Not Just the Ticket — #22, Pigface, October 18, 1991

Then-current album: Welcome to Mexico…Asshole

Opening act: …was there one? Not sure at all.

Back of ticket ad: I would have been terribly amused to see any member of the Pigface collective use the Domino’s coupon for $2 off any medium or large pizza, if only because I suspect they would have been chased out of whatever location they were in.

–

The ticket rather insists the band name was “Pig Face” and yet this was not so. I do wonder what the anonymous programmers building in all this information to their database thought of some of the band names they had to deal with; I’m surprised more opportunities for abuse didn’t come up there.

This was the show where two generations/mindsets crossed and weren’t too sure what to do with each other — but that was after the show and as far as I know the band wasn’t involved at all, at least directly.

I’m not too sure where I would have first learned of the idea of supergroups or one-offs or musical collectives or anything like that — as was the case with most anyone, doubtless when I thought of bands when I was very young, I would have thought of fixed memberships and part-and-parcel identities, so even the idea of changing lineups would have been a strange novelty to me whenever I first encountered it. I do, though, remember more clearly what got me into what I learned of as industrial, and that would have been Gregg Araki’s review of Ministry’s The Land of Rape and Honey in the LA Weekly in late 1988. He made it sound so unusual and so must-listen that I bought it soon thereafter, only to not quite get it and set it aside. But after a little more exposure to the Sex Pistols and Metallica and the like later that year the logic of what was going on with Al Jourgensen — at least in that incarnation — started to click, and when I joined KLA in early 1989 and started learning about this label called Wax Trax (I think the first thing I would have heard from them would have been Front 242′s “Never Stop” single, which I was pretty well obsessed with for a while), then things started to slowly but surely stumble into place.

But from a very different place than a lot of people already had been involved with — the lesson that ‘industrial’ as such taught me was the lesson of genre labels being very poor things at the best of times, easy flags of convenience that hurt as much as they help, if not more so. The logic of ‘if you like this you might like that’ is a compelling one in general — thus so much of the Internet this century, say — but what I thought was industrial as such was to others just heavy metal with more electronics and drum machines than might otherwise be expected. The overlapping and utterly complex — and, as I learned and still learn even more with time, often non-Anglophonic — wash of styles and approaches that were first given the tag and then increasingly focused in more and more limited ways in many areas and among many groups (and listeners) remains a tangled puzzle even now, when ‘minimal synth’ is no longer a label name (like ‘industrial’ itself) but a new tag to describe an old style that now returns in different yet similar ways.

Yet what did I know? Little as yet, and if that’s a recurring theme throughout many of these posts it has to be an understandable one — all this is happening when I’m twenty, and what I half-thought would be the end of my college career and further education wasn’t the extended stay in the field that it’s become, and only with time did I further appreciate how education never ends unless you want it to. (Horrible thought, frankly.) All I did know is that this Pigface thing, when it had been first announced that year with the release of their debut album Gub, got a lot of friends of mine at KLA excited, and I was right there with them. While not on Wax Trax it might as well have been, thanks to the Chicago connection or direct label association of so many of the participants, including En Esch from KMFDM, Ministry/Revolting Cocks/Fini Tribe veteran Chris Connelly (only then just embarking on what’s proved to be a lengthy and far too underappreciated solo career — but more in a later entry about him), Skinny Puppy vocalist Ogre and the two lead figures (at least at the time) Bill Rieflin, Ministry drummer, and perhaps most intriguingly Martin Atkins, the original drummer for Public Image Limited and therefore by default one of the most commonly heard and still regularly imitated ‘rock’ drummers to this day, thanks to his ability to help incorporate and popularize approaches from German experimental rock and Jamaican productions into what at one time was one of the most anti-commercial yet somehow successful bands in existence. All that and Trent Reznor contributed vocals to a song as well — and that didn’t hurt at all.

I’d missed the first tour they’d done earlier that year but, in what would become a pattern, they’d already released a live album from said tour, Welcome to Mexico…Asshole, by the time they came around again. In what would also become a pattern, whatever Pigface was on the tour was pretty much whoever showed up to play with Atkins and company — Atkins himself had founded and ran a label, Invisible, that was releasing the Pigface material, and in a weird way seemed to be an extension of what was the original promise of PiL with its ideas of constant production as seemed fit. So with folks like Kris C. and Steve M. and others once again part of a small crew, it was off to the Palace, with its open-access water fountain, handy spot near the stage where one could avoid being crushed and general atmosphere.

Kris, it should be noted, was all hyped up for the appearance of Chris Connelly, so when he first appeared on stage — this was when he still wore his hair long and slightly dreadlocked — she was quite happily appreciative. It helped he wasn’t wearing a shirt and, frankly, didn’t need to. His performance was strong but of the people on stage that night I most remember Atkins, who clearly lives for the possibilities of live performance and wants to see where things will go as they happen, and En Esch. There’s a number on Gub he sings with the very German name of “War Ich Nicht Immer Ein Guter Junge? War Ich Nicht Immer Schoen und Net” and the performance of that was a high-speed near rant that was shiveringly compelling — it helps he is as tall if not taller than Connelly, who’s a really tall guy himself, so seeing this imposing shaven-headed dude roaring at the audience while Atkins blasted away was pretty overpowering.

But this is another show where it’s not the full sense of what happened but the details that will remain, like the fact that Mary Mary of Gaye Bykers on Acid was also there on stage and Kris and Steve and I made a convoluted joke about how it was Peter Murphy. Trust me, far too long to explain that one. Later, near the end of the show during an extensive encore, when who I guess was either a local or Chicago-based dancehall vocalist was getting the crowd going with a chant as everyone else was on stage jamming along, I was up near the front with a couple of my friends. Next to me was a woman also happily dancing along, and at one point I did a double-take and looked more closely at her — I wasn’t seeing things, there was a well-groomed white rat sitting on her shoulder, gripping a bit into her jacket for dear life but otherwise making its way between her shoulders as it wanted to by walking across the back of her neck. During a quieter moment I leaned over and asked about this, and she talked about how it was indeed her pet and how she brought it to shows all the time. “He loves it!” she said, but I admit I just figured the poor critter was deaf by then.

