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Rx was a one-off side project by Skinny Puppy band member Nivek Ogre, in collaboration with Invisible Records founder Martin Atkins. The project was originally called Ritalin, but the name was changed for legal reasons. The resulting album was named, "Bedside Toxicology."
"This collaboration between Skinny Puppy frontman Ogre and dervish drummer Martin Atkins is the industrial-rock album for people bored with the genre. Toxicology harbors interesting textured--rhythmic bombast; short, sharp tape scratches; hydraulic found sound; slasher-movie music; pastoral English countryside settings-- and now tired power chords or samples cadged from movies rented at Blockbuster. Ogre uses very little vocal processing...concentrating on vocal melodies instead of falling back on the angry-parrot-with-distortion tricks he ultilized over a decade ago. At most lyrical, his delivery is reminiscent of Robyn Hitchcock's-- and to think that for all the years we thought Ogre was a machine.
The songs seem deceptively skeletal, yet they unfold into tense atmospheres. A cover of 60's pop icon Petula Clark's "Downtown" is reduced to an ugly trawl, yet the version of Syd Barrett's "Scarecrow" is whimsically straight. "Crackhead Waltz" is disturbed merry-go-round music last heard in John Wayne Gacy's crawlspace. "For Dusts and Mists" closes the album, giving time for the stalker sitting behind you to finish the job. There are no dancefloor-firiendly tracks on the this album; don't you have enough of that stuff anyway?
The industrial genre needs more stylistic inversions like this in order for the music to rise above hollow counterculture gestures. Bedside Toxicology is the result of two been-there, done-that artists who know how to use a calendar." -Jason Pettigrew Alternative Press
"This was recorded in-between my move to the UK. I think I have the beat to "Exfoliate" as "Nuneaton 3," Nuneaton being the city I was living in, in the UK. I think that Christmas I packed up as much of my digital equipment as I could and spent part of Christmas Eve and most of New Years Eve working on beats in a cold room. I also conceived, during this period, the "tinklings" of Crackhead Waltz, which is an instrument I created using sped-up and slowed-down 1/4" tape loops, sampled into a program called Samplecell and then played on a traditional keyboard.
I don't think either Ogre or I had very much confidence in how the album would turn out. (What a bunch of insecure wankers we are.) And, at one point, we had created some scenario where the album would be more like a live-recorded "radio performance", the idea for which was that as soon as we met Ogre at the Chicago airport, we would put him in a flightcase and record the next few hours! At some point Lee Fraser (of Sheep On Drugs/Damage Manual) was involved. - Martin Atkins
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