Nine Inch Nails News 2013

Nine Inch Nails' Rhythmic Jack Move 'Hesitation Marks' Makes It Rain Acid Beats
(By Christopher R. Weingarten, Spin.com, August 30 2013)

As a record from the gear-grinding, bloodletting, mud-sweat-and-tears, industrial void-enterer Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, Hesitation Marks is an almost scandalous about-face, powering down the Hate Machine and revving up the Man-Machine, boldly exploring "EBM" for a generation of headbangers still coming to terms with the throbbing gristle of "EDM." As part of a cultural moment, it's the third in a trilogy of bluntly minimal albums — following the Knife's Shaking the Habitual and Kanye West's Yeezus — that retrofit an icon's chosen genre into a blocky, clinical, Piet Mondrian painting. Noise is rendered as tight, impenetrable polygons of sound; beats are clicked together like Duplo bricks in primary colors; 808s are heartbreak; and everyone seems to be jacking to the same circa-1988 Chicago house records.

All of which to say, this is the most important artistic statement from NIN leader Trent Reznor since the late '90s, when SPIN dubbed him "the Most Vital Artist in Music Today." You can follow Reznor's status as a relevant figure because it always runs parallel to his relationship with hip-hop — another genre that hit pop paydirt with noise, repetition, and first-person emotional autopsies. Reznor was Lolla-generation vanguard when he was also on rap's cutting edge: 1989's Pretty Hate Machine churned with the tinny, broken-Walkman, traffic-jam bustle of Public Enemy (thanked in the liner notes, presumably sampled); 1994's The Downward Spiral had the warts-and-all grit and somber confessionals of Wu-Tang Clan ("Hurt" was promptly sampled by Ice Cube's Westside Connection); and 1999's long-awaited The Fragile had the wide-screen auteuristic vision of Dr. Dre (who helped mix) or Puff Daddy (who got a remix).

But during the four albums that made up his '00s output, the very idea of the "vital artist" in pop or alternative music itself got replaced with the messy democracy of the Internet. And while Reznor was an early pioneer of online commerce and conversation, the avowed Pitchfork reader had some trouble staying ahead of the game, spending the majority of the decade chasing the wake of Queens of the Stone Age (2005's "Getting Smaller"), Definitive Jux (2007's "Me, I'm Not"), and James Murphy (2008's "Discipline"), or just teaming with unfashionable dudes like Saul Williams.

Through coincidence or design (he's a Kanye fan), Hesitation Marks surges with the energy of modern hip-hop — hey, the surge of modern everything. Sometimes the beats have the skeletal post-hyphy sproing of DJ Mustard or Droop-E, sometime they work as a harder-rocking counterpoint to the goth-tinged Haus of Pain drone machine that is A$AP Ferg's Trap Lord. It's hard to imagine the Slinky-down-a-staircase drums of "Satellite" and "In Two" happening in a world where Timbaland hadn’t existed. It makes sense that rap's biggest envelope-pusher, Kanye West, and industrial's biggest envelope-pusher both recently turned their live shows into shadow theater — Reznor blowing his shadow up 10 feet tall for his "Tension 2013" tour, Kanye performing as negative space at the Video Music Awards. Both are pop stars who have been proudly reduced by Rick Rubin at some point, literally using a spotlight to negate their role as pop stars. The huge sucking abysses of nothing(.) on their respective albums feel like a final frontier in confrontation. Kickstarted by Portishead (2008's Third), attempted by M.I.A. (2010's MAYA), it's a trend that lets a festival headliner like Reznor make magic on beats that sound like a busted Madlib invasion (check out the stumbling, misaligned hi-hats in "Disappointed") or saxophones that strobe like blinking pixels (see the end of "While I'm Still Here").

