Patrick O'Neil's harsh-noise project, founded around 1994: rotten, abstracted electronics, a precedent for the wall, and the record that began Hospital Productions on vinyl.
Skin Crime is the American harsh-noise project of Patrick O'Neil, founded around 1993 to 1994, and the Bureau files it at Tier II as one of the most influential American noise projects of its decade. It grew directly out of O'Neil's earlier project Hanged Man's Orgasm, and he ran it alongside his Self Abuse Records label, one of the chief outlets of 1990s American noise. From the start it was a sustained body of work rather than a passing bedroom act, which is part of why it carried the influence it did.
The sound is its own argument. O'Neil took the synthetic sources associated with industrial and overloaded them until their electronic origin was no longer recognisable, turning clean machine noise into something rotten, organic and decayed. The result is dense and monolithic rather than busy, and it marks the point at which noise broke away from industrial to ruin its electronic roots further. Dominick Fernow of Prurient has called Skin Crime the missing link between European musique concrète, Japanese noise and American harsh noise, and the phrase has stuck because it fits.
Its place in the form follows from that density. The harsh noise wall, the static, near-motionless extreme of the music, took the monolithic mass as its founding premise, and Skin Crime set that precedent before the wall had a name. The early wall artists, Werewolf Jerusalem and The Rita among them, built on a sound Skin Crime had already reached for. It reads, then, as a precursor to the wall as much as a harsh-noise act in its own right, and the archive files it on both counts.
The line-up moved from solo to group. O'Neil began alone, and Skin Crime later became a trio with Mark Jameson and the now-former member Shawn Smith. A 1997 recording paired O'Neil with Scott Hull, a figure better known from grindcore, one of several collaborations that recur across the catalogue. Through it all O'Neil remained the constant, and Self Abuse Records the home base.
The clearest measure of the influence is what it set in motion. Fernow has named Skin Crime as a catalyst for his own Hospital Productions, the label that became a centre of American noise and power electronics in the 2000s, and the first vinyl release Hospital ever issued was Skin Crime's self-titled LP in 2003. The label returned to the project in 2016 with Case Studies in Early Taxidermy Techniques, a 20-disc retrospective gathering studio and live recordings, early versions and unheard mixes, the kind of treatment usually reserved for the form's acknowledged anchors.
The Bureau files Skin Crime at Artists · Tier II as a foundational American harsh-noise project: a precedent for the wall, an influence on the Hospital Productions line, and one of the undocumented hinges on which American noise turned away from industrial and toward its own rotten abstraction.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Holocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene