As a thank you for his fans and loyal supporters, The-Awesomeness-That-is-Trent-Reznor today released a new Nine Inch Nails album, called The Slip, as a completely free download. That's ten MP3 songs, baby, completely for free, with no DRM. W00t! (Streaming audio here.)

As with Ghosts I-IV, each song has artwork attached (if you use iTunes), and they seem to have some relation to Year Zero, especially the one for "Letting You," which looks to be the OSR flag turned sidewise.

Once again, the music has been released under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, readymade for remixing, sharing, blogposting, podcast background or foreground, et cetera.

This is so full of win I can hardly stand it.

That download link again.

Been offline for a few days, so I missed the celebration yesterday of the second annual International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day (ipstp). However, I am belatedly participating nonetheless.

For your viewing pleasure, I have posted my short story "Most Excellent and Lamentable" (originally published in Text:UR - The New Book of Masks, ed. Forrest Aguirre, March 2007) for free on my website.

Not only that, but I am releasing it under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License. Which means that you can "remix" the story (i.e. convert it into different formats, such PDF or TXT or MOBI, or scrawled by hand on papyrus with a quill pen), and create derivative works from it (a short film, a dramatic podcast reading, a song with lyrics based on the prose, artwork based on the characters, &c.) just as long as you give me credit as the original author, you don't take any money for your efforts, and you release your own work under a CC BY-NC-SA license. You don't have to ask my permission to remix the story or derive your own creative work from it, but I would appreciate receiving an email about it, so that I can link to your groovy reworking on the M.E.A.L. page.

For a story that does quite a bit of ShareAliking of its own (it relies heavily on the Commedia dell'Arte and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and there's even a tiny reference to Neil Gaiman, as well as other little bits and bobs), it seems wholly appropriate to have others try and make something of their own based on it.

Whenever I can find the time in the near future, I'll be recording the story for my podcast Lies and Little Deaths: A Virtual Anthology, accompanied by music from the Nine Inch Nails album Ghosts I-IV (which was also released under a CC BY-NC-SA license).

Nota Bene: Most of my published fiction can be found online for free; links to these stories are at the bibliography page on my website.

Postscript: NIN just today released a new single, also as a completely free download, called "Discipline." Pretty groovy stuff, and free!

Dudez! I am right! this! moment! downloading the spanky new instrumental album from Nine Inch Nails, Ghosts I-IV (Halo 26), and trying oh so very hard to contain my excitement. It's NIN's first album after quitting their record label and going indie, and is available in several formats:

• Free Download: The first 9 tracks from the Ghosts I-IV collection available as high-quality, DRM-free MP3s, including the complete PDF.
• US$5 Download: All 36 tracks in a variety of digital formats including a 40-page PDF.
• US$10 2xCD Set: Ghosts I-IV on two audio CDs in a six panel digipak package with a 16-page booklet. Pre-order, to be shipped April 8, 2008. INCLUDES immediate full download in a variety of digital formats.
• US$75 Deluxe Edition Package: Ghosts I-IV in a hardcover fabric slipcase containing: 2 audio CDs, 1 data DVD with all 36 tracks in multi-track format, and a Blu-ray disc with Ghosts I-IV in high-definition 96/24 stereo and accompanying slideshow. Pre-order, to be shipped May 1, 2008. INCLUDES immediate download in a variety of digital formats.

The album (in all formats) is released under a remix-friendly Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, and all tracks are completely free of Digital Rights Management. As I've stated before, Trent Reznor is an incredibly savvy and forward-thinking dude, and actually treats his fans as reasonable and smart human beings; his business model for Ghosts I-IV (refined after the recent releases of Radiohead's In Rainbows and Saul Williams' The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!) rewards his fans, and makes it possible for casual listeners to get interested and spread the word.

From the man himself:

This music arrived unexpectedly as the result of an experiment. The rules were as follows: 10 weeks, no clear agenda, no overthinking, everything driven by impulse. Whatever happens during that time gets released as... something.

The team: Atticus Ross, Alan Moulder and myself with some help from Alessandro Cortini, Adrian Belew and Brian Viglione. Rob Sheridan collaborated with Artists in Residence (A+R) to create the accompanying visual and physical aesthetic.

We began improvising and let the music decide the direction. Eyes were closed, hands played instruments and it began. Within a matter of days it became clear we were on to something, and a lot of material began appearing. What we thought could be a five song EP became much more. I invited some friends over to join in and we all enjoyed the process of collaborating on this.