The real moment of the evening came after the show, though — you might notice from the ticket there that the show started a little early. That night was also a regular KROQ-sponsored dance night at the Palace, a common enough splitting of the evening at a club or venue into two events. This meant that our rather bedraggled, none too sharply dressed audience poured out of the Palace to come face to face with a slew of people dressed in their best eighties holdover gear and early nineties fashion. There had been an announcement from the stage earlier that we could all stay for the club if we wanted to, which I think made everyone leave all that quickly.

The irony is that both audiences were, in general terms, about to be crushed within the next year by The Nineties In All Caps, as grunge-as-fashion (with G-funk hot on its heels) rendered the club audience old thanks a rapidly reinvented KROQ while our own self-perceived edgy non-style style with weird bands was going to be reduced down to ‘Industrial? Like Nine Inch Nails?’ And of course I was already a longtime fan but even so. There wasn’t any sort of weird confrontation, it was more two ships passing in the night, both about to slam into hidden icebergs.

Presumably the rat enjoyed more shows until it met its inevitable end. Probably saw a lot more fun shows than most people did.

Remembrance of electronic angst past

A little under eighteen years ago, I was standing in about this same place with the same view below. It was a little earlier in the day, the sun was out more and all, but the stage was still filled with fog and at the center of it was an individual wearing black, on tour with his band on a multi-act bill, playing the song “Terrible Lie” just like was the case when I took this photo last night at what was Irvine Meadows Ampitheatre and is now called Verizon Ampitheatre or something similar.

Hi there, Trent Reznor, leader of Nine Inch Nails. Glad to have you back again and all.

I hadn’t been planning on attending this tour, actually. The announcement of a Nine Inch Nails/Jane’s Addiction co-headlining tour earlier this year — named, with a strained logic, NINJA — caused a flicker of interest, certainly. As I hope has been made clear enough via a variety of past posts, I am quite the fan of Mr. Reznor and have been for years, and have seen him enough times to know he puts on a show and all.

Meantime, Jane’s Addiction has been through enough revivals and the like that I admit my eyes long since glazed over about anything involving Perry Farrell running out of money again (or whatever drives him to reassemble the band every so often). But the fact that this time around the one member who had actually been my hero for never participating in the reunions ever since the original breakup back in 1991 decided to come on board this time — bassist Eric A., whose majestic work, simple but devastatingly effective, on songs like “Up the Beach,” “Summertime Rolls,” “Mountain Song” and “Three Days,” says it all (note how he starts each song, how that bass is at once warm, inviting and powerful, setting the entire tone of each performance that follows).

Still I was kinda unsure. Then my friend Tom picked up an extra ticket in payback for the Depeche tickets I’d scored for us and a mutual friend earlier this year and I figured, “Well, why not?” At the same time, having learned that they were playing at this particular, my own back and forth again qualms about reunion and retrospective shows came roaring back. It’s not that this was planned by the bands per se — this is a venue that acts regularly play and all, that’s the whole point of it to start with. But inevitably I could only flashback.

1991 was the year of the first Lollapalooza, Perry Farrell’s attempt to translate the spirit of the Reading Festival in the UK to the US, only via a collective tour instead of a fixed location. No need for me to go into detail about it but the smash success of said tour and its immediate successors, combined with that of similar tours covering other general styles, helped lay the eventual groundwork for that kind of fixed-festival location approach that now dominates summer shows, with Coachella being the obvious forebear there in turn. Whatever else one may think about the two related models, their impact on assumptions of how music is packaged, seen and appreciated is now simply a baseline commonplace.

And there I was, twenty years old, going to enjoy the show. Some acts I’d already seen, others I was finally seeing for the first time. That included NIN and Jane’s both, who I’d actually seen earlier that year together in LA, NIN being the opener there of course. They’d only just started to fully catch fire over the previous year, where Jane’s at that point were legitimate hometown heroes — only Guns’n'Roses were bigger as a rock act when it came to LA and they were already in a stratosphere all their own, where Jane’s were rapidly rising but still just enough of a personal secret of sorts, a classic example of being able to catch a band still arcing upward.

What I remember of both Lollapalooza sets was that they were pretty good — Trent’s aggressive/artistic approach to performing and staging was already well set, and if everything since then has been little but refinement, it’s because he’s always been able to throw poses and shapes with the rest of them, if not better. A friend once said that he destroyed industrial music in order to save it, and while that’s an exaggeration it does sum up the endgame approach he ended up playing — the logical product of a previous decade’s music wrapping up everything in a ball of wax and figuring out how to sell it back to America. What matter if he looked a little goofy playing Pretty Hate Machine songs in almost total daylight when darkness and bright lights suited things better, really?

And Jane’s were Jane’s — one of those acts that was always better live than in studio, much as I love the studio work. I regret not seeing them more at the time than I did — there’s a Palladium show from late 1990 in particular I wish I could have seen, with the Pixies opening; happily that show is included in the new Jane’s box set. But like Radiohead, for instance, everything great about Jane’s in studio kicked up so much more live — the versions of “Three Days” I saw them do at those shows remain jawdropping moments of absolute perfection, willful self-rock-god deification that worked.

Last night Tom, his friend Sue and I made it into the parking lot and discovered that Trent was opening this night, and in fact was about to play. I admit nothing was going to stop me at that point and as soon as I could I found myself at the point where I took the photo, sitting back against a barrier and letting it all happen. A great set, certainly — I’d been told to keep an eye out for Ilan Rubin, the drummer (thanks Brad for the trip!) and he was a monster but also knew how to do things subtly — not bad for someone who was only a year old when Pretty Hate Machine came out. Meantime plenty of people in the crowd were younger than that too, emphasizing the weird time-warp feature that was running in my head during the entirety of the show.

Another time warp thing was more unfortunate, but reflected the last time I saw the band in 2007 in London — a set list that relied heavily, too heavily really, on The Downward Spiral. A great album then and now, but also not an album I need to hear again, it’s pretty much inculcated in my memory. Frankly it’s the newer stuff I keep wanting to hear from Trent and company, as well as the interesting oddities like (as played last night but this link is from a few days ago) his cover of Gary Numan’s “Metal,” first done in studio about fifteen years back. But that was relegated to the side for the most part — only about four songs or so were even from the whole of this decade, doubly frustrating given that this has been his most productive yet, releasing more albums in the past five years than he had done in the previous fifteen. And to be sure, the killer conclusion of “The Hand That Feeds” and “Head Like a Hole,” (the latter from an earlier show but anyway) a smart combination of then and now, was worth it.

