Around the same time, Echoing the Sound user hellospaceboy (aka LTamasfi on Twitter) put a bid in on another tape from the same collection. Like the Fragility 1.0 VHS, the only known images of this tape originated from the nin collector site, and I've never been able to track down whether or not the audio from this made its way onto any bootleg CDs of the day, because although a description existed, if the audio ever made it to the web, I certainly missed it.
Fast-forward to 2019. There's a message in my inbox from hellospaceboy with a Dropbox link and some background information. I immediately put on my headphones at work and tried to multitask through what turned out to be a 46 minute long interview recorded at an incredibly pivotal point for Nine Inch Nails. Trent speaks in detail about the circumstances around recording Broken.
"Pretty much everyone I played it for before it was completely done didn't like it, because it was too much, or the things they were expecting to hear in terms of melody or being able to hear what I'm saying weren't as readily apparent as it was on Pretty Hate Machine, and those are all conscious choices... Let's just make something that's irritating and is as ugly as I feel now."
Trent talks about recording individual tracks, between New Orleans, Lake Geneva Wisconsin, and eventually Los Angeles, and goes into some depth about individual songs, including why Suck and Physical appear on the EP. How the popularity of the first record could have affected process on "the new record," how the media portrays Nine Inch Nails as 'industrial' despite the music being 'a far cry from that', decries the handling of the AIDS crisis and other American current events and political trends, and eventually talks about the follow-up full-length album, The Downward Spiral, sharing a surprisingly prescient vision of what the album ended up being.
You can listen to the full interview on Soundcloud below:
And if you'd like a local copy, I guess we'll test out my new hosting by hosting a zip file with the interview on our own server. If I had done this at the height of our popularity, I would have gotten a terrible hosting bill the following month, but one of the benefits of our obsolescence is that if I'm lucky 40 people are going to hit that link. Thanks again to Laszlo for sharing this insightful document of the era.
Can't wait to see what shitty headline AlternativeNation pinch off to after digesting this one!