The end result is a wildly varied body of music that we're able to present to the world in ways the confines of a major record label would never have allowed - from a 100% DRM-free, high-quality download, to the most luxurious physical package we've ever created.

More volumes of Ghosts are likely to appear in the future.

- Trent Reznor, March 2, 2008

It'll be supremely interesting to have not one but four new albums worth of instrumental NIN. As soon as the zip file completes downloading (naturally, it's taking a while), and I get a chance to listen to it, I'll let y'all know. In the meantime, you can download Ghosts I completely for free, and taste the new music for yourself.

P.S. I heard about this very wonderful news from the Dresden Dolls mailing list, since Brian Viglione (who provides drums on tracks 19 and 22 of Ghosts I-IV) is the silent drumming half of the Brechtian punk cabaret duo.

The video for Saul Williams' "List of Demands," the 2004 song that got Reznor interested in him in the first place [source]. This makes me want to turn up the volume and dance around like a crazy person.

And below is the video of Williams performing the song live with Nine Inch Nails in 2005.

An email from Trent Reznor last week, via The Spiral email list:

As many of you know, I've been working closely with Saul Williams on his new record. We've spent many hours together in hotel rooms, busses, backstages and studios around the world working on something we knew was great. This is the most involved I've been with any project outside NIN since Antichrist Superstar, and I've been impatiently waiting for the chance for you to hear it. Well... guess what?

The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! has arrived! After my own recent dealings with record labels we decided to release it directly to you. Head over to www.niggytardust.com for all the details. Register now and you can download the record November 1st. Working on this project was a real pleasure. Saul was interested in breaking boundaries / crossing genres / defying expectations and we learned a great deal from one another in the process. When asked about the sound of the record, I've had to resort to "... I really don't know HOW to describe it." That's a good thing more than ever these days.

A word on the way we've chosen to release this. There are obvious similarities in how Radiohead just released their new record and the way we've chosen to. After thinking about this way too much, I feel we've improved upon their idea in a few profound ways that benefit you, the consumer. You obviously will be the judge of this in the end. One thing that IS very different in our situation is that Saul's not the household name (yet!) that Radiohead is, and that means we need your support on this more than ever. If you like what you hear, spread the word.

I hope you enjoy the music,

TR

Being the huge Trent fan that I am, I was at the very least intrigued. After going to the site, I was interested enough to plunk down $5.00 for the album.

A word about the publication. As he says above, the album is being released directly to the public, with no record label acting as middleman. However, the link to Trent and Nine Inch Nails certainly adds cachet to the project, and will hopefully bring in more listeners than if it had been produced by someone less well-known. As with Radiohead's In Ranbows, Saul Williams' The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! is now available as 15 DRM-free MP3 files. However, the difference here is that instead of setting your own price (and then, in addition, having to pay a fee to the transaction company, even if you enter £0.00), you can either download the entire album for free in 192Kbps format (which isn't shabby, but not quite CD quality), or kick $5.00 directly to the artist and download the album in one of three formats (192Kbps MP3, 320Kbps MP3, or FLAC lossless audio). The set price does take some of the choice away from the buyer, but, as Trent says, Williams is not yet a household name, so setting a minimum price is a bit of insurance that they'll be able to make some money from sales; plus, if you don't want to pay, you can always download the whole thing for free.

Another change is that they're using PayPal for the transactions, which is incredibly smart. I dread making a purchase online these days where I have to actually submit my credit card number; PayPal is secure, can handle a whole slew of currencies, and is phenomenally easy to use.

So I preordered the album in 320 kbps MP3 format last Friday, and got the email yesterday with the download link. Even zipped up, it took about an hour to download the whole album, including a 33-page liner-notes booklet in PDF (though I will say that my connection has been slower than usual lately, so it may not take that long for other folks). I listened to it on the train to class last night, and also on the way home. (I'm listening to it again right now as I write this.)

First impressions: it's very evident that Trent Reznor produced it; his industrial style is all over the album, but hey, that's why I bought it, right? His instrumentation is very similar to what he's used previously in Nine Inch Nails, and I note in the credits that he actually provides the music (whole or in part) for 12 of the 15 songs. So it's not just that he produced the album, he also had a very direct hand in the music as well. That said, all the lyrics (sung, rapped, or word-spoken), with the exception of the cover of "Sunday Bloody Sunday," belong to Saul Williams.

