PIG
SINSATION
(2024 REMASTER)
album reissue
deluxe 2xLP | CD | digital
out 23.08.24
(Metropolis Records & Armalyte Industries)
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deluxe 2xLP | CD & digital
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PAINIAC
(2024 REMASTER)
video
PIG | Painiac (2024 remaster) video
Following hot on the heels of his new album ‘Red Room’ (released in May 2024), industrial rock mainstay Raymond Watts aka PIG has today reissued a fully remastered version of his seminal mid-‘90s album ‘Sinsation’ via Metropolis Records (CD, digital) and Armalyte Industries (deluxe 2xLP vinyl). Out of print for almost three decades, it makes a timely reappearance just ahead of a North American tour.
‘Sinsation’ was originally released in 1995 on Nothing Records, the label established by Nine Inch Nails kingpin Trent Reznor, and not long after PIG had opened for NIN at a number of shows. Nothing was an influential and commercially successful label with a cult underground following that also issued records by Marilyn Manson, Squarepusher, Autechre, Meat Beat Manifesto, Pop Will Eat Itself, Einstürzende Neubauten and Plaid, as well as NIN themselves.
PIG | 1995 photograph by Stephen Lovell-Davis
‘Sinsation’ features PIG classics such as ‘Painiac’ VIDEO, ‘Hamstrung On The Highway’ and ‘Hot Hole’, with Watts adeptly blending the profound and the profane. As ever, he and and his carefully chosen cohorts tease, taunt, tempt and tantalise with their singular blend of hook laden, genre-bending, electronic-tinged alternative rock, loaded with malevolent reverence, glitz, glamour, sleaze, sin and swing.
“Every record I make is PIG through a different noose, and when I made ‘Sinsation’ the noose hung high,” recalls Watts. “It was born at Ranch Apocalypse in London. The culmination of creation and cremation, an apotheosis of desperation, nihilism and desire, the only place I could go was to the poison well and drink deeply. I was locked inside both the studio and myself. The barricades were up in my fortress of solitude with only [guitarist] Steve White and a large box of drugs for company. ‘Sinsation’ was the sound of the last card turning and burning. The only way out was through. I had to give birth to the noise inside my head and record it. A fiendishly simple and yet simply fiendish task. A place in which I was so uncomfortable that success would be to fail, as to fail had been my only success.”
Recorded and mixed by PIG and Helen Woodward (Pale Saints, Dodgy, Kitchens of Distinction, Alien Sex Fiend, Ultra Vivid Scene), ‘Sinsation’ featured contributions by notable artists such as Karl Hyde (Underworld), Jimmy Cauty (The KLF) and White (KMFDM), as well as Carol Anne Reynolds (Sow) and Japanese artists Imai Hisashi (Buck Tick) and Hoppy Kamiyama.
“‘Sinsation’ wasn’t anything about the ascent of man, it was the descent of ham,” Watts continues. “As surely as everything passes, so did the spotlight on sin, as the long thin shadow that scratched the words from deep within and conducted the chaos would soon cast its darkness on a new vision. PIG would crawl to a different master in me and hang from a new noose.”
In regard to the newly mastered version, he adds: “I was surprised and saddened to re-visit ‘Sinsation’. Surprised by the energy and invention and saddened to hear the pain. But, I was strangely glad to have visited hell, and blessed that I didn’t stay.”
PIG | autumn 2024 North American tour itinerary
Watts has enjoyed a stellar career since starting out as a pioneering member of the mid-1980s industrial rock scene. As well as releasing fourteen albums as PIG, he has toured with KMFDM (he was a member of the band in their early days), Nine Inch Nails and Einstürzende Neubauten, written music for fashion and film for Chloe, Marios Schwab, Halston, The Row, as well as creating the sound design for the exhibition ‘Punk: Chaos to Couture’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Watts also collaborated with the late fashion icon Alexander McQueen, who commissioned him (with John Gosling) to embellish the serene instrumental track ‘Inside’ (from the 1999 PIG album ‘Genuine American Monster’ album) for the soundtrack to ‘Plato’s Atlantis’. The show was reprised after McQueen’s untimely death in as the finale of ‘Savage Beauty’, a posthumous retrospective that broke all records at both The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum.
Watts co-wrote much of the current PIG album ‘Red Room’ with Jim Davies, a longtime member of Pitchshifter but best known for his acidic and acerbic guitar lines on many chart hits by The Prodigy.
PIG | 2024 photograph by E Gabriel Edvy