And unlike Radiohead, you can dance to it. This is acid. Reznor's clean, crisp, basement-breaking beats are a daze of Phuture's past. Chicago house is already seeing a revival on the gnashing edges of the noise scene (Vatican Shadow, No Fun Acid, Alberich, Unicorn Hard-On) and in the hyper-accelerated world of stadium techno (Skrillex's horror-rave project, Dog Blood, is a metal-up-your-acid mix of Green Velvet gone Black Album). It's already got the potential to be the Internet generation's Ramones T-shirt: moody, abrasive, infectious, aggressively simple. After ten years of having monster drummers (Dave Grohl, Josh Freese, Stephen Perkins) wage war against the machines, Reznor uses a steady, unadorned, corrosive electronic pulse in twin singles "Copy of A" and "Came Back Haunted." The chasms of space are more destructive than, say, writing another "March of the Pigs" — and totally post-modern when you get Lindsey Buckingham to play guitar over them. Only one song allows Ilan Rubin to play "live drums." And when the guitars finally do come in (like on the airy "Running"), they are strangled, choked, tied up, and denied their Jimmy Page orgasms. It's an S and M torture trick.

It's the first time since the Schoolly D wrecking-ball pound of 1989's "Down in It" that Reznor's music has pulsed with the actual sounds of a black art form (the drums of Chicago house, Detroit house, and hip-hop) instead of white punks approximating a black art form (like the Gang of Four and A Certain Ratio beats that propelled '00s singles like "Only" or "The Hand That Feeds"). "All Time Low," a song that splutters like a glitchmower version of David Bowie's "Fame," might be the exception, but remember that the Thin White Duke's groove was superbad enough for James Brown himself to gaffle it outright for 1975's "Hot (I Need To Be Loved, Loved, Loved, Loved)." All in all, Trent makes everything majorly funky for a song with the line, "This paranoia turns to fear."

All of which leaves outlier "Everything," a Camaro blasting a sunny Rick Springfield/Romantics tune right down the centerline of the LP. Even though it's easily the happiest song on an album that boasts lines like, "Yesterday, I found out the world was ending," its aggy New Wave is easily the catchiest thing on the record. It also makes some sort of weird sense in a time where Bruno Mars is approximating the Police and 2 Chainz is rapping over the Knack. Through his own twisted K-hole, #ARTPOP icon Reznor is once again one of the most vital artists working today, coming back haunted, breaking the habitual. Let's get physical.

http://www.spin.com/reviews/nine-inch-nails-hesitation-marks-trent-reznor-columbia-acid/?utm_source=em&utm_medium=dailynl&utm_campaign=090113&utm_content=article1

Trent Reznor's Upward Spiral

(Written By David Marchese, Spin Magazine, August 25 2013)

This summer — Nine Inch Nails' first as a living, breathing entity in four years — Trent Reznor has been taking the stage alone. Muscular and short-haired, he opens his shows by marching to a synthesizer in full view of tens of thousands of festivalgoers, all of whom had strong reason to believe they might never see this band again. Usually wearing a sleeveless black t-shirt, heavy boots, and cargo shorts, he begins to sing the stealthy "Copy of A," a track from Hesitation Marks, the imminent new NIN album those same festivalgoers had equally strong reason to believe might never exist.  "That moment is our reintroduction," says Reznor, seated on a red leather couch in a conference room at Hollywood's posh Soho House, a cocktail-jazz version of Nirvana's "Lithium" clinking quietly in the background. "It's supposed to challenge the audience. I didn't want to come out and signal that we're just a band playing songs you know we're going to play."  He cocks his head, as if considering a problem he's still in the process of solving. "I haven't had a chance to live with the show yet, so it's hard for me to tell what people think."  Indeed, these things take time, but over nearly a quarter-century of Nine Inch Nails, Reznor has learned that if you tackle the hardest things first, the rest of it has a way of working out.

For roughly 80 percent of the band's existence, a bet on Trent Reznor sitting in a room like this discussing his career in early August 2013 would've drawn long odds. The reasons range from the mundane (his industrial baby-step years spent in Cleveland) to the medical (a personally confused, chemically indulgent '90s) to the plainly literal (a burnt-out Reznor told a 2009 Bonnaroo crowd, "This is our last-ever show in the United States").  Yet here we are, in a brief window between gala appearances at Lollapalooza and San Francisco's fellow multi-day extravaganza Outside Lands, with gigs on the European muddy-field circuit approaching quickly, and solo North American arena dates looming on the horizon.  "I'm at a peak of exhaustion right now," says Reznor, who minus a scowl (and plus some longer pants) largely retains his onstage guise offstage. He's sipping from both a cup of coffee and a can of Diet Coke, and is a polite, even friendly presence, firm with his handshake and quick with a smile. "I was shooting a video till three in the morning. The last few weeks have been terribly intense. The way I work is that up to the last second stuff looks like shit, and at the last minute it comes together. But I feel like I've done good work, and there's still an audience there. I'm not looking out at the crowd and seeing a bunch of orthodontists. It's new faces that look like the old ones, if that makes any sense. It feels valid to be back."