Still, it fed into the whole sense of grinding my wheels a bit — I understand why he takes this approach, and maybe I just keep catching him on the wrong nights (more than most he varies up his set lists). Of course, if I was eighteen instead of thirty-eight and this was my first time seeing him I’d be feeling a LOT different. And on balance it was a fine show, no regrets.

But after that, as we were waiting for Jane’s, Tom, Sue and I talked and we all agreed — we didn’t need to stay. Home sounded pretty inviting and Jane’s, well, even for me and even with Eric A. on board, Jane’s just wasn’t thrilling me as an idea this time around. I would have been happy to see them if they were opening for NIN but that was not the case this night, and I’d already literally been there and done that with both bands, NIN opening for Jane’s, twice before. I didn’t need a third time — and NIN, at least, had always kept going, a one-man band of course but still, working, touring, releasing, being busier than ever, resting on past laurels to an extent but never actually stopping. Not the story of Jane’s by a long shot, where the jokes about their inevitable reunion were being made back in 1991 even before their final shows then.

So we left, and as we did so we heard the opening notes of “Three Days” begin, Eric A.’s basslines prompting the crowd into a huge roar. I hope they all had a great time. I already had.

So that Nine Inch Nails documentary I was filmed for? It’s out!

Slightly unprepossessing cover but no worries, if anything it reminds me of Kiss the Stone CD bootlegs from the mid-nineties. Anyway, here’s the Amazon listing for the DVD, while over at Clicky Clicky Jay Breitling has a detailed review up, including this amusing namecheck:

“Metal Machine Music” at first seems overly reliant on the musings of music critics including the always likeable Ned Raggett. But the video succeeds in providing a watchable and thorough investigation of Nine Inch Nails…

I’ll take that compliment, thanks!

If you’d like to read more about the evening of shooting, my old blog post about it is here. I still haven’t seen the disc myself! Really interested in the Chris Vrenna footage…

Me, a camera, an interviewer and Nine Inch Nails

So the context for this photo, taken on Tuesday night — I heard from Brendan at Metal Edge that a small film company in the UK, Prism, was doing a DVD documentary on Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor and industrial music, having been commissioned by another firm to do so. I was intrigued and passed on my name, and soon Alec from Prism, who you can see there in shot, and I were talking online. After reading a positive review of Prism’s Iron Maiden/NWOBHM documentary by fellow ILX denizen/music writer Adrien Begrand I took that as a strong vote of confidence and our plans were set for Tuesday night filming.

Alec came down with his cameraman Pete (who took this photo — thanks again!) as part of the series of interviews they were doing throughout America, including Canada — turns out they’d barely had any proper food in a bit due to all the plane flights and running around so I directed them over to Taco Mesa first so we could have a good meal (and in their case, some actually good SoCal Mexican food for the first time).

Then it was back to the apartment for setting things up and filming — you can’t see the full setup in this shot but it was elaborate and quite imaginative given the circumstances. Since by default these kind of shoots mean working in a number of different environments, it’s no surprise that Alec and Pete had not only the equipment but the patience and time to work out best camera angles, lighting and so forth. Reminded me again how I really lack the patience for such work, I admit, so I was happy to let them do it!

Now, I’m under no illusions regarding all the filming we did — I’m one of many people, there’ll be a lot of editing, and if just a few comments pop up in the final product, that’ll be great. But it was good fun being asked to do something which I admit I love doing — going on about music a hell of a lot, in great detail — and since I’ve been a fan of NIN all these years, why not? I talked about concert stories, mass media contexts, the history of ‘industrial’ as a genre (I tried to emphasize a key point, namely that there is no way to describe said genre, and that it was in ways the success of NIN and Pretty Hate Machine in particular that fully codified a mainstream sense of what it was supposed to be, which Reznor’s essentially been kicking against ever since).

This went nearly up until midnight — I admit I was tired but Alec and Pete, jet-lagged to hell and back, were even more wiped — and they headed up north to carry on from there. Great folks! We idly talked over possibilities of future documentary appearances too at Alec’s suggestion — so we’ll see!

I’ll post details about the DVD when it’s available.

Brief thoughts on “The Slip”

Giving it a second listen here now:

• At 43 minutes this is the shortest album Trent R. has released since Pretty Hate Machine, and while arguably you can look at Ghosts I-IV as being a complement to it all that could have easily swollen the size of it, taking a more compact route all around with this one seems just right.
• Initial impressions among many friends ranked it as Trent by numbers to a large extent and I can’t disagree — without the selling point of Ghosts as a fully instrumental collection, this feels like a combination extension and reworking of recent obsessions on the rhythm front, as the lead ‘singles’ “Discipline” and “Echoplex” (and I can’t get over the name of that one, knowing how much my old roommate/housemate Jake loved his — and a more un-Trent-like person I could not name) showed already. This is so far enjoyable rather than striking, and in terms of compressed pop punch nothing still beats “The Hand That Feeds” for me when it comes to the last three years, though I suspect everything on here will be more of a grower with time.
• It is, however, extremely poppy in the best possible way — elsewhere today friend Anthony talked about how he might have figured Trent would have in fact gone ahead and just ‘dropped the boogie’ once he was off a major label, but as I said in response, there’s some part of him that will always want to be Prince. I think this is exactly what he needed and showed from the start, to excellent effect, and his devotion to astringent funk — again, “Echoplex” provides a prime example — pays off in spades. There are a couple of quiet and ambient moments as per usual — indeed, it’s interesting that all the instrumentals didn’t just end up on Ghosts, and “Corona Radiata” is an entrancing take on that style, while “Lights in the Sky” lets him indulge in his piano jones once again, nearly two decades removed from “Something I Can Never Have” but still tackling that sorrowful bent.
• The whole thing, as I muttered earlier today, is yet another astounding PR move on the part of Reznor and his team — and there’s no doubt that having learned their lessons well they got in the server space to handle everything properly, links and downloads worked like a charm for folks and I got my Apple Lossless torrent downloaded within a couple of hours on my DSL line.
• Finally, I’m still wondering what exactly the full impact of these experiments will turn out to be. Earlier today something occurred to me that hadn’t fully before — most of the various comments on the ‘free’ experiments and downloads and alternate arrangements address the question of how new bands and acts might make money in this environment, but I’ve now been wondering what if anything the current high profile pop acts would exactly do in the face of all this. The method of sale for Ghosts demonstrated one way forward; this even more consumer friendly approach is another and fully transforms the idea of album-as-promotional-tool for the current time and place.

