Interview conducted Jan. '00 by Leviathant. Coordinated by Node Girl.

     If you're not one to read liner notes, you may not know that Alan Moulder is the man who mixed The Downward Spiral, and if you don't pay attention to interviews and reviews of the latest Nine Inch Nails endeavour, The Fragile was co-produced by Alan Moulder. There's an unmistakable Moulder flavor to The Fragile. Even before the album was released, visitors to the halo thirteen era nin.com commented on how some of the sound clips had a "My Bloody Valentine" quality to them. (My Bloody Valentine is another band Alan has worked with, as you'll read below.) We took a lot of your questions, some of our own inquiries, and made a few phone calls. Now we've got answers to stuff like "What's up with alanmoulder.com anyway?" So check out a peek into the production of The Fragile through Alan Moulder's eyes, exclusively on The NIN Hotline.

      Thanks a lot for taking time out to do this interview

      No problem.

      Did you have any direct influence that drove you to become a music engineer?

      Any direct influence? I used to be in a local band that never did anything, and being in bands, seeing a studio and recording a demo was when I decided that was a good alternative. I realised that I wasn?t going to make it as a guitar player and there were a lot of people a lot better than I was, so I thought I?d change direction but still be involved.

      Were you trained or educated in engineering or did you teach yourself?

      Well in England it works a bit different to America. In America nearly everybody who?s a studio engineer goes to engineering school. There are engineering schools in England, they may not be as good, but they?re getting better I think. The English way tends to be that you get hired as an assistant or as a runner and you?re like an apprentice. You learn from the house engineer and that?s what I did. I got a job at Trident Studios and we had some good staff there and some great engineers and you learn that way, just by watching - by making tea and coffee, fetching people?s food and just doing running and basic menial tasks.

      How did you first meet up with Trent? How did you guys start working together?

      I think Trent had liked some of the records I'd worked on; My Bloody Valentine, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and he got me in to mix Downward Spiral. A friend of mine who had produced it with him, Flood, couldn't be there at the mixing, so I was called in to mix Downward Spiral with Trent. There were a few tracks left to record, and so I recorded and mixed them. I think it's just from records that I'd worked on that he liked.

      While recording The Fragile what was a typical day like in the studio?

      Well its difficult to describe a typical day since the album spanned over 2 years so days varied. What we normally did was start at about eleven. There'd be about half an hour's worth of acclimatizing, drinking coffee and just talking, and then we'd go into the studio to start on whatever was currently being working on. In the early days it'd be building the tracks that were written in the studio. Trent had some ideas when I arrived that were in varying states of evolvement and some were written when I was there. Some days we didn't feel like working on songs so we would be just making sounds. This could be either making a bank of drum sounds or lots of new keyboard sounds or experimenting with a new piece of equipment that had arrived. The good thing about these days were that we always got something useful out of it and inspired us to go back and apply this work on the tracks or even for Trent to write new tracks. Or some days it'd be working on a song or mixing. We would sometimes break for an hour in the late afternoon at about 6 p.m. to clear our heads. Then there would be the hardest decision of the day -- what to eat and then after dinner we would carry on until around 3 a.m. We normally worked every day although CD shopping trips and trips to see movies were fairly common.

      It sounded from several articles in the media that it's been a very intense couple of years making the album.

      It was fairly intense but most of the time was fun. It was very much a fun record to make, very enjoyable. I mean in two years you're gonna get some of those bad days which you get on every session. But my general memory of it was that I really enjoyed making it. Trent is never dull to work with or hang out with!

      Were there any tracks on the album that made you stop and say "Hah! We've got it", when you as a producer listen to the album?

      Yeah, there are a few and I probably didn't think it at the time of finishing it. The one that probably stands out is called "Just Like You'd Imagined". That got to a point where I thought it sounded terrible and I spoke to Trent about how annoyed I was getting, I thought it wasn't sounding very good and we'd been struggling with it for a few days. We both got kind of annoyed with it and made a few bold decisions, then in about an hour and a half that was it -done. Then when I listened back to it a couple of weeks later I thought it was really good. That's probably the one that stands out but because of the amount of songs and tracks we were working on we never listened back to what we had done until months later and nearly every time we were surprised at the fact it always sounded a lot better than we remembered.

      Are there any particular tracks that didn't make the final cut that you would like to have seen released?

      Yeah there's a lot. There are probably at least ten really good ones that didn't get finished. All the ones that haven't made it haven't been finished. The stage a lot of them are at is still quite instrumental. There are a lot of them I think are fantastic as instrumental tracks and it was just a case that we had so much material that Trent wasn't able to get lyrics for all of them. So some were completed by a process of them being our favourites and they had to go on, and some were done by a process of Trent having a lyric or melody for it. The ones that were left behind weren't left behind because they were weak, it just became "well I can't get an idea for that now because of time I have to go onto the ones that I have got ideas for".

      Are you surprised at the sort of success The Fragile has had, debuting at number one in America? Was that something people were anticipating in the studio?

      I was kind of surprised yeah. I mean we'd always hoped it would. Downward Spiral had gone in at number two and that only leaves one more place. But obviously after five years you don't know whether anyone remembers the band or not. So we were worried about that, but we hoped. We didn't speak about it much, but secretly we hoped. It wasn't exactly discussed. So I was very, very pleased about it. When I spoke to Trent and he said we were in at number one we were both ecstatic! There was this incredible feeling of joy that it had happened. Surprised? I guess I kind of was surprised. But, we felt we'd worked so hard there was an element of feeling "thank god! A payback".

      After seeing the major Nine Inch Nails campaign on the internet, how do you see the role of the internet in promoting music? Do you see it as the future of things or just another medium?

