It seems over the last few months, that everything’s been coming up Trent Reznor.
There was the news that ‘Daisy’, the codename for the revolutionary new music streaming service he’s creatively leading, received $60m from investors, including Aussie media mogul James Packer, to help realise their ambitious aim of doing to on-demand music what the iPod did for the mp3 last generation.
Reznor has also been promoting the debut album and North American tour from How To Destroy Angels, his collaboration with wife Mariqueen Maandig and longtime collaborators Rob Sheridan and Atticus Ross, and gloriously putting a trolling fan in their place in the process.
But some of the biggest news was that the musical project that first brought Reznor to fame would be staging a major live comeback, revealing last February that Nine Inch Nails would be heading out on an upcoming world tour through 2013/14, and to help get fans in the mood, Reznor has dipped back into the NIN archive and brought back some rare, archival material.
As Consequence of Sound reports, the prolific and tech-savvy musician has launched a Nine Inch Nails tumblr that’s unlocked the band vaults and started posting a treasure trove of rare photos, images, artwork, videos – you name it – from the group’s long history.
Best of all is the rarely seen 75-minute tour documentary about the group’s Self Destruct Tour, which began in 1994 and ran until mid-1996 across 8 massive legs to promote the landmark NIN opus, The Downward Spiral.
The film (which you can view in the banner up top) was originally only previously available on the 1997 two-part Closure VHS, and features some incredible (NSFW) footage, including cameos from David Bowie and Marilyn Manson, documented live performances, as well as video of the band from their early days.
The NIN tumblr also contains the recent jam between Reznor, Queens Of The Stone Age frontman Joshua Homme, and Foo Fighter Dave Grohl, for the latter’s all-star rockumentary Sound City: Real To Reel.
Meanwhile, the newly-revised and “refocussed” Nine Inch Nails lineup are heading out on their first live shows since the 2009 Wave Goodbye Tour, at the time thought to mark the end of the industrial electronic pioneers; the 2013 live lineup includes regular NIN members Alessandro Cortini and Ilan Rubin, along with Eric Avery (Jane’s Addiction), Josh Eustis (Telefon Tel Aviv), and King Crimson alumni Adrian Belew.
The latter was even the catalyst for some new material, Reznor previously revealed in the band’s official tour announcement:
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 first dates of which are Japan’s 2013 Fuji Rock Festival, which skyrocketed Nine Inch Nails to the top of the rumour mill for this year’s Splendour In The Grass.
Speaking to NME about the forthcoming world tour, Reznor says that “the intention is to reconstruct songs based on this new instrumentation and only play songs we as a band feel good about.”
A philosophy reached after Reznor grew tired of the way he used to do things. “With Nine Inch Nails last time, I felt that I’d explored that kind of bludgeoning rock thing in a lot of different ways, like I’d done everything I could do with that format,” he says.
As for new explorations and the possibility of new material being aired on tour, don’t get too excited. “There isn’t any new material to play except from a couple of tracks Adrian [Belew] and I started experimenting on that were intended to go on a greatest hits record. We decided to push that back to 2014, and there’s no new record scheduled at this point.”
Australian fans hoping for a visit from the new-look Nine Inch Nails were banking on a Fuji Rock/Splendour In The Grass crossover, that would see the band hopping the waters to the Aussie music festival in the winter.
That looks unlikely now, given that Nine Inch Nails play Japan the same day that Splendour kicks-off, as revealed in the recent announcement of the festival’s 2013 dates and relocation to a permanent home in North Byron.
There is hope however, while Reznor and co. are headed to South Korea for the Ansan Valley Festival at the end of July, there’s a two-week gap in their schedule before heading to Europe for a string of festival dates, starting with Belgium’s Pukkelpop, that’s a nice Australia Tour sized hole right there. We live in hope.
You can view the NIN Tour itinerary, along with a rare 1995 performance of ‘Hurt’ with David Bowie on lead vocals, below
Nine Inch Nails 2013 Tour Dates
July 26th – Niigata Prefecture, JP @ Fuji Rock Festival
July 28th – Ansan, KR @ Ansan Valley Festival
August 15th – Kiewit, BE @ Pukkelpop
August 18th – Hockenheim, DE @ Rock ‘n’ Heim
August 23rd – Leeds, UK @ Leeds Festival
August 25th – Reading, UK @ Reading Festival
