Skinny Puppy

ReMix Dys Temper (Nettwerk)
by Rowan-Morrison

After over a decade of providing Puppy chow for fans of harsh electronic dance music, this Vancouver crew had called it quits. Unfortunately, their leather-clad legions of fans weren’t ready to let go, and many latched onto Skinny Puppy side projects, like Ritalin and Download. In order to keep the canine catalogue alive, Nettwerk has re-opened the dog pound’s archives and allowed their classics to be remixed. Rather than relying on just a bunch of similarly styled industrial-dance oriented artists, some less abrasive – and subsequently more popular – techno talents were invited to take part in this delicate endeavor. Among the remixing militia were Autechre, Josh Wink, Adrian Sherwood, God Lives Underwater, Deftones with Tinfed, Rhys Fulber, and plenty of other cyber scenesters. While the result is a hit and miss disc, there are more hits than misses, and the misses don’t miss by much. The strength of most of the contributions lies in the fact that Ogre’s once distorted and buried snarling has been made cleaner and more coherent. Sure, his voice isn’t an inviting sound for the uninitiated, but fans of the genre will be ecstatic to finally be able to understand his lyrics.
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