that he told me, in no uncertain terms, after Dwayne died, the day after, 'cause we had the big argument about what the fuck happened, it was his emotions, and he said, "I don't even want to tell you what Dwayne thought of you right before he died." And left it at that. And I was like, fuck, I felt so fucking bad for days. I was in Seattle just staring at my computer screen going, "Fuck - this sucks." Driving around just fucking crying, and fucking feeling like shit. And then I talked to Rave, and Rave was just like, "Bullshit." And I have to go back to that - why would he say that? He did, in a way, retract it, but cEvin's never the type to completely retract something. There's always that "little bit" - that fragment left in your head.

Forth