THE NIN HOTLINE

Now that I've finally implemented permalinks, I can do cheesy stuff like look at the most-linked-to stories of the year. I'm cheating a little bit this year because I don't have data for the first three months of the year, but no one really cares anyway. Without further ado, the top five NIN Hotline stories from 2010:

1) 40 minute rough cut pro footage from NIN/Bowie concert surfaces (Oct 27)
2) The Gift of NIN (Oct 20)
3) Hallo Spaceboy and Hurt, as performed by David Bowie and Nine Inch Nails (July 31)
4) How To Destroy Angels: a 6 song eponymous EP coming summer 2010 (April 27)
5) Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross score David Fincher's new film (July 1)

And in case you missed it on Twitter and nin.com, here's HD footage the band released for Christmas from the opening of the 550-capacity Bowery Ballroom performance in New York. It's great to see that footage hasn't been forgotten, and if we're lucky we'll see more of this in the coming year.

Over at DVDactive, we've learned what some of the features being included with the disc releases of The Social Network are. The DVD has two commentary tracks, but the Blu-ray is chock full of goodies, and the two that are most pertinent to this site? "Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross and David Fincher on the Score" and "In the Hall of the Mountain King: Reznor's First Draft". The movie will be released on disc come January 11, 2011, and Amazon's taking $23.99 for the Blu-ray and $16.99 for the DVD.

You can catch a glimpse of what is presumably one of the featurettes, played in the background of Tavis Smiley's interview with Trent. Missed it? The Audio perv sure didn't, and they've posted rips to Photobucket and YouTube. Enjoy!

There was a lot of excitement at the end of the month when a previously unreleased/unheard NIN demo tape showed up on eBay at a price of $20,000... or best offer. That listing's ended, but the tape has been re-listed this time as a traditional auction, and the first bid was $0.01. There's still a week to go, but bidding's already bumped the tape up to $280 at the time of this post.

There's a more detail in this auction listing, and there are two samples up on Martin Atkins' Facebook page, but the clips provided don't really give you the proper impression of the fidelity of the recording. I took the time to run them through autotune, a pirated Waves noise reduction plugin, and then compressed the shit out of the recording so that people could complain about the loudness war and dynamic range, and am presenting you my edits of the demo clips below. And don't tell me you want a copy on vinyl because it's not happening, chump.

Sin (Demo) Clip


Terrible Lie (demo) Clip


Well, obviously I didn't actually process those at all. Someone posted these clips online earlier this year, but I'm not sure if they want their name out there. But they're a good 20 seconds longer than what else is available, and seem to be recorded straight off the tape, rather than from a mic held somewhere near a speaker that's playing back the tape.

Word poured in from all corners of the internet that Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor have been nominated for a Golden Globe award this morning for the category Best Original Score for their work on The Social Network soundtrack. Congratulations fellas, you're in pretty good company -- you should make friends with Hans Zimmer and geek out at his ridiculous studio.

If you've got PBS (and you probably do), hopefully your local affiliate gets Tavis Smiley, because tonight Tavis is interviewing Trent Reznor. Well, technically they taped the interview yesterday, but it's debuting tonight, so set your DVRs up. More than likely, there will be a recap at Echoing the Sound, and we'll be sure to link you to that... when there's time.