More detailed thoughts at another time, perhaps.

NIN, Trent Reznor, “The Slip,” free new album, etc.

Yeah, a bit of a Google-bait blogpost title but hey. Point is:

http://theslip.nin.com/

To quote the basic details:

as a thank you to our fans for your continued support, we are giving away the new nine inch nails album one hundred percent free, exclusively via nin.com.

the music is available in a variety of formats including high-quality MP3, FLAC or M4A lossless at CD quality and even higher-than-CD quality 24/96 WAVE. your link will include all options – all free. all downloads include a PDF with artwork and credits.

for those of you interested in physical products, fear not. we plan to make a version of this release available on CD and vinyl in july. details coming soon.

Just amazing. Dude has arranged the music PR coup of the year over these last couple of months and heaven knows what else is up his sleeve.

Anyway, will be downloading this while I’m at work so thoughts on the music later tonight. (UPDATE: and you can find those thoughts here).

A past and a future

I’ve been brooding on this for a couple of days and am not entirely sure how best to address this — but nothing ventured, etc.

First, I’ve already spoken in detail here and here about what Trent Reznor’s already been up to this year, and he’s done it again — yesterday he let a full-on new single emerge out of nowhere, “Discipline.” It’s good, not great but it already beats the hell out of “Survivalism” as an initial single — and that’s the thing, it looks like it IS an initial single since the implications are that a full new album is on the horizon in the next two weeks. Which I’m all for.

I’ve already made a joke over on Idolator about how if he wants to become the new Muslimgauze in terms of turnover of releases, he can go right ahead — why not, after all? But combined with what’s almost certainly going to be an even bigger haul than Ghosts I-IV made on initial release, Reznor and his crew are sitting so pretty going into their upcoming summer tour that it’s really kinda crazy. I’ve outlined in my previous posts exactly what this all means and how Reznor’s in a strong position to have this approach work for him in the first place, but I still often think about how many artists and managers would just kill to have that level of committed devotion that translates into immediate cash returns. If as I suspect he goes from there to selling immediate show downloads from the tour, as opposed to those demi-clunky LiveNation setups, then the sky is really the limit — but let’s see if that happens, it’s just a guess on my part. And there’s nothing to say he wouldn’t have yet another album out soon as well. And did I mention the inevitable remix collection. And…

My contrasting story really isn’t comparable, but it did happen around the same time, so. The fact that My Bloody Valentine’s reuniting and touring and all that is its own thing, and I’ve felt oddly flat about it for some time. Part of the reason is selfish, of course — the sense that a certain ‘special’ moment that I was lucky enough to catch through timing and an accident of geography (the latter helping establish that I caught the ‘last’ show, as I wrote about in Marooned) is no longer quite so special. If anything I guess I know what people who saw the Velvet Underground with Lou Reed in 1970 at Max’s Kansas City or wherever the last show was felt when 1993 rolled around. Further, as there’s been some vague talk that the lineup coming together for the tour wouldn’t be the exact same one, I’ve felt more than a little discontented — while you could argue that a full-on reunion of the original lineup would therefore have to include Dave Conway, it’s more straightforward to note that aside from his departure after the first EP the lineup stayed unchanged through to 1992.

What’s left me feeling really deflated, though, was the announcement of the New York festival that they’re playing at and curating, another in the series of ATP festivals that pop up as they do. And one look at the lineup was enough for me to know that something — for me, at least — had gone wrong:

MY BLOODY VALENTINE
FUCK BUTTONS »
POLVO »
LOW »
EDAN WITH GUEST DAGHA »
MOGWAI »
THE DRONES »
BUILT TO SPILL PERFORMING PERFECT FROM NOW ON »
WOODEN SHJIPS »
SHELLAC »
THEE SILVER MOUNT ZION ORCHESTRA »
AUTOLUX »
MEAT PUPPETS PERFORMING MEAT PUPPETS II »
TORTOISE PERFORMING MILLIONS NOW LIVING WILL NEVER DIE »
THURSTON MOORE PERFORMING PSYCHIC HEARTS »

Let me put this in an appropriate context, if I could.

Let’s say it’s 1998, ten years back. Allow for the fact that a couple of these acts didn’t exist then — and those acts make up the minority of the bill. Let’s say someone had forwarded an e-mail of this to me with a “HOLY…!” subject line or whatever. My jaw would have dropped, and my thoughts would have been along these lines:

My Bloody Valentine coming back? Damn, so great! Tortoise, whatever, but Thurston Moore, the Meat Puppets, Built to Spill, all playing albums straight through, cool. Mogwai! Low! Hell, even Shellac!

And so forth. I would have been scrounging for plane tickets and making plans as I could, or at the very least hoping like hell there would be something on the West Coast like it. This was the same year that I attended my first Terrastock festival, the second overall, up in San Francisco, and that would have been an amazing complement to it.

Now, it’s 2008 and…well, I am going to Terrastock again. Being frank, a lot of the appeal of Terrastock is its familiarity, and it’s something which has been discussed both positively and negatively in recent times, about how it’s the ‘same’ acts each time and all. Not true, but there are many acts that do appear every time, and many people who always attend, and so forth — it is a social function as much as anything else, it does rely on comfort and certain expectations, though some of the best performances often come from those who reappear and try something different each time out, working with their new albums and releases and so forth.

Which is a key part of my unease with the ATP festival. Over on ILX, John D. and Sean Carruthers have been able to articulate a little more clearly than I why I’ve felt so down about that festival news, though, so let me quote them first (alternating between John and Sean, with John’s last quote being a response to another poster, Matt):

Jesus Christ but the indie/alternative kids really are becoming the “I want to hear the classic music of my youth ’cause it was the best music” generation without making any bones about it, eh?….the people getting excited to go see a bunch of people who haven’t made any new music in ages come from the generation who Nelson Muntzed at oldsters going to see Clapton drag Layla out of the grave for the millionth time – for me, I don’t care how good the band doin’ the “here’s the great music we made when we all were young!” was: if they’re not making new music, it’s sad & pernicious nostalgia

….

I’m constantly vigilant about exactly what you’re talking about above — I hate JackFM and the whole “we’ll play nothing but that awesome shit you grew up with 24 fucking 7″ so this lineup (especially considering the really good chance that MBV is going to pull a baileroo) is only marginally more appealing to me than sitting at home and pulling out albums by Velocity Girl, Chapterhouse and the 24-7 Spyz. I mean, yeah, it would probably be a great concert but I’m not THERE any more.

