Your Favourite Artists / Bands

[bizarre_eye@Cult Labs]

I thought it would be nice to have a thread for people to share their favourite artists/bands, why they like them, background info on the band for the potentially uninitiated, and maybe a few favourite or 'essential' tracks.

Not only is it a great way of sharing the love of music, but a great recommendation tool; as I, for one, am always on the lookout for new bands/sounds to enjoy.

I'll start off with (quite possibly) my favourite band of all-time:

"Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada (1982 – present)
Skinny Puppy is an influential industrial band, formed in 1982 by core members cEvin Key (Kevin Crompton) and Nivek Ogre (ohGr) (Kevin Ogilvie) in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Inspired by the groundbreaking music of Chrome, Kraftwerk, Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, Portion Control, The Legendary Pink Dots, and others, Skinny Puppy experimented with electronic recording techniques and methods. The band composed multi-layered music generally using keyboards, synthesizers, found sounds, drum machines, live percussion, tape splices, samplers, and conventional rock music instruments. Whereas many contemporary remixes and re-edits of songs were created in order to make a song more suitable for dancing or different radio formats, Skinny Puppy approached remixing and re-editing as an artistic process of reinterpreting compositions, often using remixes to push their sound into styles of ambient, dub and techno. Skinny Puppy’s often informal, improvisational approach to musical composition is indicated by use of the term brap, coined by them and defined as a verb meaning “to get together, hook up electronic instruments, get high, and record”.

Skinny Puppy’s first two proper releases, Bites and Remission, fall somewhere between the found-sound chaos of early Cabaret Voltaire and the abrasive, futuristic synthpop of the Units or Crash Course in Science. While the intense synth programming, abstract rhythms, and surreal samples—all Puppy trademarks—are present here, the albums owe as much to new wave as to industrial."

(source: last.fm)

Some of my favourite tracks:

Assimilate (Bites)

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Curcible (The Process)

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Dig It (Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse)

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Goneja (The Greater Wrong Of The Right)

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Smothered Hope (Remission)

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Spasmolytic (Too Dark Park)

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Tin Omen (Rabies)

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Essential Albums:
Bites
Cleanse, Fold and Manipulate
The Greater Wrong of the Right
Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse
The Process
Too Dark Park