      I think it's going to be the future of things. It's not there yet and I think it's still in quite an exciting period of development and where it's going to fit in. I think it's threatening the record companies a lot and I think that they don't know what's going to happen, and that may be affecting the music that's coming out at the moment and their attitude to it. So, I think it is the future, but I think it's early days and we haven't quite seen how it's going to be involved yet. I think there's going to be some significant steps that haven't quite happened yet and I don't know what those are because obviously if I did I'd be involved in them and make an absolute fortune.

      When you're not working on music what do you like listening to?

      That completely varies. I listen to a lot of [Dr] Dre. The old Death Row stuff. I listen to numerous rock records. The album I've been playing for the last few months is the Cardigans' last album Grand Turismo, which I thought was fantastic. I listen to some film soundtracks - nothing specific. Every now and again I have one album that is a favourite that I play every morning and The Cardigans are that at the moment.

      Some people were wondering - even though he was only in for a short while to arrange the running order - what it was like working with Bob Ezrin?

      It was interesting because he wasn't actually involved in any of the music, he was involved in post production. When we asked him to get involved, we didn't know what to expect because you know, he's been around for a long while and you come across producers who have been working in that era and some of them -- how should I put this, have an element of burn-out. So we didn't know what to expect from Bob. We soon found out that he certainly isn't burnt-out. He's great to work with - the guy's enthusiasm, liveliness and general music knowledge was inspiring. Obviously he's got lots of great stories to tell. You could tell from that all the records he'd been involved in, he'd been incredibly involved in. Sometimes, you get some people and there's element of luck - the band do it all or whatever - but you could tell with Bob there was no way that happened, he was definitely very actively involved in those records. He was inspiring and very, very nice to work with, no big ego or anything like that. He was great. But he had a very strong opinion that he put forward which was also needed and very useful. His running order was definitely the one that was used. Also, he did three other running orders that weren't right . Then we listened to the third one and he was gonna go that day but we didn't think it was working and so he said, "ok, I'm going to stay another day". We listened to his one the next day and that was it! He just nailed it - he managed to pull it out of the bag at the last minute.

      Did you have any favourite moment in the process of making the album?

      That's difficult because there were so many high points. I think one of the turning points was when we'd mixed some of these songs early on. Trent wasn't feeling lyrically inspired so we knew certain ones were going to be instrumental anyway and so we thought we'd do those and get them done. We did them all kind of back to back, and again we put them down and thought "yeah, not bad, not bad". Then we didn't listen to them for about three months and we were gonna take a weekend off to go to some amusement park in -- well we were going away for the weekend anyway, and while we were waiting to go to the airport we had a listen back to about six instrumentals which we hadn't heard since we'd done them, and we were all like Christ! These are fucking great! It was a very uplifting moment and a point where I think we felt we were kind of over one of the hills on the way up to the top of the mountain. That's probably one of many that stick out.

      A lot of people are wondering -- what has happened to alanmoulder.com?

      [Lots of laughter] I'm really glad that this has come up! I am really really glad! Did you ever see it?

      Oh yeah!

      Well I can tell you than I had absolutely nothing to do with that website - nothing in the slightest - That is all the manufacture of Trent Reznor. He did the whole thing as a joke. Nobody was ever meant to find out about it. He was basically teasing me one day going on about, "you know you should have your own website", and I said, "I don't need my own fucking website! What am I going to do with my own website?" and Trent was saying "No you should, it'd be great. You know there could be some other Alan Moulders out there". So I said - Well okay - and Trent said, "Let me put in alanmoulder.com and see what comes up". And there it was.

      He bought the site name and got Steve Duda, one of the programmers to do it. It's a parody of another producer, who will remain nameless. It was a parody of his website. The picture of me was a picture he basically found and it was an old one taken of me just after mixing the Woodstock soundtrack where I was absolutely drunk. So the site had nothing to do with me. He sent me an email the other day saying, "they found out about your website, I have to get the password and take it down", and so that's why it got taken down. He saw on one of the sites that people had found it and he knew that I'd be gutted. So he took it down. He created it. He took it down. So that's what that was all about.

      Very interesting -- it definitely had a lot of us chuckling.

      Yeah, yeah it did me -- it's kind of embarrassing. [Laughter] Steve Duda's poetry leaves a lot to be desired. I think he and Charlie Clouser's girlfriend Judy wrote the poems and thoughts.

      Is there anybody in particular you're looking forward to working with in the future?

      I get asked this a lot and I can never think at the time. There's a lot of bands that I like and I'd kind of like to work with, but I like the way their records sound anyway and part of me thinks that if you work with them it ruins it, you can't enjoy it. I'm kind of interested at the moment in working on things that are bit different to the projects I've already done and so I'm probably going to be mainly mixing for a while because it's a lot quicker than producing. The last few things I've worked on have taken a long, long time. I just fancy something with a bit of a quicker turnover. There's no specific band. Like I said before I really like the Cardigans' record but I think the production on that's great so I wouldn't want to interfere with that. A band like The Prodigy I really like. I also really like Korn. Again they do great stuff, its sounds fantastic. I can't think of anyone specifically, I try to keep an open mind on that.

      If there is any one thing you could change on The Fragile what would it be, if anything?

      That is a difficult question at the moment. I go through a cycle on records when I've finished them of how I feel about them. At the moment I can't hear it any other way. Things I could change -- I have thought about this and nothing in particular comes up. I think that's one you'd have to ask me in six months.

      We had a few people who read the NIN Hotline submit these questions for this interview and we'd like to thank you very much for your time.

      That's a pleasure.