cEvin Key of Skinny Puppy, Download, The Tear Garden, PlatEAU, DubCon, bananaSLOTH, Doubting Thomas, Hilt, Cyberaktif, ohGr, Images In Vogue. did i just type someone from Skinny Puppy will be performing at Even Furthur!? fucking hell man, it’s still hard to believe.
make no mistake, this promoter is a Skinny Puppy fan. the first time i saw them live was in 1988 at the Metro in Chicago. to say that it changed the way i thought about live music would be an understatement. the shock and awe of the spectacle was inspiring and you see some of that to this day in dbn events. it was the VIVIsectVI tour so there was a lot of theatrics on stage and i still have a piece of mirror covered in fake blood that singer Nivek Ogre used on himself. it has special powers. 
everyone is familiar with the frontman Ogre’s guttural vocals and performance art. but in the back or off to the side behind the keyboard rack is cEvin Key, the genius electronic music experimenter. he calls his improvisational method for creating music “brap”, and wow the brapping he’s done!
a couple of fun facts about Skinny Puppy. the first time i remember hearing the word rave was from the producer credits on their albums, Dave “Rave” Ogilvie, years before our rave. Skinny Puppy’s music was used by the Dept of Defense at Guantanamo Bay as torture and the band sent them an invoice for $666,000.
anyway, if you were into dance music in the Midwest in the late 80s/early 90s you were probably into Skinny Puppy. if you ever went to Medusas or Wax Trax! Records you were for sure a fan. that’s not a huge demographic for Even Furthur, so this felt more like a personal booking. then after we made the talent announcement on MayDay the messages came in from our peers, producers, djs, and friends. people were ecstatic we booked cEvin Key. this sort of outpouring has never happened before! a few djs mentioned that Download and PlatEAU tracks were secret weapons in their sets.
so how is it we even booked cEvin Key? it was out of nowhere actually. we got a few random messages from people asking if we ever thought about booking him. at that point me and steve had already decided that the headliner was going to have an industrial background and we had some acts in mind. we didn’t think we’d be able to accommodate a live show from cEvin, but then we got another message that a mutual friend had booked him to dj in Denver in the past. who knew!? a message was sent and 15 minutes later the mutual friend had me talking directly to cEvin motherfucking Key!
it wasn’t that easy though. why would a legend like cEvin Key play a rave in Somewhere, WI. enter headbanging buddy Baseck who just so happens to be a close friend of cEvin. he explained how Even Furthur isn’t your typical festival and how if your going to rave doing it with us was going to be cool. a few conversations later it was done. i’m not gonna lie, i’ve booked 100s, actually 1000s of djs and live acts and this was the first time i was overcome with how incredible a booking was. i am fortunate and i am grateful.
we have no idea what cEvin plans to play for us. he knows what we’re about and knows we like it dark and hard. that includes A LOT of his music. we are more than ready to hear him on the Midwest Wall of Bass, no matter what he plays! but if he drops Assimilate it’s over…i’m gonna lose my shit.
we’re not going to include any Skinny Puppy links to music because that might scare some of you. lol. there’s not a lot of cEvin’s dj sets online either and the one’s that are posted are all over the place. we’re just going to expect the unexpected and leave it at that.
instead here’s a link to an interview on Waveshaper TV’s I Dream of Wires Archive Series that’s pretty cool. he brings up Fred aka The Kooky Scientist from Psychic TV, which reminds us of another time we combined rave and industrial, at the first Psychosis, and how glorious that night was.
can you tell…we’re EXCITED!?
Tickets on sale now to see cEVIN kEY at Even Furthur 2019! Get on the bus!