That's because more than at any time since the release of 1994's self-loathing alt-angst classic The Downward Spiral — an album to which Hesitation Marks ruefully nods across the decades — Nine Inch Nails, and their formerly tortured and wraithlike leader, once again have the zeitgeist on a leash. The man who once made it a mission to jolt rock beyond its guitar/bass/drums doldrums has delivered a heavily electronic LP into a world where binary code is now just accepted as what makes music go. The band's ticket sales are stronger than ever, and the David Lynch-directed video for self-reflexive first single "Came Back Haunted" quickly earned more than two million YouTube views. Reznor's sound — confrontational, fiercely technological, pretty damn catchy — now reverberates through the banging aggression of American dubstep and the visceral clang of so much contemporary hip-hop.

For English producer Evian Christ, who contributed to Kanye West's electronically noisy Yeezus, "There's been a resurgence in the influence" of Reznor-indebted music. "I'll always be grateful to Trent for sparking my interest in music that I would otherwise never have been aware of." And in a period when the digital world is throwing off the brightest, sexiest creative sparks, Reznor has diversified, pointing his sharp mind at the puzzle of streaming music, working with Beats by Dre to develop what the company hopes will be the ultimate subscription-based music service, due to launch in a limited fashion this fall.  But Reznor knows better than most that riding these socio-cultural waves is as much a matter of luck as sweat. "There's always been an element of 'right time, right place' to Nine Inch Nails," he says. "When we stepped onstage at Woodstock '94, I could sense it. I get goosebumps thinking about it now. Like, 'I don't know how we did this, but somehow we've touched a nerve.' And then as you move forward, you realize that you can't set yourself up for doing that again. So the fact that our music may or may not be in the air now and people seem eager for it, and that I'm working on something with Beats that's a marriage of humanity and technology, which is sort of what my music has always been about, and I'm doing this after years of working on my own trying to figure out how best to get music to the people who want to hear it — you can't plan for those things. It's just the way the world works."

At some point in the not-too-distant future, Trent Reznor's sons, two-year-old Lazarus and one-year-old Balthazar, are going to hear their father sing "Closer," complete with its chorus of "I wanna fuck you like an animal."  He's been airing that song in concert these days, and admits he hasn't quite thought through the long-term implications. "When I was 25, people used to say to me that having kids would change you, and I'd roll my eyes," says Reznor, who married singer Mariqueen Maandig in October 2009. "I don't know what it'll be like when they read old stories about my addiction or listen to the older songs. I do know that I caught myself swearing in front of them during a road-rage moment and was worried they'd parrot it back."  He shakes his head. "It's a humbling thing, having kids. One of my sons came to rehearsals, and now he says Daddy's job is 'go play loud music.'  I'm not as afraid of judgments as I used to be. I just want to do the best I can do, and not squander any more time than I already have when I was high. That's my main concern.”

That job, and Daddy's relationship to it, is very different now. While Reznor takes pains to point out that he'd only ever said that Nine Inch Nails were taking a break from touring — the band had been on the road almost constantly from 2005 to 2009 — he does admit that his attitude about the project that made him rich and famous had profoundly shifted.  "The main thing was that I didn't want to be on an endless rock-band tour with Nine Inch Nails," he says. "And I said that adamantly enough to force my hand at trying something new. It was like with getting sober: I announced to the world that I was sober so that I'd be held accountable. What I feel bad about is that this is some 'KISS Final Tour of Mid-2013' idea. I get that people might feel that way, but I've given up on trying to manage the spin on things. Nine Inch Nails felt right for me to do, and that's because it felt uncomfortable in a lot of ways. That's usually a sign for me that something might be interesting."

