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með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust
Sigur Rós new album, með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, stream available in the blog.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
TR interview. New York Times.
Frustration and Fury: Take It. It's Free
TRENT REZNOR’S home is on the outskirts of Beverly Hills, up a maze of climbing one-lane roads that baffle a rental car’s GPS navigation. It’s perched on a dizzyingly steep slope with a panoramic view of smoggy downtown.
At the moment Mr. Reznor isn’t living there. The place has become a full-scale construction site after a kitchen renovation somehow spread to the entire house. But one room remains neat and dust-free. It’s the studio where Mr. Reznor, recording as Nine Inch Nails, made the two albums he has delivered this year: the instrumental package “Ghosts I-IV” and the latest set of Nine Inch Nails songs, “The Slip,” which was released as a free download from nin.com on May 5.
“This one’s on me,” Mr. Reznor announces on that Web page. The album was downloaded more than a million times before the end of May, according to him. A retail CD version of “The Slip” is due shortly before Nine Inch Nails starts its tour on July 25 in Vancouver.
“Aside from any kind of monetization of it, I’m glad to know that a million people have it on their iPods,” Mr. Reznor said. “If you paid for it, great, but I want everyone to hear it, you know? I want to blow people’s minds.”
He has joined the superstar exodus from major labels. Acts with large audiences and established brands like Radiohead, Madonna and the Eagles no longer need the labels’ star-making clout. They have calculated that they can do better, and have more options, outside the old system.
Now that Mr. Reznor has finished his contract with Interscope Records, he is following his impulses on when to release music. “I don’t have to ask permission,” he said. The situation suits his business sense and his temperament. In “Head Like a Hole,” the climax of countless Nine Inch Nails concerts, he sings, “I’d rather die than give you control.”
Mr. Reznor, 43, is an unlikely combination of recluse, showman, tortured Romantic, workaholic and tech geek — which may just be an effective personality for a musician in the digital age. His songs have become perennial adolescent anthems because they blurt out frustration, fury and self-loathing in a dramatic balance of pop melodies and ominous, lacerating noise. And in conversation, he doesn’t hide negative thoughts. “Fear has governed my life, if I think about it,” he said. “I don’t even know why I’m saying this in an interview situation, but I always feel like I’m not good enough for some reason. I wish that wasn’t the case, but left to my own devices, that voice starts speaking up.”
He wonders, in the songs on “The Slip,” whether he is irrelevant. The music revives Nine Inch Nails’ past, from stomping hard rock to dance-club beats to piano ballad to inexorably building instrumentals. Yet amid walloping drums and distorted guitars — the sounds of angry youth — Mr. Reznor ponders his place in the present. “Start it up again like it matters anymore/I don’t know if it does,” he sings in “1,000,000.” Nine Inch Nails, Mr. Reznor said, is “an aggressive, honest, naked, angry, ugly thing. I don’t hear anybody doing anything like that right now that I’m aware of. Maybe there are, but it doesn’t seem like it’s the flavor of today.”
As a musician and fan, Mr. Reznor is an old-school rocker who is devoted to the album as a creative unit to be savored and pondered as a whole. But he has also reinvented himself as a digital-era adept. Unlike the Eagles and Radiohead he’s not taking years to make albums; he has recognized that while he grew up treating an album like a novel, younger listeners, freely downloading music and setting their iPods on shuffle, are more likely to treat it like a magazine.
Mr. Reznor lets his music travel freely at Internet speed, extending album concepts into parallel online universes. He’s familiar with file-sharing sites and music blogs, including those that irk him by taking potshots at Nine Inch Nails. Playing live, his laptop now replaces pedals and effects. Mr. Reznor even posts online all the raw digital tracks from Nine Inch Nails albums for anyone to remix. “I’m done with them,” he said. “Why not?”
“Ghosts I-IV” grew out of ideas after a 2007 tour, which Mr. Reznor set out to record “with very little forethought,” he said. He released the album in March, making it available in multiple formats, from a bargain downloadable version for $5 to standard CDs and LPs to a luxury $300 limited-edition boxed set of CDs, vinyl, DVDs and artwork. (The 2,500 copies of that set sold out immediately, for a quick gross of $750,000, and now fetch $500 on eBay.)
Font: The New York Times
