THE NIN HOTLINE

A little over a week ago, word got out that Nine Inch Nails' The Hand That Feeds would be part of the Fortnite Festival. Among the other groups featured in the festival is a new name: Witchgang. A few days ago, a lyric video for the song Nothing's Alright was released, and people were posting to reddit about being confused about this band.

Fortnite Festival has its roots in the game Rock Band, and the team behind Rock Band, Harmonix, recently joined Epic, the company behind Fortnite. In the past, Harmonix has included lesser known bands in Rock Band, and folks were postulating that this might be the case here. There's scant information about Witchgang online - a minimalist website links to several outlets where you can hear their music. (Personally, I'm still all about bandcamp, since you can download lossless copies, stream freely, and musicians get more of a cut, but I digress). Their Instagram account has comments cheering them on, mixed in with a couple people who are acting suspicious about the appearance of this band out of nowhere.

It was shaping up to be a fun mystery to unpack, but leave it to the corporate overlords to give the game away. Now, if you're reading the lyrics to Nothing's Alright, lines like "the world’s on fire but nothing can stop me now" are going to stick out to you. Even the name of the song hints at themes familiar to visitors of this site. So when the song's page on Apple Music lists the production and writing credits, and you're seeing names like Dave Sitek, Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Thomas Fec, Ross Birchard, among others - the picture gets even more interesting.

There are two tracks available now: Nothing's Alright (which you can perform on Fortnite), and Timeless. I'd bet there's more to come.

Jerome Dillon emerged on social media yesterday to share a link to a brief post on Extra, which announces a new work by Dillon:

Jerome joined Nine Inch Nails as the touring drummer around the time this website launched, and continued with NIN through 2005, including multi-instrumental performances on And All That Could Have Been: Still. Dillon released debut work Reminder under the moniker nearLY in 2005, featuring Claudia Sarne of 12 Rounds on vocals. He's scored a variety of films as well, from John Waters' Cecil B Demented and horror film The Collector. His scores for No One Lives and Officer Down are available on Bandcamp.

Last night, during the live broadcast of The Game Awards, a "global celebration of video games" that's approaching its tenth anniversary, famed video game designer Hideo Kojima was one of the guests and presenters. Following a trailer for his new game, OD, Hideo took the stage while the chorus of Came Back Haunted played, and was later joined by Jordan Peele, as a way of announcing that the illustrious Mr Peele is one of the collaborators on this new game.

We already know that Jordan Peele "had a goth phase, listened to Tool and Nine Inch Nails" (an influence that I'm pretty sure never went away), and in the above segment from the Video Game Awards, Kojima mentions his shared interests with Peele and that "I have other creative collaborative partners with me on board, I can't say who they are, but they are legends" - so, look. The only verifiable news here is that Hideo Kojima played Nine Inch Nails as his walk-on music for this thing.

But given the recent revival of the Quake soundtrack, you can't help but think it would be a fun opportunity to get these incredibly talented folks from the film, video games, and music worlds together on a weird, cerebral collaborative project. Maybe it even spins out to Trent & Atticus doing score work for Monkeypaw Productions.

This is how you know I don't use a feed reader for my own website. I'm not sure when this changed, but the RSS feed for the NIN Hotline is now https://feeds.feedburner.com/theninhotline/twxq. It's amazing that Feedburner still exists as a free service, and somehow has dodged the Google Graveyard, but I'm glad it's there, absorbing the tremendous traffic I'm sure the RSS readers send this massively popular music website.

In what appears to be an evolution of the Rock Band and Tap Tap Revenge (oh man, remember that?) concept, gaming phenomenon Fortnite is premiering Fortnite Festival on December 9. Dozens of bands are participating, including Nine Inch Nails, which specifically contributes The Hand That Feeds to the jam playlist. Ostensibly, you'll be able to get on stage with friends, pick an instrument, and rock out.

And here I just switched to Apple Silicon. Kudos to GC Punk for cluing me in on what was going on here.