He last felt such seductive discomfort shortly after getting off the road in 2009, when director David Fincher approached him and Reznor collaborator Atticus Ross about scoring 2010's The Social Network. "The process of working on that was surprisingly great," Reznor says. "It was like the first Nine Inch Nails van tour — some of the most rewarding work I've ever done. At the time I'd just gotten married and was feeling like I was getting old to be touring, and I thought film-scoring could be a reinvention."  Reznor, who relocated from New Orleans to Los Angeles in 2005, won an Oscar for that moody, hypnotic Social Network score, and he and Ross worked with Fincher again on 2011's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But those fulfilling experiences, he explains, were aberrations. "Seeing more about how Hollywood operates, you recognize that making movies is an economic calculation. If, by chance, a high-quality film comes out, that's good, but it's not about executing some great vision. Working with someone as smart as David Fincher isn't normal. I love the idea of making films, and hopefully want to make one of my own someday, but it wasn't a world I wanted to spend more time in."

Wait. So what Trent Reznor really wants to do is direct?  "I'm thinking a super low-brow bro comedy," he says dryly. "I'm into nut humor."  Even while Reznor was scoring the exploits of interpersonally awkward coding moguls and Swedish cyberpunks, he never stopped making music for himself. "Trent is always experimenting in the studio," Ross says. "He doesn't make some big announcement ahead of time and say, 'This fragment will someday be a Nine Inch Nails song,' but I knew that he'd return to Nails eventually."  The more vexing question was what Nine Inch Nails should be in the second decade of the 21st century. Sober, happily married, wildly successful in his other musical pursuits — what reason did Reznor have for bringing the band back to life?  “The unglamorous story is that I owed Interscope a couple of songs for a greatest-hits package," he says bluntly. "I thought that might be a good excuse to try some new things, and 'Satellite' and 'Everything' came out. It was obvious that I would have censored myself from doing things so minimal and pop in the past. That made me think, 'Let's keep chipping away at the crack in the ice. We might fall through, but that prospect is exciting.'"

With the greatest-hits project shelved until 2014, the resulting, all-new Hesitation Marks (those two early tracks included) is both sonically singular and thematically linked to a particular scarred and multi-million-selling predecessor in the Nine Inch Nails catalog. "For some reason, when I started working more on Hesitation Marks, I started thinking back romantically about who I was when I was writing The Downward Spiral," Reznor says. "I was looking back on who I was then and who I am now and how things have turned out, for better or worse. That was the air the new record was born in. I was looking at the other side of how I was not always honest about who I was in the '90s — and I knew I wasn't being honest — and if you sprinkle those negative feelings with some drugs and alcohol, it's usually not a recipe for success."  Except that it was.  "Until the balance got thrown off," corrects Reznor, who successfully completed rehab for drug and alcohol addiction in 2001. "I'm happy with who I am now. I feel fortunate to be where I am. We tried arranging the new songs with loud guitars, and it sounded false. Instead, we approached those old emotions in new ways that are subtler, and I think just as powerful."

Adorned with art by Downward Spiral cover designer Russell Mills and heavily influenced by the spare, rhythmically complex feel of D'Angelo's Voodoo, the result is as sleek an album as Nine Inch Nails have ever made. Lead single "Came Back Haunted" squirms on the strength of a simple drum-machine pattern, scuffed synth wash, and sequenced bass; the laser-like "Everything" could be a lost Joy Division seven-inch, complete with a chorus wherein Reznor sings (not screams), "I have tried everything / I've survived everything." But instead of sounding like a furious regret, the line hits as hard-won wisdom.  "We tried not to do the classic Nine Inch Nail things on the album," says co-producer Alan Moulder, who has worked with Reznor going back to The Downward Spiral. "The old trademark with Trent was that when we got to the chorus, the songs go up a step, he sings in his highest range possible, and a million guitars come in. We tried to do the opposite on this one. The choruses actually go down; the sound is more withheld than explosive, which is a much harder thing to do."  The album is also a more insinuating, collaborative sound, a long way from the hermetic sonic phantasmagorias of 1992's landmark Broken EP or 1999's double-disc behemoth The Fragile. "In the past," says longtime NIN visual collaborator Rob Sheridan, "Trent would bring in a violin player and give him something very specific to do. This time, he'd bring in Lindsey Buckingham and say, 'Let's see what he'll come up with.' That's a radical change in approach."

