THE NIN HOTLINE

Since Know the Score was established in 2003, I have received, on average, an e-mail per week requesting a transcription of The Becoming. I actually finished most of the transcription in a rush this summer, but I've been sitting on it for a while because I'm completely inexperienced at transcribing drum kit. However, procrastination* is totally the name of the game this week, so Becoming fans win. If you're a music-reading drummer and you have a beef with the transcription, let me know.

* In case you're wondering, I am currently putting off completing a ridiculous cantata based on text from the senate judiciary hearings of Alberto Gonzales. Hopefully it will be performed next year -- unless the procrastination persists.

4,589,024 people and their mothers wrote in to let us know that Metal Hammer has posted the transcript of their interview with Trent Reznor, held in Glasgow, Scotland. Thanks to all. (Cliff was going to post that, but something new about IE7 seems to have made it so he can't log in from work.)

This exclusive interview covers a lot of ground, including the process of making Year Zero and With Teeth, talking about Saul Williams' new album, unreleased tracks from The Fragile and With Teeth... it's a real good read. Big thanks to Gill for putting this online!

In a fairly surprising turn of events, Amazon is now offering DRM free MP3 downloads from the Nine Inch Nails catalog. A total of 106 songs are available for purchase at the moment, for $0.89 and $0.99 each. You can buy full albums for less than their CD equivalents -- for example, Year Zero is $7.99 in MP3 format. This doesn't always work out, mind you, as Further Down the Spiral in MP3 is $9.49, though that EP is typically $7.99 whenever I see it in the store.

It should be pointed out that while Amazon will not sell MP3s with DRM, apparently select tracks from the service may contain watermarks applied before they receive the files.

Anyway, if you don't already own all the entire catalog, check this thing out. I think that you can thank Steve Jobs for taking one for the team to make this happen.

If you haven't taken a moment out to vote for us at the Digital Music Awards this year. I'd write more, but I feel like the last few months have had enough posts from me begging you to vote for this or that, often punctuated with a statement about news being slow. One advantage of this slowness is that I'm working on a redesign that should vastly improve the readability and scalability of the site. Considering the last redesign was about two years ago, it feels like we're due for a change-up in the layout department.

Somehow this slipped under our radar -- the Blue Lion Band, out of Washington Court House, Ohio (If I did my Googling right) performed The Hand That Feeds at least two weeks ago, and while there are a couple of videos of them playing this song online, I'm posting the one from six days ago because the band appears to rock out a lot more in this clip. Thanks to theartofdecay for sending this in. Now, without any further adieu, the video:



Not only do they perform this New Orleans marching band tune, this year they have been playing songs like Metallica's "Enter Sandman" and Linkin Park's "Numb."

I'm doing some research to help deal with some ridiculous requests from Wikipedia naz editors, and along the way, came across an farily comprehensive interview from April, 1994 that I hadn't seen yet. Reposted to I Bleed For This magazine in May of 1995, I decided to toss it in our archives in the event that textfiles.com ever bites the big one. So if you want to read it in the plain text I found it in, read it here, but if you like a little bit of formatting with your article, read the copy I just made here.

I don't really remember reading any other interviews that talk to both Trent Reznor and Steve Gottleib (of TVT Records). It's a pretty good history of Nine Inch Nails up to the release of The Downward Spiral.

Tomorrow night, La Salle High School in Pasadena, CA will be playing football against... some other school. And at the show, their marching band will be performing The Hand that Feeds. In the formation of a hand. We'll be on the lookout for YouTube footage. It may or may not sound something like this. Thanks to littlemonk3y613 for the heads-up.

I decided to stop over at ninremixes.com to see what they've been up to over there, and was surprised to see that they've retooled their site significantly in celebration of their third birthday. The site looks very polished with its new fluid layout (that is to say, it expands to fill your browser window. I'm totally working on doing that for the Hotline, and now I feel as though I've been beat to the punch :p) and as part of this new layout, it even works on the iPhone (and presumably that new iPod touch) It's a major, major improvement, kudos to everyone involved over there.

Yeah, we realize that we're pushing this story pretty hard, but it's a pretty important one. Bob Lefsetz saw Ryan.'s video, and wrote up a comparison between Kanye's style of self-promotion and Trent's form of self-preservation through touring. Or something. Anyway, it'd be really cool if you could help get this story to the front page of Digg, because every time I get a story on Digg's front page with my handle, Cunnybungler, it makes everyone just a little bit happier. Support Trent Reznor, vote Cunnybungler!

