GHOSTS I-IV

Trent certainly looks to have the formula right this time.

After the majority seem to have downloaded NiggyTardust! for free things can’t have been looking that good. I doubt there was any way that Trent would have gone back to a bricks and mortar record company after the trouble he’s had in the past. The Closure video set still hasn’t been released after what must be two or three years after it was first mooted. I bet all the record companies were hovering, hoping against hope, that Reznor would fail. After what seems like a month of teasers on his web-site the music is finally out. Trent has truly embraced the internets. Blogger, flickr and YouTube all have official NIN content and if you dig deep you’ll find official torrents.

This has to be the right way to do things. Offer your fans what they want. Not just the usual mass produced CD for £15, closely followed by a ‘special version’ some months later, just to rip the fans off one more time. Offer downloads in whatever format they want, download now and get a CD in the post, special packaging and even vinyl.

I chose the $10 download and CD option. With the servers going into meltdown getting at the content after paying did prove a little difficult. The download link would expire after the zip file hits my hard-drive. Clicking the link showed the file downloading at a snails pace then crashing out. Waiting for the US to go to bed helped and I managed to get the zip file after an hour or so this morning.

Unzip it and you find, the cover art, a PDF file containing 40 photos and what would in normal circumstances be the liner notes, extras like two different sizes of wallpaper and all kinds of graphics for your web-site and avatars, and also the MP3 tracks themselves.

The music is just totally instrumental and experimental. If you've enjoyed the non-vocal tracks from The Fragile and the like then you’ll love this. I knew that Adrian Belew had a role in this project as a little video clip on the web-site showed him at work with his pedal wrangler hard at work, but I was surprised to see Brian Viglione, the male half of The Dresden Dolls, appear on the credits. Not a great shock to me as I first saw The Dresden Dolls support Nine Inch Nails a few years ago.

The package as a whole is just incredible. The attention to detail. The fact that each song has its own album art just shows the care that has been put into this project. Trent can certainly put more of his energy into this kind of thing instead of fighting with record companies.

Beside You In Time

It pains me to say this but I'm not that impressed with it.

I've been a fan since the Broken EP, have bought everything that has been put out since, so I was really looking forward to seeing this DVD. Everything that you expect is present and correct. Great packaging. Cool menus. Brilliant audio and visual quality. The shows that were recorded looked spectacular. Lights, smoke, more lights, lots of thrashing around onstage by Trent and his cohorts. All the songs that you expect if you saw the With Teeth tour. But just something missing… maybe it was Trent’s hair.

The DTS sound seemed a little too cold and clinical. Each song they played had a little twist to it. Not so much that you didn’t recognise it but enough to make it seem unfamiliar. The bulk of the footage seemed to be filmed way back from the stage, no doubt to show-off the lights. And throughout the main 90 minutes you only saw the faces of the crowd twice towards the end. You can’t miss the fans but you only ever get to see their arms holding up mobile phone cameras.

The only part of the disc that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck was a video of them rehearsing ‘The Collector’ that’s part of the extras.

Possibly the greatest live footage of Nine Inch Nails has already been filmed but is not officially available… and that’s Woodstock 1994. All of the band members covered in mud, a really distorted sound and Trent breaking everything that he could.

Trent Reznor

Yes, I know that I'm a little late with this weblog entry as the show was broadcast on 6 April 2005 but bear with me and I’ll explain.

As I mentioned at the time I went to see Nine Inch Nails at the end of March at the Astoria in London. While Trent was in town he presented The Radio 1 Rock Show for that week whilst Mike Dee was in L.A. I didn’t want to miss it but considering that it was broadcast very late at night, possibly even early the next day, and that I don’t have a radio that I could easily record from, I was stuck. Until I read in a forum somewhere that it was to be streamed by the BBC for public consumption. For some ungodly reason the BBC use Realplayer for this and there was no way of just downloading the program so that I could listen to it at my leisure. Thankfully I found some Mac software called iRecordMusic which will record any audio stream, convert it to mp3 and even add it to iTunes. Without paying for it the demo version would only record 15 minutes of audio before it stopped. So I paid my money and bought the software. I knew that the BBC don’t keep these shows available indefinitely so I had to act fast. When the show was available I used the software and after a couple of hours had a hefty 137mb mp3 file in iTunes. I listened to it on my iMac and my iPod shuffle and liked it. But then again what’s not to like when the mastermind behind your favourite band is chatting and playing songs that he likes.