For his part, Buckingham recalls there being a "great sense of calm in the studio. Trent's got this aggressive persona, but then he turns out to be this laid-back, soft-spoken guy putting things together in a very painterly way."  Reznor also enlisted former David Bowie and Talking Heads sideman Adrian Belew and D'Angelo studio bassist Pino Palladino, among others, for Hesitation Marks, and though things still aren't perfect — Belew has since bowed out of the NIN touring production, telling reporters, simply, "It didn't work" — the overall change in dynamics is still pronounced. "There's a lot less face-punching in the songs now," Reznor says. "I'm not as afraid of judgments as I used to be. I just want to do the best I can do, and not squander any more time than I already have when I was high. That's my main concern. If you don't like the music or think I should be someone I'm not, fine."  He juts his chin out defiantly. "But I'm still competitive," he says. "If I'm going to do this, I want to win."

In the time between 2007's Year Zero (released on Interscope) and Hesitation Marks (released on Columbia), Trent Reznor hocked a lot of thick loogies in the direction of major labels. Publicly and repeatedly, he chided them for sticking their collective heads in the sand with regards to file-sharing. He thought that the suits were more inclined to sue fans than serve them. So he left.  "At Interscope, it felt like we were one of 50 bands, and we didn't sell as much as Eminem, so no one cared about us," Reznor says, having finished the coffee and moved on to the Diet Coke. "Combine that with unquestionably wrong move after wrong move in terms of the response to new technologies — I just felt like I could figure things out better than they could."  He was correct, up to a point. 2008's raw, jittery The Slip, offered for free on the NIN website, was downloaded 2.4 million times; a lavish, pricey physical package sold in the neighborhood of 250,000 copies. (That same year, he also offered the instrumental ambient collection Ghosts under his own Null Corporation umbrella.)  "Being in control of your own destiny was great," he says of the decision to go indie. "It felt good to have my own neck on the line. But you spend a lot of time figuring out who the influential blogger at some radio station is. Market research is not a sexy thing to think about. More than that, when you're self-releasing, you have this walled garden of people that are interested in what you do, and to everyone else you're invisible."

Meanwhile, as he sought to extend the boundaries of his fan base, he was reconsidering his role as a public figure.  "I was excited about Twitter when we went out on our own because it felt like the most direct way to penetrate people's attention," says Reznor, an early and eager adopter of the platform, who in his mid-aughts guise was quick to volley with fans and fire shots at fellow musicians. "I also got a charge out of people realizing that I wasn't a recluse sleeping in a coffin. But in hindsight, my experimenting with Twitter was a mistake. Oversharing feels vulgar to me now. I know we've been fooled into thinking it's okay to show dick pics and that the Kardashians' behavior is normal, but it's not. I've tuned out in the last couple years. Everybody's got a fucking opinion. It takes courage to put something out creatively into the world, and then to see it get trampled on by cunts? It's destructive."  There's another factor to Reznor's more cautious approach to social media: "I've had the experience over the last few years of liking bands, and then checking what they're up to on Tumblr or something, and immediately realizing, 'This is you?' Fuck.' I don't want my personality to get in the way of what I'm trying to do musically."

Once Reznor had sifted through the results of his various outreach trials, he decided he needed a hand. In November 2012, Columbia released An omen EP_ by How to Destroy Angels, his ambient-pop project with Maandig and Ross; that was followed up with a full-length, Welcome oblivion, earlier this year. "It was no meddling, a modest advance, we split any profits," he says. "If there used to be 100 people at a major working on a record, now there are 18, but they're the good ones. There's a lean, mean hunger. I'm not trying to be a major-label apologist, I'm just telling you what I saw. Instead of me and Rob Sheridan trying to figure things out, there's an extra 15 people and the sense that someone in France was aware of what we were doing — instead of us hoping we'd remembered that France existed. So when a Nine Inch Nails album was in the works, and the mission was to try to make as many people aware of it as we can, we thought, 'Let's try it. Let's see what happens.'" (Still, he adds that NIN's deal with Columbia is "not long-term.")