….

I am totally in favor of old bands still working, and I don’t say they have to be always innovating. (It’d be pretty ripe for me to be the guy demanding that bands always be branching out, right?) But it’s this revivalism that icks me out…when the bands and albums in question were iconoclastic signal moments whose very motivations, in some cases, were the tearing down of dwelling-in-the-past modes of thinking – well, y’know, it’s like I’m sure that last Sex Pistols tour was a fine rockin’ time, but how sad for it to have come to that. You know? It’s not that I ONLY want CONVULSIVE! INNOVATION! – fuck dude I listen to death metal, that shit has been stagnant for ages and I like it that way – but (and I say this as an old dude!) once you start making a point of reliving the past, it’s just strikes me as really conservative.

There are other points to raise but these capture it pretty clearly for me. Something just seems WRONG about all this. Part of it is the play-the-classic-album-straight-through gambit — as I said on the thread, I can be of two minds about this; Sparks is doing its upcoming 21 night stand of going through all its albums, but in the last few years all their shows have been centered around touring and performing their current album at any given time in full, something that strikes me as wise anti-nostalgia, and which I think has done them a world of good.

But Sean’s comment — “I’m not THERE any more” — cuts to the chase. I almost can’t add to it. It’s not like the THERE in question is a bad thing, and neither is it the case that I don’t still like a number of these acts, though in many cases I now do so far less intensely than before. That’s just how taste changes. In terms of my listening, whether driven by review work or by random word or curiosity, I’m mostly elsewhere now, and I hope to be elsewhere down the line still more; I’ll never claim to be the most diverse listener in the world, but I’ll hope to not be completely in the box which my past words and obsessions have inevitably marked me as. They capture snapshots and thoughts, not necessarily conclusions of any sort.

To quote a comment of my own from the thread as well: “if Kevin Shields made the final decision on who played…I dunno, it’s just that here was the guy who was talking about Public Enemy as the wave of the future in 1988 and raving on about jungle tracks back in 1993 and so forth.” Something about the promise of MBV as the Creation releases happened was a sense of obeying the time, responding to it and incorporating it, and that meant a lot of things in the pot. But if you look at the festival lineup…the dance/hip-hop/rave element in MBV gets reduced to a ‘here’s Edan, enjoy’ moment. This in a world where you have Daft Punk, one of the most widely known/referred-to/sampled/imitated acts out there right now, talking about how it was hearing “Soon” that led them to explore dance music more thoroughly in the first place, for instance. But instead of those destabilizations and incorporations and sense of wider awareness and all that implies, there’s stolidity and formalism. Now, let me say again — I prefaced my statement with ‘if.’ How big his involvement is with this bill I don’t know. But just having it exist as it does is cause for a sigh.

Again, trying to connect this with Trent Reznor’s latest steps is a stretch, there’s no exact parallel to e drawn here. But in a conceptual way, you do get a sense that Reznor is obeying the time brilliantly, maybe less so musically than socially, culturally. Anyone can see he’s figuring out what to do now in a way that keeps a wide variety of people happy and interested while keeping himself solvent. If that means merely praising him and his manager for a good business sense, then hey. In contrast, the ATP festival is a huge ‘remember when?’ activity at work. People will go, and they’ll have good reasons to go, and there’ll be good times. But I’m not there anymore. I’m glad to be here. I’ll be glad to find out where I end up. I just idly, frustratedly wish that all would be so glad in the end.

So about that there instrumental NIN album (again)

Last week I offered up a fairly discursive ramble about its release and what it might all mean. As has been reported in a variety of places (here’s Idolator, linking to Billboard), it seems to have been a heck of a smash success, since, unlike Radiohead, NIN are reporting some numbers:

Nine Inch Nails’ 36-track instrumental opus Ghosts I-IV, released March 2 via NIN.com, has amassed a first week total of 781,917 transactions (including free and paid downloads as well as orders for physical product), resulting in a take of $1,619,420 USD.

Now a little under half of that comes from one thing alone, namely the deluxe $300 set that sold out in under two days and adds up to $750,000. As further noted, ‘transactions’ don’t specifically equate ‘sales’ and wouldn’t be meant to. These numbers aren’t being officially submitted to SoundScan, which is an interesting move as well, and while on the one hand there’s no reason to doubt any of them, at the same time this could be the start of a new realm of claiming first day/week ‘transactions’ that, in order to be accepted, would need some sort of auditing or verification from an outside source (presumably — it might not be needed, after all, but that seems unlikely, given human impulses to create lists, determine who is top dog, etc.).

Largest point to make right now, though, is the obvious one — this is major money. As Jess obliquely notes in the Idolator entry, the trick in ways is seeing whether or not the numbers and sales last beyond this initial burst. If this is what in UK chart terms has long been described as a ‘fanbase release’ — IE, one huge week of sales and then disappearing, thus the history of most singles by, say, T. Rex or Depeche Mode — then while Trent and company aren’t crying their way to the bank at all, it just reconfirms the special case scenario this all really is so far. But let’s say it becomes a catalog item of sorts — that every week they’re able to show numbers that aren’t huge but consistent, and reflect further income going straight to the band. Then the general interest in this as a stepping stone becomes a heightened one, especially in a time of economic unease combined with relying on worldwide audience possibilities (something Trent has been pursuing and carefully building up over these last few years in particular — aside from a Hawaii date, all Year Zero shows were in countries other than America, though he’d toured With Teeth into the ground — while the official website prominently offers options in Russian, Chinese and Korean).

Meantime, having finally made a long overdue step on the cell phone front (seriously, some friends of mine are absolutely astonished I did this), I can say something else — Ghosts I-IV is an incredible iPhone album (or if you like an iPodtouch one). By which I mean that its being designed as a full release with individual song art so ridiculously and perfectly suits an iPhone — its screen quality, the way the photos look and so forth — that I was honestly surprised a bit when giving it an ear this morning. The importance again isn’t that anything new per se is being done here, merely that Trent and company are incredibly canny people when it comes to maximizing opportunities and possibilities with this release.