So, time goes by and I finally have enough web space to upload the file to so that people can download it. I think that the show is interesting enough for Nine Inch Nails fans to listen to and to hear what Trent has to say.

A couple of weeks ago Apple released iTunes 4.9 with Podcasting and one of the first that I downloaded was the iTunes New Music Tuesday podcast. This is basically an advert for the iTunes Music Store but it’s an enhanced podcast. As the track plays the album art for the song is displayed and changes as each new track starts.

Last weekend I had a little free time so I had a dig around on the internet and found a command-line application called Chapter Tool, currently only available for Mac OS X, that Apple have produced to allow people to add graphics and even web links to a podcast track as it is playing. The other great thing about this is that the chapters are selectable via a little dropdown button which is visible as an enhanced podcast plays.

I split the audio file into two segments of about an hour each using QuickTime. Luckily the BBC posted the tracklisting on their web-site so I knew what tracks were played. The Gary Numan and M.I.A. tracks must have been removed from the steam when it was prepared for some reason. I used QuickTime again to play both hour long tracks and noted the start times of the songs and when Trent does the links in between. You have to add this information into an XML file along with the track names and artists. Then I copied the album art from Amazon.co.uk for each track, making sure that the images aren’t greater than 300x300 pixels, and I also copied the link to the album. When all this was in the XML file I ran the Chapter Tool to produce an m4b file. I did this twice, for both hours, and uploaded the files to my web-site. Then I wrote another little feed XML file so that you can download them using the Podcast feature in iTunes.

It all works brilliantly well. Even I've spent a while clicking on the tracks or just listening to Trent saying, “Hi, this is Trent Reznor on The Radio 1 Rock Show filling in for Mike Dee”.

You can download the full mp3 version which is 137mb and has no chapter markings or better still…

1. Download iTunes, if you don't already have it, and install it
2. Copy this feed link to the clipboard
3. Open iTunes and click on the 'Advanced' menu and select 'Subscribe to Podcast...'
4. Paste the link into the URL box so that it reads 'http://s3.amazonaws.com/carldpatterson-website/feed.xml' and click Ok
5. Click on 'Podcasts' and you should see the first hour downloading
6. Click on the disclosure triangle to download the second hour

Have fun!

Please note that the copyright of this material is owned by the BBC.

Update – if you want to have the show in 15 minute mp3 files then download this zip file which contains 8 files covering the full 2 hours.

I've just recorded the stream of the new Nine Inch Nails CD ‘With Teeth’. I had, of course, seen it available for download on various torrent sites but had resisted the urge to download or listen to it before the CD arrives in the post. Google Alerts sent me an email of all the Nine Inch Nails news for the day and one email mentioned that www.nin.com had a streaming version on the site. Luckily I had bought iRecordMusic, audio stream to mp3, recording software a few weeks before when Trent did the Radio 1 Rock Show. So I already had all the tools.

iRecordMusic recorded it and converted it to an mp3 track, just the one, that it added to a play list in iTunes. All I had to do was burn it onto an audio disc so I can listen to it in the car. Almost made me look forward to going to work.

When I bought my Mac I wanted to try ProTools by Digidesign as I had heard that a lot of the bands that I like use it to edit and record their songs with. So I ordered ProTools lite from the website and tried to use it on my iMac. When I tried to install it said that there was some problem with the speed of the hard disk as I recall. So that was that. Then Uncle Steve, during his 2004 keynote speech, said that they had a new product, part of the iLife suite, called GarageBand. That was exactly the kind of product I was looking for. I placed an order, received it, installed it and played around with it for a while. Clicking and dragging loops around was great fun. I had even toyed with the idea of buying a USB keyboard, that’s a music keyboard, which would be a cheaper option than a USB to midi converter. Alas the novelty soon faded. Until…

The Hand That Feeds
GarageBand

I read on the internet that Trent Reznor had posted on the Nine Inch Nails website a GarageBand file of “The Hand That Feeds” single. This was exactly what I wanted. Trent had taken the music tracks straight out of ProTools and saved the segments as Apple loops. My favourite band was letting me personally remix a song that I had had buzzing around my head for weeks before. I don’t mind telling you that I was quite excited, which doesn’t happen often.

