Pig (musical project)


Raymond Watts is an English musician, the founding and sole member of the post-industrial music project PIG, sometimes written as .
Watts was an early member and periodic collaborator of KMFDM, and has been a visible part of the industrial music scene since the early 1980s. He has toured with KMFDM, Nine Inch Nails, Schaft, Schwein, and Einstürzende Neubauten.

Biography

Recent activity (2010–present)

Watts, Dr. Shinto and John Gosling released a four-song EP Titled Mellan Rummen on November 15, 2010 on Amazon.com.
On 8 June 2012 Marc Heal revealed a demo version of "the first new PIG track in eight years" entitled "Drugzilla " via Cubanate's Official Facebook page and providing their followers a link to his personal SoundCloud page. The link was reposted by Watts a few hours later. A second demo entitled Shake was released on 15 July 2012; again via Heal's Soundcloud page, this time also noting Dan Abela as engineer. In November 2014 Watts approved mixes for an upcoming joint-release EP.
In March 2015 another collaborative EP was announced with Primitive Race entitled "Long in the Tooth" with a worldwide release date of 5 June 2015 through Metropolis Records. Later that month in an interview, Watts revealed a new PIG album has been written and recorded. Former KMFDM bandmate En Esch will be providing final touches to the album.
On 15 June 2016, the official PIG Facebook page announced that the new PIG album would be released on 9 September 2016 on Metropolis. Soon after tour dates were announced The American Excess tour with opening bands En Esch & Peter Turns Pirate. The North American tour takes place in September and October 2016. A remix album, 'Swine & Punishment' was released in 2017.
In 2018, PIG released the album 'Risen', supported by another North American tour. 2019 saw the release of a collection of cover songs on an LP titled 'Candy'. The release of 'Candy' was followed in the fall of the same year by the Divine Descent North American Tour, supported by Cyanotic and A Primitive Evolution. The Divine Descent Tour concluded on October 6th, 2019 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Style

PIG tends to sound more orchestral than KMFDM, with darker, more complex, more ambient beats. His album and song titles tend to be witty, rife with alliteration or are plays on the titles of popular works or phrases. He also manages to work food, heroin or pork related terms into his albums. Like KMFDM, humor features prominently in PIG's lyrics, although they tend towards a darker/grittier tone than KMFDM's.

Collaboration with KMFDM

Because Raymond Watts is a central figure in both PIG and KMFDM, the two projects have seen much crossover. Watts has contributed his skills as a songwriter and vocalist to several KMFDM albums, including their first album Opium in 1984, and has a heavy presence on their 1995 album Nihil, which spawned the hit "Juke Joint Jezebel". A collaborative EP titled Sin Sex & Salvation was released in 1994 under the moniker "PIG vs. KMFDM". KMFDM has in turn assisted Watts with his PIG projects in production and personnel. Current KMFDM guitarists Steve White and Jules Hodgson
and drummer Andy Selway have been involved with PIG. Watts has performed with KMFDM as part of the touring lineup, with the concerts billed as "KMFDM featuring PIG". The setlists for those shows feature KMFDM songs alongside Pig songs. A live CD from the 2002 "Sturm & Drang" tour was released on Metropolis Records that same year.
Watts was given a tongue-in-cheek description in the lyrics to the KMFDM song "Intro" from the 2003 album WWIII:

Other collaborations

Watts has worked with several industrial and avant-garde artists, receiving credits as PIG and Raymond Watts interchangeably. He has also been credited as "Nainz Watts" or "Nains Watts" on several early releases.

Current members

Several of his albums were originally released in Japan, where he enjoyed considerably more success than in the United States and United Kingdom, but some of those albums were eventually released in the US.
In 2004 he signed to Grand Recordings for distribution in the UK, under the name "Watts". The All Hamerican Pig Show was released in 2011 as a DVD via the Pig website, featuring performances from Pig's 2006 U.S. tour and a complete live performance from Osaka, Japan, 1999. The DVD also included the music videos for Painiac and Everything.

Studio albums

Several music videos have been filmed, but most remain unreleased outside Japan. Most videos have surfaced online on YouTube in questionable quality. The video for Arbor Vitate is actually a re-cut version of the Schaft video of the same song.