But given Reznor's willingness to call bullshit on the corporate overlords, was there any hesitance from said overlords to get into the Nine Inch Nails business?  "With an artist like Trent, you have to trust that they're making the decisions they want to make," says Columbia Records Chairman Rob Stringer. "He's been very smart about building up the demand for Nine Inch Nails by working on so many different things over the last few years — and the new record is so strong — that it feels like an opportunity for us to work with somebody who has an effect on pop culture. There was no trepidation on our part."  So far, so good. "Nine Inch Nails feels bigger than it ever has," says a bemused Reznor. "Is it because we're on Columbia? Is it scarcity? I don't know, but it doesn't feel bigger in the sense that we've desperately adopted some new clothing style. It feels organic, and it feels good not to be worrying about whether or not we shipped vinyl to the cool record store in Prague. I know that what we're doing flies in the face of the Kickstarter Amanda-Palmer-Start-a-Revolution thing, which is fine for her, but I'm not super-comfortable with the idea of Ziggy Stardust shaking his cup for scraps. I'm not saying offering things for free or pay-what-you-can is wrong. I'm saying my personal feeling is that my album's not a dime. It's not a buck. I made it as well as I could, and it costs 10 bucks, or go fuck yourself."

There's been a lot of change in the life of Nine Inch Nails, but also some constants. Twenty years and hundreds of performances down a crooked road, Trent Reznor still often chooses to say goodbye to his crowds with "Hurt," the last track on The Downward Spiral, and the song that in its lean, confessional intensity is Hesitation Marks' most direct emotional precursor.  "When I was younger, to hear people singing that song, or any song, back to me? Holy shit, what a great feeling," says Reznor, leaning forward. "Over time, that feeling corrupted me. I didn't feel interesting enough to deserve it, and then I reinvented myself as a caricature. Money creeps in, people want to sleep with you, you distort. Add alcohol and drugs, and things go south fast. A song like 'Hurt' is reinterpreted by who I am now — and I like that person a lot more.  "The person you're talking to now is the real me — the smart, together me from high school," Reznor continues. "I feel so much younger than I am. I wish I could change some things about the path it took to get here, but I feel lucky that I'm not as caught up in anger as I was."  Then a sinister glimmer flashes across his hazel eyes, and Trent Reznor does what he's always done. "Believe me," he says, offering that old unsettling reassurance. "There's still no shortage of things that piss me off."

 

http://www.spin.com/featured/trent-reznor-upward-spiral-nine-inch-nails-spin-cover-september-2013/?utm_source=em&utm_medium=weeklynl&utm_campaign=082713&utm_content=coverstory


Trent Reznor Brutally Dismisses Smart-Ass Redditor in How to Destroy Angels AMA

(By Chris Martins, Spin.com, 05 March 2013)

Trent Reznor's How to Destroy Angels released their debut album Welcome Oblivion today and, as a treat for fans, hopped onto Reddit to host an AMA ("ask me anything"). With recently announced tours on the horizon for both HTDA and the recently reformed Nine Inch Nails — plus that "Head Like a Hole" Carly Rae Jepsen mashup making the rounds — there was plenty to talk about. That said, it was a fairly boring talk, with one glaring exception.  One "fan" took the opportunity to call Reznor out for a handful of things: "As millionaires, why did you sign up with a record label to promote your new album? ... I don't buy the 'get it to as many people as possible' excuse ... especially when Trent conveniently places a spotlight on his former cash cow a few days before your band releases this new album. Good marketing, Gene Sim-, er, Trent Reznor. When can I get my NIN toothpaste?"

But stow your "oooohs" until you read Reznor's argument-ending response: "[Trent] Sorry, the wifi on our yacht is having issues, we can't get your full question to load. Try sending me an email at gofuckyourself@youcunt.com." Burn. "How to Destroy Assholes," quipped one Redditor. Another pointed out that the user had a valid question, even if it was dripping with utter insult.  Another highlight came in Reznor's response to a question about Dave Grohl's Sound City and the issue of people trumpeting (no pun) traditional instruments over computers: "I don't really care if you can play an instrument or not. I don't think that's a mandatory skill required to make music that can connect with people. I do think computers have made it easy to make lazy music that sounds nice. I find a fair amount of what's championed today feels to me like it falls in that category - much more fashion than substance. There's also a lot of current music I think is great ... The Knife is a good example."