I downloaded it, I opened it up, I listened to it all the way through, I changed the tempo, I shifted the verses around, I moved things forward, I shifted things back, I switched tracks off all together and… it all sounded crap. It’s a great song anyway so what could I possibly add or subtract from it to improve it. I think I've spent longer just listening to it watching the position indicator move across the screen. I've always listened to the Nine Inch Nails remix CD’s and thought that I could do that. Now the reality finally dawns that I can’t, even with the required technology. Possibly I do need one of those USB keyboards after all, maybe that’s the problem.

10:30 in the morning and I was off on the tube to Whitechapel to visit The Royal London Museum.

The museum is tucked away down Newark Street behind, what appears to be the main hospital building. I went to see the exhibits they have about Joseph Merrick (the ‘Elephant Man’). I had bought the David Lynch film on DVD and knew that Mr. Merrick had spent the last years of his life at the hospital under the care of Frederick Treves. The museum itself is very small, much smaller that I thought it would be or could judge by the photographs on the website. The articles concerning Mr. Merrick are very interesting. Photographs, a log that recorded his arrival at the hospital and one of his hoods that appeared to be a large cap with a ‘veil’ which looked as if it was made from sack cloth. I'm not sure if it’s an original or a reproduction. There was a photograph of Joseph, the one with him in his Sunday best, but this was a reproduction. It was all very interesting but wasn’t going to use up the rest of the morning, so it was back on the tube to Westminster.

I wanted to see the Saatchi Gallery, which is located in County Hall. I had read the book by Damien Hirst and knew, from my visit to the Sensation exhibition years ago, that Charles Saatchi was an avid collector of his work. Having paid my £9 and looked around, I was a little disappointed. I had hoped that the gallery would contain pieces from Sensation as well as The Triumph Of Painting exhibition. Certainly not worth £9. I don’t think that there were any artists that I had heard of. No wonder there had to be people outside on the banks of the Thames trying to get people to pay them a visit.

It was then off to Regent Street and my favourite store in the land, the Apple Store. I only wanted a little dock for my iPod shuffle and thankfully that is all I left with. I could spend thousands in there: 30 inch monitors, dual processor Power Mac, Power Book, iPod photo, iSight camera. I could end up being very broke but very happy. One of these days I tell you, when my Uncle Ernie remembers where I live. The place was full of tourists checking their emails. Just about every available screen had some mail web page open in dozens of different languages.

Anyway, I was getting hungry so I bought some sandwiches and sushi and went back to the hotel for a nap.

London Astoria

I started queuing at the Astoria a little later than the previous night so I was about 10 feet further back. The same drunk was there, the same t-shirt sellers trying to convince us all that the t-shirts inside were being sold for £30’s. Thinking about it now the time seemed to fly by. But at the time is seemed like an age. I'm just not the most patient of people. Luckily the queue started to move nearer 6 o'clock than the previous night. Before you’re allowed in you have to be checked to ensure that you aren’t carrying any knives or anything. There was a chap there with a video camera filming people as we all walked in. I remembered, from the night before, that this same guy had been on the right-hand side of the stage filming the action. I only found out afterwards, from reading internet forums, that this was Rob Sheridan, the guy who helped Trent to piece together the ‘And All That Could Have Been’ DVD. I also knew that he made the video for ‘The Hand That Feeds’. With any luck I could be on the next Nine Inch Nails DVD. Fat chance really considering that I look like a forty-something computer geek.

Once inside I wandered upstairs to the merchandise stall to buy a t-shirt.

After the previous nights fun and frolics I had toyed with the idea of watching the concert from upstairs. But it just didn’t seem right for some reason, so I headed back downstairs. A young french couple wanted me to take a picture of them on the stairs. And I thought I'd travelled along way to get to this concert.

I bought a can of Red Stripe and stood on the left side of the mixing desk. The amount of equipment in that small space was amazing. 15 inch Power Books, a LaCie hard disk drive, AirPort Express and LED digital counter. I can’t think what they were using the AirPort Express unit for. The digital counter was being used to synchronise video and audio I think. The actual mixing desk was a little further along in the centre of the booth, the chap at the desk behind me seemed to be working some of the lights. In fact the guy with the grey pony-tail and beard came down from the stage and stood next to me talking to the man at the desk. I managed to eves drop and heard that they had a problem with midi controllers or something. The man with the beard said that he had just finished doing the programming for the set and that he was going to grab a bite to eat. He walked back to the stage carrying a PCMCIA card. I don’t know which of them was the Rob Bennett that Trent mentioned on the web site. Rob had designed the lights for this tour as well as for ‘The Downward Spiral’ tour.