Don’t overlook an equally viable — though as with Trent, if you have the cachet, money and time — model that Idolator also noted yesterday, namely Timbaland’s mobile record-and-release song-for-song unit. As Mike Barthel notes, this isn’t Mr. M. entirely going it alone, as Verizon is sponsoring it all, but the likelihood of this being a new standard is becoming increasingly clear — and what this application of “the Radiohead model gone pop” means to how pop itself is considered is damned interesting. And will require more thoughts at another time.

[EDIT: oh, and now there's the official NIN YouTube channel, building off of the remix site and the like. And onward and along!]

The Ghosts of Trent R./Blow wilder than before

(First, that title isn’t meant to be a criticism. Trust me. But go here if you’d like some context.)

Among the other joys of my birthday was discovering that one Mr. Reznor had decided to release a new album out of the blue (or almost out of the blue — there’d been a cryptic ‘two weeks’ comment on his site that amount of time prior to Sunday, so something was going to be up; I actually think he might not have even needed to do that, but more later). Among the slight sorrows, though, was the realization that nobody had expected demand to be the insanely high thing it was — both Trent and his official minions had various ‘whoops, sorry folks’ messages up on the main site and the store and album sites saying as much only a few hours after the announcement, and it wasn’t until over a day later that everything was running smoothly.

Which it did, and this morning I was able to download the album (Apple Lossless format at $5), and I’m giving it my first listen now. More concrete thoughts on that will appear at the end of this post, as well as a possible follow-up, but there’s much more to talk about right now, because this, ultimately, may well be the turning point for early 21st century music distribution…maybe.

The problem with hyperbole, of course, is just that — it is hyperbolic and it doesn’t necessarily bear any relation to reality. So my claim just now had best be regarded with several lumps of salt. In taking the time to think about this album over the past couple of days, though — its existence and its availability and much more besides — the sense of a real moment has been settling in, something that can’t not be noticed with interest, concern, fear, celebration — a lot of different things.

Let’s get one thing out of the way now, though — the Radiohead comparison. Which is logical, because the controlled leak of In Rainbows was the story of late last year on the music business front, and still represents a way forward. As a combination promotional tool, excitement builder and a careful leveraging of resources, ranging from the group’s Internet infrastructure to the passion of its fanbase, In Rainbows was a stroke of genius — and any of you following my countdown to the release knows that I was happily caught up in it all as well.

It was around this time that Trent announced his departure from Interscope, leaving with a not-bad-at-all remix album for Year Zero, noting Radiohead’s move and speculating where things might go next. In this regard his most important release since wasn’t Ghosts I-IV but the Reznor-produced Saul Williams album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!, which was made available in two basic options — a temporary free download at a passable mp3 bitrate (much like the Radiohead option, which was also the only choice aside from the full limited edition release) or a charge of $5 for a variety of download options, from higher bitrates to FLAC files). It wasn’t a blockbuster — Reznor and Williams clearly had no illusions it would be, as well as knowing that a large amount of interest would be generated solely because of Reznor’s fanbase — but it did work well enough.

And so now Ghosts I-IV, which as a full-on NIN release unsurprisingly has generated a slew of attention, god knows exactly how much Internet traffic and most notably the widest variety of ordering options yet for a high-profile release like this — as you can see from the order page, there are a total of five, including one that’s not available any more which I’ll discuss more in a bit.

It’s all early days still, and trying to make a unified essay out of it all is a bit much for me right now, so instead let me dwell on a variety of observations to make:

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* This is still an established artist’s privilege, first and foremost — a pat thing to say, but to spell it out: let’s say that a group out of nowhere offered its debut album in the fashion given here, including the limited editions and all that. Exactly how far do you think they’ll get? In contrast, in NIN we have the example of an established band, musician, brand and more — now almost two decades in the public eye, high profile at every step of the way, packing out arenas and so forth for the last few tours — able to command a fanatical loyalty that isn’t a matter of assumption but utterly demonstrable via the demand for downloads and other bits of evidence. Ignoring that loyalty or shrugging it off is a stupid assumption to make, so don’t make it — right now, most of the working musicians in this world would love to have this kind of attention and following.

* A record label is unneeded — the corporate entity releasing this project is simply ‘The Null Corporation,’ an obvious reference to the old Nothing label setup with Interscope and just as obviously Reznor’s own self-contained unit. Where Radiohead contracted with a Dave Matthews-affiliated label to formally release In Rainbows, right now it seems like there’s no need or reason for Reznor to go that kind of route. Realistically, why should he? Why would he need to? What would be the point? To get the product into the stores? To spread the word via radio marketing? To drum up interest in a tour? These questions all answer themselves at this point, and while they are extensions of the kind of fanbase-supported labels and band ventures that have long been commonplace for new and old bands alike, it is the scale here that is the difference. This approach will be copied as swiftly as possible by established bands and singers wanting to pull the plug on their own contracts or otherwise seeking alternate options.

[EDIT: this said, ILXor Creeztophair did notice something I'd missed, that the album will be available in some sort of retail form in April via 'an exciting partnership and experience,' which sounds wonderfully plummy and ridiculous. I almost hope it's through Hot Topic for the hell of it.]

* iTunes is unneeded — in ways, this is actually the bolder move, though conditionally so. The fact that one can also order mp3s (and that’s it) of the album through Amazon’s music service shows that Reznor is hardly averse to working with a larger organization where it can be helpful, and in fact this was the only way to get the album during the initial day and a half of main site swamping. So a little corporate power isn’t being sniffed at here — but again, it was through Amazon, *not* iTunes, which clearly wants to be music central and is now among the top retailers for it around. Rightly, the order options indicate which files can and can’t be played in iTunes without conversion — Reznor knows what software nearly everyone’s using — but that’s the extent of it. Now imagine, knowing what he now knows demand will be like for whatever his next release is — especially since it’ll presumably be something with vocals and straight-ahead anthems as is his wont — why he would want to pair up with iTunes (OR Amazon) when he could just acquire some more server space upfront and go to town.

* You don’t need anticipation — Radiohead did a ten-day delay, got people talking, got critics wondering, the thing became a huge enough news story, and so forth. His one little post aside as noted, Trent basically said, “Here ya go” and that was that. Both demonstrated that the established promotional/run-up to release process could be readily ignored but NIN have taken it to a logical conclusion — you’ve recorded something and have it ready? Put it up. Now, this in and of itself isn’t new — all you have to do these days is put music up on a Myspace page or something similar as you record and release it, if you don’t want to strain your own site. But you can just as easily make it an event, as formal as you want it to be, and this clearly is a formal release. And again, anticipation? Sure, it’s exciting to wait, but Reznor knows that he’s at a time where everyone wants something now, so now it is.

