By Jonathan Williams

It’s not every day that someone says things like, “You ate it! It’s a lizard’s tail moving on its own. He bit it off or something. That’s fucked up, dude. The tail is fucking flipping around and moving on its own. It keeps fucking twitching. It’s got life, dude. I’m freaking out. Anyway, sorry, I apologize.”

While some people might actually expect such words from Nivek Ogre, the iconic and theatrical front man for pioneering industrial band Skinny Puppy, he tends to actually be a rather mild mannered guy when he’s not onstage in elaborate costumes spraying blood out of machine guns. Ironically, his lizard tail diversion was a result of his dog, who is likely not skinny considering that he dined on everything but the lizard’s tail.

Having just released the latest Skinny Puppy album hanDover in October, as well as unDeveloped, the fourth album by his ohGr project, in May, Ogre begins his first ohGr tour in since 2008 in San Francisco tonight. When his dog wasn’t partaking in reptiles, here’s what Ogre had to talk to Wrestling with Pop Culture about as he prepared for the tour.

Considering that the ohGr album unDeveloped came out in May, followed by the new Skinny Puppy album hanDover in October, how much would you say the two albums influenced one another? Were they recorded simultaneously or were they completely separate ventures?

At one time we were contemplating doing a Lou Reed Metal Machine Music type of record to satisfy our third album deal with SPV when they went into insolvency. There was a slight overlap there, but then the two projects definitely veered off and became two totally different projects. The writing styles on both of them are probably as polarized as you can get. There were a few tracks like “NoiseX” and “Brownstone” on the new Skinny Puppy that were conceived around the time that we were doing unDeveloped and it makes sense because there’s a character based around that song title that kind of works his way through the unDeveloped themes. Really, when it came down to it, when the albums were done there was probably about a year between the two, at least.

Whether you’re working as ohGr or with Skinny Puppy, you often have characters and concepts playing out through each album. How do these two albums compare thematically? Is there any conceptual relation between the two records?

Only in the sense that Brownstone makes his first appearance after the fact on the Skinny Puppy record and is talking more about the housing crisis. Brownstone is a character that’s basically an ex-high level intel operative within the U.S. military who kind of went rogue after realizing he was being experimented on. He turned against everything and went deep and dark and took on various identities. But his whole life, he’s been kind of obsessed with electronic devices and he also shuns the idea of electronic communication, so he uses an Oliver typewriter, which is the typewriter that was used in Naked Lunch, the kind of Princess Leia-eared, beautiful pre-Depression typewriter. He manually types out all these pages after he goes and collects data on the streets and pontificates and uploads his thoughts to a Facebook page in the form of these pages, that are kind of these scattered, schizophrenic data blasts, almost like military proofs in the way of what his agenda is. So he’s sort of my schizophrenic counterpart.

Would you say he’s a Skinny Puppy character, an ohGr character, or is he present in both realms?

He’s probably more of an ohGr character, to be honest with you. Although the minds collide, they split, they find heaven and hell in the same amount of time, but he is definitely more of an ohGr character. For me, ohGr is a bit more of a personal project looking inside and Skinny Puppy tends to externalize through personification and looks outward. The new Skinny Puppy album hanDover kind of indirectly, because of our own experiences with the insolvency of SPV, is examining and popping the various bubbles in the state of our great way of life in a lot of ways. Within all that there’s a certain amount of crossover and our own inner worlds tend to meet in various ways that I’m sure not we’re not aware of through actual perception.

Skinny Puppy and ohGr always have very theatrical and conceptual shows. What are your plans for these ohGr shows? Do you have plans to tour more extensively with ohGr after this West Coast stint?

I’d like to. I’ve had two false starts on this tour in the sense that I was trying to do a full U.S. tour, but ohGr’s a bit of a baby band. It stated in 2000 and we did one tour, released two albums and seven years went by. That’s almost a musical lifetime for a lot of people. So it’s a bit tough in the sense that it’s not an easy sell. We toured in 2008 with ohGr for Devil’s in my Details and it was right when the economy crashed. All the promoters were like, “We know what’s going on right now. We know gas prices are really high and we understand what’s going on. You guys did really good considering…” But everybody looks back now in 2011 and it’s a bit of a building thing for me. So it’s really difficult to get ohGr to the East Coast without losing money. I’m not taking a wage and the musicians are taking way less [than usual] because we’re friends. We’re doing a bit of a pressure release, but we’re also trying to work the band and build it up. It’s a building process and hopefully, if things go well, we’ll do more shows. We’re planning a Skinny Puppy tour in spring, but if this goes off good and promoters start saying, “Hey, that sounds good,” we’ll definitely tour more. I definitely don’t want to lose money. I don’t mind not making any money, but losing money sucks balls.

Definitely. You mentioned plans for a Skinny Puppy tour. How much have you planned for that tour and how do you think it will compare to these ohGr shows?

I’m going to be approaching Skinny Puppy the same as I did with the last tour, with heavy visuals. We’re playing smaller clubs and there’s not a lot of room in a lot of these places, so this is more just straight music as a band. We’re touring with Violet Tremors, which is my ex-wife’s band, and Left Spine Down, which is some friends from Canada. There’s theater in the sense that there’s a theme to the show and we’re all going to look really good, I’ll tell you that. We’re going to look really good this time. But as far as the theatrics and the production go, there isn’t a lot of room for that on this tour. And for me personally, doing 26 years of Skinny Puppy and constantly trying to create a spectacle, I’ve never given myself to go out and be a singer in a band and it’s something I’d really like to do. When you’re encumbered with a bunch of heavy costuming or prosthetics or blood or whatever, it takes you out of that because you have a lot of other marks to hit. With ohGr it’s funny to work with these people I really like and just perform as a front man and a singer. There’s still a bit of theatrics, but it’s not as important as it would be for Skinny Puppy, and it’s a bit of a diversion for me so I’m giving myself a little break.

Speaking of theatrics and costuming, a few years ago you were in Repo! The Genetic Opera, which was your first acting role. You’ve also worked with Bill Moseley, both in that film and when recording. Do you plan on doing more acting or branching out in other creative ways?

I’d love to. I was lucky with a bit of serendipity with Repo! and I had a really good audition. I had a really bad audition once before for The Crow. I was up for the part of Funboy and I went into a room with Alex Proyas, the director, and producers and I was playing a sexy part to a girl, who was the assistant director, who was a guy, and I was really out of my element and couldn’t do it. So when I had the chance to do the Repo! audition, I really prepared for it and had an amazing audition. It changed everything for me in a lot of ways. So I nailed the audition and got the part, then I did 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams with Bill Moseley, which was a sequel to the remake of 2000 Maniacs. And I’ve done some other small things. I did an Edgar Allen Poe thing for Staci Layne Wilson and I’m doing another thing for her maybe when she gets it up. When I get back from this tour I’m going to put my reel together because I’d love to do some more stuff. It’s a lot of fun. It’s tough, too. You really have to work for it and nothing comes for free.

I painted a bit when I was younger and I’d like to get back into that just for myself. I don’t know that I’d ever show anything, but I really enjoyed the very fact that it was a medium I had complete control over. It was something that I started with a white board and finished with the last stroke of paint. With a lot of other things you’re not really in control of the outcome sometimes, so I really liked that.

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