The music that was being played before the show seemed a little odd. At certain points it was music but then it changed to what sounded like a narrator, of some kind, with a very English accent, reading a medical book, listing symptoms. Very odd. I don’t know if this is specific to the Astoria or if it’s part of the Nine Inch Nails show.

The Dresden Dolls played and I think their music must have started to sink in. I have since bought the CD and like it quite a bit. There was one punk in the audience who seemed to be singing along to every word.

Set List

The Frail/The Wretched

You Know What You Are?

March Of The Pigs

The Line Begins To Blur

Piggy

Terrible Lie

Burn

Closer

Reptile

The Big Come Down

Gave Up

The Day The World Went Away

Suck

Even Deeper

Wish

Hurt

The Hand That Feeds

Starfuckers Inc

Head Like A Hole

Nine Inch Nails came on with Trent playing the keyboard parts to ‘The Frail/The Wretched’. This was a better move than the previous night as the crowd knew the tracks and became suitably pumped up straight away. I honestly can’t remember much more about it. I was singing my little heart out on the tracks that I knew and listened attentively to the songs that I didn’t. I was glad that I had chose this spot as it was up on a box so I had a good view of the crowd and the stage. I was thankful that I had a rail behind me as it did get really squashed as the gig went on.

The show ended, as it had the previous night, with ‘Head Like A Hole’. Everyone just went mental. When the band left the stage, and the lights went up, people still thought that there was going to be an encore.

I can honestly say that even if the Astoria looks a little like a flea pit from the outside the security people, and the staff generally, really know what they are doing. They were passing water out before and during the main event and anyone crowd surfing was quickly taken care of.

Even now I still can’t quite believe that I've seen Nine Inch Nails. I've been a fan since the ‘Broken’ E.P. and have been a fanatical collector of their music since. Just about anything that bears Trent Reznors name. I can remember when I received the email from the mailing list, saying that the tickets were going to go on sale, that I had second thoughts.

I've read on internet forums after the show that people at the front, against the barrier, had actually seen Trent smiling. Alas, no photographic evidence of this exists.

Related Links
Concert photos by Flash Wilson

I had downloaded the video for ‘The Hand That Feeds’ and just couldn’t get the song out of my head.

London Astoria

I arrived in London at about 1:00pm and walked down Tottenham Court Road to where I thought the Astoria was located. I'd never seen it before but had a vague recollection that I had walked past it last november, on my last visit to our nations capital. It does not look in the best of shape. It looks like it hasn’t had anything done to it since the days of Queen Victoria. I thought, “What the hell are Nine Inch Nails doing playing here!”. Of course the really hardcore fans, or those without hotel rooms to go to, were already queuing at a quarter to two. I headed off down Denmark Street to find the Travelodge and somewhere that sells sandwiches and bottled water.

I waited in the hotel room until 4:30pm before making my way to the queue down the side of the Astoria. Everyone was in good spirits, as you can imagine. A drunk and the t-shirt sellers kept us amused. The doors where supposed to open at 6:00pm but there must have been some sort of hold up as I'm sure that the queue didn’t start moving until at least twenty minutes past the hour.

The inside seemed so small, just an empty space in front of the stage. It’s more like a club than a theatre and certainly nothing like the stadiums that Nine Inch Nails are used to playing in. There was a sort of metal cage around the mixing desk. The balcony had small tables and chairs and of course another bar. I managed to get a spot that was about 5 people back from the centre of the stage. A great spot, at least that’s what I thought at the time. I was used to all the jostling and jumping around after seeing Rammstein in february.