* You don’t have to adhere to a fanbase expectation — this is, after all, an instrumental album, where NIN has gained so much of its reputation for its perfect shout/scream/angstathons. Hey, it’s how I first got into the band back in 1990 or so, and anybody who discovered them via the With Teeth singles would have had the same visceral reaction (if they liked what they heard!). Of course, at the same time Trent has the ability to afford avoiding adherence. To put this into some context — bands like Marillion and Einsturzende Neubaten, to name two examples of many, have exercised the option where fans contribute money towards recording and manufacturing costs of releases. However, going that route, which seems logical on the face of it, can create a vicious circle — do fans want you to simply repeat what you’ve already done? Will they accept you trying something totally different? If they don’t like the results, will they be so interested in the next time around? Rather than doing that, Reznor got into the studio with his preferred collaborators — Alan Moulder again does production, Atticus Ross as cowriter of every track, Adrian Belew guesting on guitar on many songs and so forth — and did whatever the hell he wanted to do in the belief that people would be interested in whatever it was he did. He said up front it was an instrumental album and people did in fact go for it.

* You can embrace ‘piracy’ and still make a hell of a lot of money — this might actually be the real stroke of genius here, with, again, the clear caveat that this is because Reznor is established and well-off enough to be able to make this work for him. Break down those ordering options a bit — you’ll note that on the one hand he’s offering the first nine tracks as a free direct download; elsewhere, he’s directing folks to grab high-quality mp3s straight through one of the highest profile torrent sites around, the Pirate Bay. Having recently come under fire legally, for them to have Reznor not merely in their corner but as an active participant is a perfect middle finger back — artist and distribution site allied for mutual benefit, and Reznor himself neither under illusions that all of Ghosts won’t be copied and shared, even though he only shared those first nine songs directly, nor standing on ceremony when it comes to copyright. As the release notes indicate, Ghosts I-IV has been released under a Creative Commons license, similar to what I do with my photos on Flickr. That’s pretty sharp all around.

So where does the hell of a lot of money come in? Easy — there’s that $300 limited edition package that was also offered, with each package containing the full album on both vinyl and CD, a separate CD of data and multitracks, a Blu-Ray disc, tons of photographs, Mr. Reznor’s autograph, etc. etc. Tchochtkes galore, and I’m sure more than a few people thought he was nuts and that whoever working for him was nuts. Certainly I looked that price tag, shook my head and shrugged.

But having been put on offer the evening of March 2, it had fully sold out by the morning of March 4. Like that, the Null Corporation had raked in a jaw-dropping $750,000 from the sale of 2500 album packages.

Again, fanatic fanbase, established artist, etc. I keep having to say it because it can’t be ignored. But *think about that* — three quarters of a million directly to Trent and whoever he has on his staff and whoever he pays his bills to (including of course manufacture of the packages — which aren’t going to eat up all that cost by any stretch of the imagination). And that was just the hyper-limited edition — now add in the straight downloads, the CD pre-orders, the slightly fancier CD deluxe edition, all the money to be made from those, straight to him and his accountants or whoever. I don’t think any American artist has it quite so good right now and I’d be surprised if anyone else in the world does either.

—

So all that said — how’s about the music? I’m now mostly finished on my first listen through it all, and it’s very enjoyable. I had actually figured shortly after hearing it was a lengthy instrumental album that this might well be his Selected Ambient Works Volume II, some kind of monumental release with extended meditations and explorations. It isn’t, and part of me is kinda disappointed, but that’s really by means of comparison (let’s face it, if I’m thinking about that as the role model, almost everything else will suffer!) — taking it as it stands, it’s a grand mix, touching on everything from more immediately obvious fragments and sketches to anthems without lyrics, from contemplation to swagger. As such it’s an extension of Reznor’s recent work more than anything else, though in its quieter moments especially it suggests the musical approach he’d embraced on The Fragile and then left behind for subsequent efforts, something which I’m glad to see him work on again.

Beyond that, though, I have little to immediately say about Ghosts I-IV artistically — not that I can’t, just that these are my first quick impressions after a still incomplete listen (I have about three tracks to go). But given what I’ve discussed, I’ve no doubt that this, Reznor’s least immediately accessible ever, might well also be his most important, for what it is more than for what it sounds like. Time will tell, and I can’t wait to see what surprises me next.

The half-life of a record company, the death of a magazine

So here’s how it went today:

Last night, AllHipHop.com sent out another one of its random news mails linking to this bit of schadenfreude:

New York based independent record label TVT Records terminated the majority of their employees today, sources revealed to AllHipHop.com today (February 18).

TVT, which is home to major recording stars like Lil Jon & The Eastside Boyz, Pitbull, Ying Yang Twins, The Polyphonic Spree and others, is expected to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this week.

TVT Records was founded by its current President, Steve Gottlieb, who launched the label out of his New York City apartment in 1985.

Meantime, Gottlieb himself has responded claiming things like “I am optimistic that the company’s independent spirit, history of innovation and willingness to pioneer new music and new business models are more valuable in this marketplace than ever before and that we will emerge from this reorganization a stronger more vibrant entity.” And if your eyes glazed over while reading that, you weren’t alone.

So you might be thinking, “Mm, another nail in the music industry, not a good sign.” We’ll get back to that. You might also think, “An indie label going down, that sucks when the majors are still going.” Conceptually a good point.

Thing is, though, that Gottlieb has a bit of a reputation.

Does he ever.

The first I knew about TVT, aside from the ‘TV’s Greatest Themes’ compilations that made their initial name, came courtesy of a little release of theirs in 1989 called Pretty Hate Machine, the debut album release of another entity equally well known for a three-letter name. I remembered looking at the cover art and all at KLA at UCLA and thinking, “Oh, another thing on Wax Tra…wait, this isn’t on Wax Trax? What the hell?” (Keep in mind this was at a time when it seemed like EVERYTHING that NIN was, shall we say, inspired by was on or had been on Wax Trax, with the exception of Skinny Puppy. There were other roots as well but context is all and if you told me then, “Stern industrial/dance album with blunt themes…label?” I would have said “Wax Trax.” Everyone would. It was that era.)