The percentage of hip hop in my overall musical tastes (Cyprus Hill, Eminem, M.I.A., Busta Rhymes, Beastie Boys, Rage Against the Machine, Chamillionaire, Lauren Hill, Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, Tricky) is fairly low, so I can't really talk about NiggyTardust in an overall hip hop context, but I'm digging the album so far. Only one of the songs, "Tr(n)igger," has samples from previous music (Public Enemy's "Welcome to the Terrordome"); everything else is original. It's industrial, it's hip hop, it's spoken word, it's raw and it's angry. There are times, mostly when Williams sings instead of raps, that his voice sounds eerily like Reznor's (making me wonder if this was purposely done, or whether it's a wonderful coincidence), so much that when Reznor actually adds background vocals for "WTF!" it's impossible to tell them apart; this track is also the most NIN-like on the album, which may be why it's my favorite song so far.

I very much recommend NiggyTardust if you're a fan of hip-hop and/or Nine Inch Nails, or if you want to support an artist in what will soon become a sizable community of musicians who want to break free of the control of music studios. If nothing else, you can download the album first for free, and if you like it, donate some money straight to Williams himself.

Some very cool news from Trent Reznor:

Hello everyone. I’ve waited a LONG time to be able to make the following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate. Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008. Exciting times, indeed. (via Ed)

I've blogged previously about Trent's awesomeness, and this is indeed exciting news. He's often commented about studio pressures impinging on his artistic vision (oddly similar to Poppy Z. Brite's relationship with Three Rivers Press), and of the actions taken specifically counter to his promotion of Year Zero (as part of the ARG associated with the album, he purposefully leaked mp3s of songs from the album before its release, both online and on thumb drives planted in the toilets of NIN concert venues, with the express purpose of P2P sharing, and his label stupidly sent cease-and-desist notices to the sharers).

Ed notes:

With Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead now operating without record contracts, perhaps the music industry might want to reconsider precisely how it conducts business. The artists and the listeners are not the enemies. The industry’s continued litigation towards online music listeners, the industry’s sustained avarice towards artists locked into unfair contracts, and the industry’s failure to embrace inevitability collectively suggest that we may very well be witnessing a remarkable revolution that may well knock the remaining wind out of record companies.

Other less well-known bands have already gone this route and begun selling directly to their fans -- Royal Crown Revue and Collective Soul are two that immediately come to mind, not to mention the legions of bands who give their music away on their websites and on MySpace -- but the fact that two huge players like Radiohead and NIN are no longer willing to play the record companies' game is a huge defection. I don't completely agree with Ed's assessment, but I sincerely hope that the company executives get their heads out of their asses and stop treating their customers as criminals. They're losing millions of dollars on their petty little RIAA crusades, and it's produced nothing but ill will toward them. It's time for a sea change, and we may be seeing its emergence.

Trent Reznor remains my hero:

Year Zero is selling for $34.99 Australian dollars ($29.10 US). No wonder people steal music. Avril Lavigne’s record in the same store was $21.99 ($18.21 US). By the way, when I asked a label rep about this, his response was: “It’s because we know you have a real core audience that will pay whatever it costs when you put something out - you know, true fans. It’s the pop stuff we have to discount to get people to buy.” So, I guess as a reward for being a “true fan” you get ripped off.

[...]

We will put out one last album for Universal and after that we will sell albums directly to fans from our website at (say) $4 an album.

Nine Inch Nails just played their first ever concert in China, and this is what he had to say to his Chinese fans:

As for the special situation in China, it does not seem to be easy to obtain Western music via legal channels, so I have the following suggestion for our fans: If you can find and buy our legal CDs, I express my thanks for your support. If you cannot find it, I think that downloading from the Internet is a more acceptable option than buying pirated CDs. Our music is easy to find on the Internet, and you might not need to spend much effort to find most of our songs. If you like our songs after you’ve heard them, please feel free to share it with your friends. As I have put all my effort and heart into my music, I sincerely hope that more and more people can share the enjoyment with us.

Still visionary, still relevant. The dude just gets it.

More soon...

Rolling Stone reports that Nine Inch Nails has initiated an unusual way to promote their new science-fictional concept album Year Zero:

It is no longer 2007. According to Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero mania sweeping the internation, we’re almost three months into -15 BA (Born Again). In the semi-terrifying world of Trent Reznor’s new future-based concept album, the year 2022 is Year Zero, the year we were “Born Again.” Every 12 months prior to Year Zero is denoted by negatives, thus 2007 is -15 BA. If this confuses you, give up now.