Billboard online is reporting that the solo album by Rage Against the Machine frontman Zach De La Rocha is a wrap! According to this article, although they're not sure if the tracks produced by DJ Shadow and Trent Reznor are on this incarnation of the album in question. The money quote from the article: 'Sources familiar with the album say it features De La Rocha playing keyboards and that the sound is a hybrid of "Led Zeppelin and Dr. Dre. Some of it has the power you'd expect from him in Rage."' Thanks to sighfinine for the news!

After hitting #1 on Reddit this morning, Ryan.'s YouTube clip from the Sydney show took off on Digg (and is still going crazy strong) garnering the attention of Digg founder Kevin Rose. The evening culminated with a post to Slashdot on the story. We also saw coverage on rawstory.com The video only made it to the second page of YouTube's most viewed today listing, presumably due to lack of breasts and/or Chris Cocker impersonations.

Thanks to Tony from NIN Wiki for his pimping efforts, and to mharriger, whose post sent gobs of Reddit traffic here.

Update: Fragileprincess wrote in to mention that the news made front page headlines in the Sydney Morning Herald. You can read the full article here.

"Last time I was here, I was doing a lot of complaining about the ridiculous prices of CDs down here. And that story got picked up and got carried all around the world and now my record label all around the world hates me, because I yelled at them, I called them out for being greedy fucking assholes. I didn't get a chance to check, has the price come down at all? I see a no, a no, a no... Has anyone seen the price come down? Okay, well, you know what that means - STEAL IT. Steal away. Steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealin'. Because one way or another these motherfuckers will get it through their head that they're ripping people off and that that's not right."

Vote for this story on Digg if you have a spare moment.


Hey hey, it looks like someone posted this to Reddit. Thanks to Ryan. for braving venue security and YouTubing the speech & song.

Vessel, Me, I'm Not, Capital G and My Violent Heart. What do these things have in common? Songs from Year Zero? Yes. New t-shirt designs from FACTION? You got it. Jason's all the way up to eight song-inspired shirts with eight left to go. Grab 'em now because they kick ass and they feel smoooooth.

Also, if you really liked the "MARCH" and Red AIR flag shirts, guess what? THEY'RE BACK! And, in the case of the AIR shirt, they've been updated! Constant coolness is what's going on over there. Grab a few shirts and stickers and support the revolution.

Morgan from north-side.net passes along this interesting interview revolving around the upcoming Honolulu show. Most interesting is this sensationally presented tidbit:

If you haven't bought your plane ticket to go see Aaron North wail 'n' flail... THIS MAY BE YOUR LAST CHANCE! Then again, it may not, and the same touring band may continue on to different format shows. We shall see!

leo3375 posted about this on ETS. In short, if you go to AcademyFilms.com, click on Music Videos, then Walter Stern, you will find a link to an alternate take of the video for Into the Void near the bottom of the screen. From what I briefly saw, the ending of the video is completely different. If you don't feel like navigating through a flash site to see the video, I've embedded the YouTube clip that icklekitty made from the flv on AcademyFilms.com. Enjoy!

After months of deliberation over 200 fan submitted remixes, the results from the remix contest at Painful Convictions are in. 21 tracks received a majority vote from the judges, with just one track getting a "Yes" vote from all the judges. You can stream The Limitless Potential over at 9inchnails.com one track at a time, or via an external jukebox of sorts. If you prefer to download the remixes, you can now download a torrent containing all 21 remixes in MP3 format, as well as CD jewel case artwork to complement the two-disc set. The torrent is available through mininova, and is probably the best way to get this set. Congrats to Dirty Scarab, whose remix took 1st place, and Pushing Reality, whose Vessel remix made honorable mention. Thanks to everyone who sent in remixes, everyone who voted, to Hot Topic and Faction for providing prizes for the winners.

**UPDATE: Digg this story! ***

You killed it! Due to overwhelming demand, the server hosting the remix files I had posted about earlier has taken a big dump. We're working to put them up on The Pirate Bay or Demonoid or something, but that may not come til later tonight. When things are back to working order, I'll repost what was here earlier.