Thanks to a handy combination of touring, photogenic looks and payola grease (or whatever else was needed), that proved to be the breakout release for band and label, getting reasonable attention and airplay at a time when few small labels could. That Trent Reznor might have ended up on a major label at some point seemed clear, but as this handy little page summarizes, he was driven to those arms more rapidly than might have initially been guessed, thanks to Mr. Gottlieb:

While NIN was touring both with Lollapalooza and other bands, relations between Reznor and TVT Records got much worse; TVT had released a ten song EP in the USA for Head Like A Hole which was actually a few minutes longer in length than Pretty Hate Machine. Reznor claimed that he should have received more royalties from the sales of Head Like a Hole because, according to contract, he should have received payment as though it was an album, not an EP; TVT disagreed. Also working to break down this relationship was TVT’s restrictive attitude toward NIN; Reznor wanted more freedom with what he could do with Nine Inch Nails but TVT wanted him to make a specific sound and assign him producers (a problem other bands have also had with the company). Reznor countinued to tour to bring in money without having to make another album for TVT and recorded his next album, Broken, in secret with the personal funds he raised during the first Lollapalooza. He was also going to use that money to get a lawyer that would get him off the label (“I decided to leave the label at any cost, if that was the end of my career then that was the end of my career.”). He eventually left TVT but the battles took up precious time which, along with touring, caused a long lapse in time between recordings.

Reznor worked out a deal to jump ship to Interscope and start Nothing Records; meanwhile, in a very sly bit of criticism, he recorded a studio version of a live favorite, a cover of “Physical (You’re So)” by Adam Ant. In the original, Adam, who himself had moved from a minor to major label in similarly fraught circumstances back in the late seventies, introduced the song with a quite but audible slam back at said label, “Eat your heart out, Do It.” In Trent’s version, this was changed to “Eat your heart out, Steve.” It’s a classic bit of hypermusicgeek nerdery, and of course I love it (I would).

Now, without thinking that Reznor is some sort of perfect prince himself, I pretty much figured that from there on in anyone who ended up on TVT was going to eventually complain about Gottlieb. I hardly kept a running count, but it was more obvious than not that my guess was justified. One famous battle was between the Brian Jonestown Massacre and TVT — their signing to the label was part of the brilliant film Dig!, while the commentary from some ex-BJM members on the DVD spells out more thoroughly just what the band thought of Gottlieb soon thereafter. (Anton Newcombe’s own opinions are equally dire.) Meantime,as the first link I’ve put in briefly touches on, TVT’s relationships with hip-hop, while profitable, have also been highly problematic, with nearly every artist going on to vent, complain and rant about Gottlieb.

One of the more amusing consequences of it all was this old NY Times piece — which is, in fact, a correction to an earlier piece, but which runs almost as long, it seems. This is just the start:

In a profile of Mr. Gottlieb last Monday, The New York Times reported incorrectly that Mr. Gottlieb had defaulted on a $23.5 million loan and that as a result, in February he had lost control of his company, officially called TeeVee Toons Inc., to Prudential.

In fact Mr. Gottlieb was never personally responsible for the defaulted loan and remains in full control of his company. Even if Prudential were to prevail in the dispute, which is still pending in court, its remedies would be limited to seizing certain music royalty rights that TeeVee Toons transferred in 1999 to an affiliated company called TVT Catalog Enterprises. Prudential has no claim to TVT Records itself and therefore would not be in a position to sell the company, as the article reported.

The article also cast a negative light on Mr. Gottlieb’s history of involvement in lawsuits, describing him as litigious — a conclusion that is not a fair reading of the legal cases.

And it keeps going. I suspect Gottlieb and/or his lawyers had made quite a phone call or the equivalent.

Anyway, so the world goes out last night that TVT is going down, and I really shed few tears for Gottlieb or his company — and neither does Mr. Reznor, who linked to the AllHipHop story from his homepage with grim humor.

Which is where it got funnier. I noted when I first checked in that there were a slew of comments to Trent’s post and thought I would amuse myself a bit. I got a few comments into it and felt myself becoming stupider, so I closed it and went on about my day.

Bless Idolator, though. They DID read through it. And you should read their breakdown of the kind of posts they saw.

But rather than concluding on that note, I’ll talk more instead about something else that announced it was going away today — No Depression magazine. I never felt any real connection to the aesthetic of the magazine — rootsy Americana, however narrowly or broadly described, is not a listening priority, and neither is willful nostalgia, as seen in stated goals like “The design philosophy behind No Depression is meant to reflect aesthetics in vogue from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. Illustrators working in one or more of those styles are encouraged to apply, but please don’t trouble us with work that looks as if it were generated on a computer.” It’s all a bit much for me — I prefer a free play of interchange within the historical moment, options rather than contractions — but No Depression had its approach and sought to serve its own purpose and goals rather than bow to whims, a stance I always approve of.

Sadly — and I do think this is very sad — they are ending publication. And their letter circulating about the closure, which I noticed on ILM and then referred to Idolator, contains some of the sharpest, simplest thoughts about the changing musical and music business landscape I’ve read in a long while, regretful but not self-pitying, closely observed but not railing. You owe it to yourself to read it all, but to take a core point:

We, like many of our friends and competitors, are dependent upon advertising from the community we serve.
That community is, as they say, in transition. In this evolving downloadable world, what a record label is and does is all up to question. What is irrefutable is that their advertising budgets are drastically reduced, for reasons we well understand. It seems clear at this point that whatever businesses evolve to replace (or transform) record labels will have much less need to advertise in print.

To say that there’s a direct connection between TVT and No Depression‘s troubles is silly, but that there is a conceptual one is clear. If, as is cogently noted here, ‘what a record label is’ is up for grabs even as a concept, then an economic model rooted in a certain implied stability cannot hold. A label like TVT loses revenue, cannot afford to advertise. A publication like No Depression that needed advertising to survive, in an affordable way for readers and in order to pay its writers, cannot afford to publish.

And then what?

Obviously I write from a position of self-interest, being a (very) semi-pro writer myself. As the No Depression letter says clearly, it isn’t that there aren’t potential readers, nor potential writers, nor that they aren’t proud of their work and believe in it. But older locus points of discussion are no longer surviving as they used to, and other ones may not be as stable.

And so as the TVT thing shakes down in whatever way it does, remember instead No Depression‘s farewell note. The one was ultimately about money. The other, about love of a chosen art. I know who I would side with.