In what has to be the most innovative promotion scheme since the leaked sex tape, NIN have treated their fans to a sort of Where’s Waldo game that includes tour merchandising, a dizzying network of websites and, umm, bathrooms in European concert halls. We’d be lying if we said we weren’t checking echoingthesound, the main fan checkpoint, every hour to see what the latest update is.

In case you’ve been living under a rock (without internet), let us catch you up:

It all started with a NIN tour T-shirt. An overeager fan realized that the bolded letters on the back formed a phrase: iamtryingtobelieve, which if you add a .com to the end of it, takes us to the first piece of the puzzle. Here, we learn about the drug Parepin, which has been added to the water supplies of Orlando as protection against similar acts of bio-terrorism against Los Angeles and Anaheim in 2009 (or -13 BA…try to keep up). This site speculates whether Parepin is a medium for the government to control the minds of its citizens.

[...]

Throughout NIN’s European tour, members of whatever all-star marketing squad is behind all this have been leaving USB drives in random concert venues. The drives are filled with new NIN songs (”My Violent Heart” and “Me, I’m Not”), cryptic mp3s and pictures visible only via spectrographs. These files if deciphered correctly also provide us playing the game with the next clue/website.

Want to know if your bathroom is going to be raided? Those ingenious posters at echoingthesound have discovered that every time a pixel blob appears next to one of the songs listed here, you should hit the toilets early for a chance of grabbing one of these drives.

This reminds me a lot of the Alternate Reality Games that Sean Stewart was involved with to promote the film A.I. and the video game Halo 2. I wonder if he has a hand in this as well.

Lots of things to talk about (or at least point to), lots of tabs open, so here we go.

Thing #1: Chinese New Year

Gong Xi Fa Chai, everyone! Janet and I attended the CNY festivities this afternoon at the state fairgrounds, organized once again by TACAS, the Triangle Area Chinese American Society of North Carolina. We ate some veggie dishes, watched adorable kids approximate traditional dances, sampled teas, and I learned how to make an origami box (though I'm pretty sure that now I've forgotten).

Here's hoping the Year of the Fire Pig is a groovy one.

***

Thing #2: Volver

We checked out a matinee of this film earlier in the week, and wow. Not enough good things can be said. Pedro Almodóvar has crafted an extraordinary work of art here, ably assisted by an incredible cast; Penélope Cruz is voluptuous and strong and vulnerable and absolutely commands the viewer's attention whenever she's in a scene. I've been hoping to do a proper review, but other things have been diverting my attention lately; I'll just settle for urging anyone reading this to run out and plunk down your $8 to see this phenomenal movie.

The Volver website also has a number of interesting short essays by Almodóvar himself, including this one, on Genre and Tone:

I suppose that Volver is a dramatic comedy. It has funny sequences and dramatic sequences. Its tone imitates "real life" but it isn't a portrayal of local customs. Rather it has a surreal naturalism, if that were possible. I've always mixed genres and I still do. For me, it's something natural.

The idea of including a ghost in the plot is a basically comic element, particularly if you treat it in a realistic way. All of Sole's attempts to hide the ghost from her sister, or the way she introduces her to her clients, give rise to very comic scenes. Although what happens in Raimunda's house (the death of the husband) is terrible, the way in which she fights so that no one should find out and the way she tries to get rid of him also create comic situations.

Although mixing genres is something natural for me, that doesn't mean it's free of risk (the grotesque and the "grand guignol" are always a threat). When you move between genres and cross opposing tones in a matter of seconds, the best thing is to adopt a naturalistic interpretation that manages to make the most ludicrous situation plausible. The only weapon that you have, apart from a realistic setting, are the actors, or rather, the actresses, in this case. I had the good fortune that they are all in a constant state of grace.

***

Thing #3: The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson

Like many TV watchers in the States, my first exposure to Craig Ferguson was as Nigel Wick, the effeminate authoritarian boss on The Drew Carey Show, a character that always felt like a caricature, a cartoon. Who knew that the guy was actually genuinely funny?