There seemed to be some kind of technical hitch as members of the road crew were checking The Dresden Dolls equipment and seemed to be replacing a power cable. Finally, at about twenty minutes past seven The Dresden Dolls came on. Of course I had checked out their website before hand but hadn’t had a chance to listen to their music. Their setup is really simple: Amanda Palmer, plays keyboards and sings, Brian Viglione, plays drums. I was suitably impressed. Not exactly the kind of music that grabs you straight away, as there doesn’t seem to be any really catchy choruses, but after a couple of listens the music does start to sink in. I was particularly impressed with Brian’s drumming, he really hit his kit damned hard, he just seemed to be a mass of flailing arms. Amanda sang with as much venom and bile as she could muster. No one really noticed that they were playing ‘War Pigs’ by Black Sabbath until about 30 seconds in, then everyone sang along. I wonder if anyone else noticed that she had changed the name on her keyboard from Kurzweil to KurtWeill.

The place was so small that you could see the road crew re-stringing guitars at the side of the stage during The Dresden Dolls set. Everything seemed to be crammed onto the tiny stage. Including a big bank of lights at the back. The chap that appeared to control them looked like a young Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top. He had a long pony tail and of course a long beard, both silvery grey, and a NIN baseball cap on backwards. In ten years time that’s what I want to look like.

One thing that I did notice was that Trent’s microphone stand had some kind of rubber strip running down the right-hand side. I had watched a member of the road crew pressing it at certain points along it’s length while he was testing the microphone. I never did figure out what it did.

Set List

Love Is Not Enough

You Know What You Are

March Of The Pigs

The Line Begins To Blur

Piggy

Terrible Lie

The Collector

Closer

Home

Gave Up

With Teeth

Even Deeper

Hurt

Wish

The Hand That Feeds

Starfuckers Inc

Head Like A Hole

The lights dimmed again and the band walked on stage. When we could see Jeordie White everyone yelled, “Twiggy!”, including me. Even playing for A Perfect Circle and now Nine Inch Nails it will take along time before he is recognized as more than Marilyn Manson’s old side kick. Of course the biggest cheer went up for Trent Reznor. Even I couldn’t believe he was actually there and I was seeing them play England for the first time in along time. His guitar roadie passed a black Les Paul to him before he strode up to the microphone.

I knew the set list from the shows in Fresno, that they played before coming over, so I wasn’t surprised to hear two new songs to start with. I think everyone thought they were good and the crowd was bouncing up and down but being unreleased they weren’t songs we had all listened to over and over again. I wasn’t until ‘March Of The Pigs’ that everyone went suitably mental. The security guys behind the barrier were already handing out cups of water that were being passed among the crowd. A huge chap in front of me kept pushing me, and the people behind me, back so that his thinner mate didn’t get crushed. At one point he started to wave to security but they mustn’t have seen him. About five minutes later he had had enough and he hauled his mate over the crowd and he was passed over peoples heads before the security grabbed him and led him away. This huge guy wanted to do the same so I helped to lift him up and over the crowd. I was a little uncomfortable to say the least. If the crowd just stayed in one place then I would have been fine for the rest of the show. Instead everyone seemed to be pushing left and right. Of course your upper body is squashed against those around you so that when you do move away from the vertical your feet have nowhere to go. I'm sure I felt as if all of us were going to fall into a huge sweaty heap at any moment. I think I stayed near the front for as long as I could. I sure didn’t want to leave the same way as the other two, over the heads of the crowd.

I think during an instrumental break in one song Trent sprayed us all with a couple of litres of water. Which was a welcome respite from the heat and humidity but, being a spectacle wearer, it fogged up both lenses. So I couldn’t move my feet, my body was moving 2 or 3 feet from the vertical in all directions and I couldn’t see. At the end of ‘Piggy’ Trent came down into the pit at the front and everyone pushed forward, if such a thing was possible. At this time I started to move back. Pushing back with my feet, then turning and making my way to the bar.

Never has a cold can of lager tasted so good. I stood at the bar for a while, drinking from the can before I moved a little way into the crowd. Of course I could still see the band and was still singing my lungs out during the old songs.

The music was building up to a climax. From ‘Hurt’, ‘Wish’, the new single ‘The Hand That Feeds’, ‘Starfuckers Inc’ and ending with ‘Head Like A Hole’. During that last song the entire place exploded, everyone was singing or bouncing up and down to the music. The band walked off stage, there was no way even they could top that. The stage lights went up and the road crew started to dismantle a few things on stage. I knew there wasn’t going to be an encore so I was one of the first out. Off to Sainsbury’s for some liquid refreshment, non-alcoholic, still drenched in sweat with my ears still ringing.

Related Links
Concert photos by Flash Wilson