The massive co-headline dates from Nine Inch Nails and Queens of the Stone Age is already one of next year’s most anticipated Australian tours.
For those looking for a nice preview of the upcoming show (or who missed out on tickets), there’s now the perfect salve: a free, full-length Nine Inch Nails concert movie.
This ain’t no shoddy fan-shot cobbled footage either, with the 80 minute feature arriving courtesy of Trent Reznor himself. In a partnership with video streaming service VEVO, the HD concert movie is of a show filmed at the Staples Center in Los Angeles from the 11th August, as part of the band’s Tension 2013 North American tour.
Dubbed Nine Inch Nails: Tension, the free, online movie is a precursor to an official, expanded release on BluRay, DVD, and digital in 2014 with “tons of extra content, 5.1 surround sound, and more.”
The setlist draws heavily from NIN’s minimal, menacing ‘comeback’ album, Hesitation Marks, but also includes plenty of Reznor staples – including ‘March Of The Pigs’, ‘The Hand That Feeds’, and the deathless set-closer, ‘Hurt’.
The concert also shows off the band’s trademark sense of scale and ambitious visuals from the revitalised lineup’s recent tour, with VEVO also offering some fascinating behind the scenes documentary footage on how Reznor and his fellow tech-boffins crafted their amazing production (Part 1: here. Part 2: here).
To coincide with the launch of the Tension: 2013 concert movie, Trent Reznor took a break from band rehearsals to embark on another reddit ‘Ask Me Anything’ session, where he discusses the band’s tour plans for 2014 among a series of other fascinating tidbits (including a “possible” 2014 re-issue of 1999 double LP, The Fragile).
Following in the typically droll vein of his earlier reddit fan engagement (in which he showed how to utterly destroy trolling fans), Reznor gave some thrifty, comic answers to some long-winded enquiries, including confirming further 2014 NIN tour plans, complete with a new musical lineup, setlist, stage show, and visuals. “What I’m doing this cycle is making each leg of the tour have its own identity… The setlist and presentation moving forward will be very different from what we just did…”
“What I’m doing this cycle is making each leg of the tour have its own identity,” explains Reznor. “…We’re currently rehearsing with a new incarnation of the band for what’s ahead,” says Reznor, with the current lineup featuring himself, Ilan Rubin, Alessandro Cortini, and Robin Finck.
“This keeps things fresh from a musician’s perspective, but also keeps things interesting for fans in an era where every show ends up on YouTube,” he continues.
“The setlist and presentation moving forward will be very different from what we just did. That’s part of the incentive behind releasing the Tension footage now. That was one very specific look at Nine Inch Nails in the Fall of 2013, that I wanted the whole world to be able to see (just like you can see the festival footage on YouTube, which was its own thing).”
Those changes to the NIN live show include the March co-headline tour with QOTSA, which was co-ordinated as a “better scenario” after Reznor famously snubbed an offer to headline Soundwave 2014 because “the bill sucked”.
Aside from cagily shutting down festival promoters, losing bandmates to in-fighting, and kindly explaining that Hesitation Marks “costs 10 bucks or go fuck yourself “, Reznor has also passed the time this year by collaborating with director David Lynch and Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, plus praising Kanye ‘Yeezus’ West as the year’s “most dangerous entertainer”.
All while the influential figure has been working behind the scenes to revolutionise streaming music services with his key involvement in the Dr. Dre-backed “game-changing” Beats Music.
The new music streaming service is now (finally) set for launch in January 2014, following its current beta phase as a number of artists and “other influences” test the new music streaming services, as TechCrunch reports.
Touching on the topic in his current reddit AMA session, Reznor responds to fan asking how the service will satisfy the needs of music-makers where the likes of Spotify have drawn intense criticism from a chorus of detractors that includes Thom Yorke, David Byrne, and Beck.
“I’ve spent the last 2+ years designing this platform and genuinely look forward to presenting it to the world,” Reznor says. “Our goal was to create something we would genuinely be excited to use ourselves that focuses on the joy of discovering great music, ease of use, and was built from the ground up as something that becomes an asset to the musician as well. There’s much you’ll hear me say on this in the near future.”