Reznor also explained that his view on A-list team-ups has evolved through the years: "Working with David Fincher [The Social Network, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo] taught me a lot about collaboration, and HTDA allowed me to work in a band environment that I found very rewarding. I don't know that I was ever comfortable enough with myself earlier in my life to be able to open up and collaborate. Regarding NIN, what's interesting to me about re-assembling it is trying some new things out with a different type of lineup. We're not deep into NIN rehearsals yet, but the idea is exciting."

Beyond that, Rob Sheridan spoke on his plans for HTDA visuals on the road: "Do not go in expecting [NIN's] Lights in the Sky, because this is a very very different presentation from NIN. This is going to be more of a statement, more of an audio/visual installation than a rock concert. Probably a lot of people aren't going to 'get' it, but hopefully they'll walk away saying, 'I'm not sure what the hell I just watched, but it was pretty cool.'"  Oh, and Mariqueen Maandig acknowledged the "Call Me Maybe" mashup: "Honestly I haven't even heard it yet. But I'll make that priority #586 for today." We can see why she and Reznor get along.

 

Nine Inch Nails Announce Tour With Formidable New Lineup

(By Marc Hogan, Spin.com, 25 February 2013)

After years of hints, clues, and teases, Trent Reznor is reviving Nine Inch Nails, who performed their last live shows in 2009. The trailblazing band will start playing shows with a new lineup this summer, with a U.S. arena tour to follow this fall and global dates on the way into 2014, Reznor said in a statement to Pitchfork.  Along with Reznor, the new lineup includes Jane's Addiction's Eric Avery, King Crimson's Adrian Belew, and Josh Eustis, of the sorely missed Chicago production duo Telefon Tel Aviv.  Past NIN cohorts Alessandro Cortini and Ilan Rubin are also on board.

The relaunch isn't totally unexpected. Late last year, the New Yorker reported NIN would release a greatest-hits collection sometime in 2014. The compilation was to include two new songs by Reznor, who reportedly planned to write music for a new record. A tour coinciding with those plans only makes sense, but what's shocking is that this is finally, actually happening. Hold off on those travel plans, though: No information about dates or venues is available yet.  NIN's touring plans also help to explain the abbreviated concert schedule for Reznor's How to Destroy Angels project. His band with wife Mariqueen Maandig and previous collaborators Rob Sheridan and Atticus Ross recently added only 11 dates to a docket that also includes sets at Coachella. Welcome Oblivion, How to Destroy Angels' debut full-length, is due out on March 5 via Columbia Records.  Check out Reznor's full note below.

NOTE FROM TRENT:

Nine Inch Nails are touring this year.

I was working with Adrian Belew on some musical ideas, which led to some discussion on performing, which led to some beard-scratching, which (many steps later) led to the decision to re-think the idea of what Nine Inch Nails could be, and the idea of playing a show. Calls were made to some friends, lots of new ideas were discussed, and a show was booked - which led to another, which somehow led to a lot of shows.  The band is reinventing itself from scratch and will be comprised of Eric Avery, Adrian Belew, Alessandro Cortini, Josh Eustis, Ilan Rubin, and me. The first shows will begin this summer, followed by a full-on arena tour of the US this fall, and lots of other dates worldwide to follow through 2014.  Lots of details and dates to come. See you soon.

TR

http://www.spin.com/#articles/nine-inch-nails-trent-reznor-tour-lineup-2013-2014

 

Nine Inch Nails Meet Carly Rae Jepsen In Insane Mashup 'Call Me A Hole'

(By Marc Hogan, Spin.com, March 5 2013)

Just when you thought the Internet had squeezed all life out of "Call Me Maybe," along comes the Internet to perform CPR. As the Verge points out, a mashup of Nine Inch Nails' 1989 industrial-rock landmark "Head Like a Hole" and Carly Rae Jepsen's endlessly memeable 2012 hit now exists. It's the product of a Reddit user's humble request, and, despite basically just setting Trent Reznor's anguished vocals over Jepsen's perky instrumentals, it's strangely seamless. "Call Me Maybe (Sekuoia LOL Mix)," meet something possibly even catchier. Just in time for the revivified Nine Inch Nails' summer festival dates.

 

http://www.spin.com/#articles/nine-inch-nails-carly-rae-jepsen-call-me-a-hole-mashup-stream