Janet and I have become night owls since both my jobs ended in December (and I consequently didn't have to wake up early in the morning for work), and even though The Late Late Show is on opposite Conan O'Brien, we've started watching Ferguson more than Conan. In a battle of opening monologues, there's simply no contest; bucking the traditional format of hopping from topic to topic and ending each joke on one-liner, Ferguson instead spends fifteen minutes every night, the camera never moving or cutting away, improvising on just a few topics, moving from one to next in smooth segues that often involve self-deprecating remarks and double entendres. It's like a stand-up mini-set every single night, and more often than not, the guy's got me howling with laughter.

And hey, he's also written a novel: Between the Bridge and the River.

***

Thing #4: "The End of the Novel?" by William Deresiewicz

Deresiewicz examines Milan Kundera's newest book-length essay The Curtain:

Although Kundera rightly rejects the notion that he's a political writer, he did his best work after his immigration to France in 1975. As with so many twentieth-century writers, the tensions of exile seem to have tuned his imagination to its highest pitch. Unlike most others, he lived past the century's symbolic end in 1989, and the removal of the condition of exile -- not the fact of not being at home but the fact of not being able to be -- seems to have slackened it.

An interesting notion and one I hadn't thought of before, but it makes some sense. When I was putting my Kundera books up at SCBA, the ones I was least willing to part with were The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality, all of which seem more preoccupied with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia than his later work. These are the books that remain more vivid in my mind, and I'm curious as to whether it's because this was his most vibrant and exciting work, or whether the length of each (which far exceeds his later novella-length books) caused me to remain with the characters for a longer textual amount of time.

Regardless, even though Deresiewicz thinks The Curtain can't compare to Kundera's earlier book The Art of the Novel, I'll still be seeking it out at the library once we get to Singapore.

***

Thing #5: Year Zero

Nine Inch Nails is releasing a new album on 17 April, and Trent Reznor has posted two tracks on their MySpace page*: "Survivalism" and "My Violent Heart." And if those tracks are any indication, Year Zero is going to be a disappointing album. Frankly, The Fragile was the high point of Reznor's career; nothing he's done since (with the possible exception of the live album And All That Could Have Been and just a few tracks on With Teeth) has measured up in terms of quality and scope. It's been merely okay. This may have something to do with the complete turnover of his band members, or it may just be that his best days are now behind him.

I hope that this isn't the case, and being a completist NIN fan, I'll still pick up Year Zero when it drops, with an optimism toward the other songs on the album. But Trent, d00d, you're starting to lose me, man.

* Am I the only one who thinks that it's weird that Nine Inch Nails has a MySpace page? Because industrial metal + social networking tool for teenagers = Jason's brain exploding. Of course, Janet made the point that if you're any type of musician these days, you need to have a MySpace page in order to compete at all.

***

Thing #6: Nineteen Eighty-Four, the film

Some brave soul has posted the entire movie on Google Video Canada (via Ed), so go see it before it gets taken down. (The book is in the public domain now in Canada, but I'm guessing the film is not.) The Orwell novel is still one of my all-time favorites, and this film is the ultimate in adaptations. The acting, the direction, the cinematography, it all breaks my heart every time I see it. Big Brother is Watching You.

It's also one of the few DVDs I'm taking to Singapore.

***

Thing #7: Two skiffy writers coming to North Cackalacky

Cory Doctorow will be in North Carolina on 22 February, giving a talk on copyright at the University of North Carolina at 2:00 p.m. and a talk on privacy at Duke University at 5:00 p.m.

Jonathan Lethem will be reading at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh on March 26 at 7:00 p.m. to promote his new novel You Don't Love Me Yet.

***

Whew. Well, that's all for now. Happy rest-of-the-weekend, y'all.

The video for the new Nine Inch Nails single, "Only," directed by David Fincher, is now up at the nin.com Visuals page. At first I thought I was going to be bored by it, but Fincher does some really unusual and cool things, as I should have expected.

I also notice that almost every other NIN video that's been made is up there as well, either in downloadable or streaming formats, which is just awesome.

Just announced on NIN.com, the next release by Nine Inch Nails will be Halo 20: Only, which will be released internationally in several formats. According to Amazon, it'll be released in two parts as imports, which is damn expensive. Maybe it's because he gets more love from non-USians, I don't know. I just hope he offers it on the website as well, like he did for The Hand That Feeds.

And as with The Hand That Feeds, he's offering a free multitrack download of Only for people to remix and play with. And now you don't have to have GarageBand to access it.