Sunday, July 13, 2025

Nine Inch Nails "Peel It Back" North American Tour: Aug 6 - Sept 18 | "Trent Reznor: ‘You’re Seeing the Fall of America in Real Time’" | The Guardian


Since its inception in 1988 as the brainchild of Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails have taken various non-commercial elements and counter-cultural components; songs about pain, anguish, existential confusion, power, control and submission, and combined them with noise rock, electronic dance music, and industrial rhythms, and then forged on an anvil into pop culture shapes for the goth-glam-rave set. Almost forty years on, Reznor and the only other long-term collaborator in the band, British composer Atticus Ross, are in one of their most fertile periods. As with their Bush-era treatise "Year Zero", the current political climate has charged their music once more. In interview with The Guardian, the band's frontman recounts surviving infamy, drug addiction, and a foray into tech, but in the years since has transferred his self-loathing for shame at the state of the nation, "Trent Reznor: ‘You’re Seeing the Fall of America in Real Time’". There are still glimmers of Reznor's self-focused egocentrism, a clear nod to such nepotistic tendencies can be seen in How to Destroy Angels, his band with his wife. But these are overshadowed by an intensified razor-focus on social unease and the disintegration of reciprocal faith seen in society, corporations, its citizenry and its workers. There have also been recent moments of deep personal loss and reflection, like their heartfelt cover of David Bowie’s "I Can’t Give Everything Away". Bowie’s final album "Blackstar" and its use of jazz elements alongside electronics, significantly influenced Nine Inch Nails' most recent mini-album "Bad Witch", with Reznor going further by saying; “If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t be here,”.

Rather than a new album, Reznor, Ross, Alessandro Cortini, Ilan Rubin, and Robin Finck will be embarking on this year's Peel It Back Tour on their series of recent EPs. "Not the Actual Events", the first in this trilogy of concise releases, was followed by 2017's "Add Violence", and the aforementioned "Bad Witch". Speaking with NME, Reznor said; "When we did "Not the Actual Events", we were kind of throwing the stylistic focus of the "Hesitation Marks" album out the window and being unafraid to explore approaches we have in the past". Shortly afterward, with the cultural setbacks of the coronavirus pandemic, they also launched into a series of instrumental, richly substantial environmental landscapes, anthologized and released as, “Ghosts I-IV”. As a response to the moment, “Nine Inch Nails Faced the Pandemic With Hope, Despair and Noise”, making these works available as cost-free downloadable content, the series of Ghosts continued into the pandemic with "Ghosts V: Together", and "Ghosts VI: Locusts". Alongside these new EPs and extended instrumental works, in recent years Reznor and Ross have established themselves as the collaborators of choice for such directors as, Nicole Kassell, Ken Burns, David Fincher, and Luca Guadagnino, composing soundtracks for both film and television. Few would have predicted "Trent Reznor’s Upward Spiral" as this bold mid-career reinvention for the cinema. Riding on these successes, the duo are now thinking in an even wider scope, and imagining an artistic empire which includes festival curation, such as this November's Future Ruins in Los Angeles. Indeed, in recent years it seems as though, "Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Have a Plan to Soundtrack Everything". Photo credit: Rob Sheridan.

Tuesday, July 1, 2025

"Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei" at Seattle Art Museum: Mar 12 - Sept 17 | "A Deep Dive into the Provocative and Creative World of Ai Weiwei" | The New York Times


On the eve of his previous major assembly of work at the Hirshhorn Museum, dissident artist Ai Weiwei found that he was unable to attend the event's opening, as the Chinese government had barred Ai from traveling abroad, an unofficial form of punishment for claims of tax evasion. Which he and his supporters consider a politically motivated attempt to silence one of China’s most high profile and outspoken intellectuals. The impounding of his passport by the Chinese authorities came about in 2011, when he was jailed, without charges, for three months. His effective disappearance gained international attention and protest amongst the international arts community. In his last interview before being detained, "Ai Weiwei: 'China in Many Ways is Just like the Middle Ages'" the artist described the constant state of omnipresent menace and surveillance by the authorities of him and others. In the years following, Weiwei braved periods of house arrest, a beating at the hands of local police that caused a brain hemorrhage, the following prosecution for tax evasion, the shutting down of his online presence within China, the revocation of his design firm’s license, and strikingly, "Ai Weiwei Responds to Chinese Authorities Destroying his Beijing Studio".

When his passport was returned in 2015, he left the country and has not returned since. Now residing in rural Portugal, where he maintains an art studio and farmhouse, Weiwei spoke on his new life as a artist in exile, "Ai Weiwei Finds Peace in Portugal: ‘I Could Throw Away all My Art and Not Feel Much’". Speaking further with The Guardian on everything from living in a dugout in Little Siberia, to his friendship with Allen Ginsberg in New York, Weiwei reveals a life that has driven his restless creativity, "Ai Weiwei: ‘It is So Positive to be Poor as a Child. You Understand how Vulnerable Our Humanity Can Be’". The "Challenging Work" born of this life is on display in Seattle Art Museum's "Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei", his largest survey to date in the United States, which traces his evolution from artist provocateur, to one of the most globally visible critics of authoritarianism. Coinciding with this month's Seattle Art Fair, the show features some 130 works in this "Deep Dive into the Provocative and Creative World of Ai Weiwei" spanning the mediums of performance, photography, sculpture, documentary video, and large scale installation. Some of which are known, like the Tate Modern’s commission of 100 million "Sunflower Seeds", while others are here in their international debut, such as "The Cover Page of the Mueller Report, Submitted to Attorney General William Barr by Robert Mueller on March 22, 2019", and others are variations on existing pieces, like the exacting recreation of the room of his extended detention at the hands of Chinese authorities, first seen in the exhibition entitled "S.A.C.R.E.D." for the Venice Biennale.