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 returned to the series of instrumental, richly substantial environmental landscapes, previously 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 both "Ghosts V: Together", and "Ghosts VI: Locusts" released in 2020. Alongside these three EPs and expanded instrumental series, 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.

Luca Guadagnino's “Bones and All” at SIFF Cinema: Nov 22 - Dec 15

Filmgoers familiar with the director's breakout 1980s period romance, "Call Me by Your Name", can attest to his artistry and the sumptuous, corporeal, physical attributes of, "Luca Guadagnino's Cinema of Desire". Among the array of sensory craft on display in the film, the soundtrack offers an almost baroque reinforcement of the Italian coastline's rapturous beauty. Yet, like the mildly feverish fantasia of "A Boy’s Own Desire in ‘Call Me by Your Name’", passions of mind and heart bear influence over the following tumult, sorcery, and inner and outer conflicts of his following remake of "Suspiria". This is both apparent in the film's sound design as well as the prominent role Radiohead's Thom Yorke is given in his score for the film. An audiovisual banquet, it also watches as a showcase for the cinematography of Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, known for his award winning collaborations with Thai arthouse auteur, Apichatpong Weerasethakul. By setting his adaptation in a concretely placed sociopolitical setting, and a witchily uncanny eye for references within modern dance, Guadagnino's film offered a very different, and deeply melancholic, point of entry into the nightmare of The Three Mothers. And it is between these two points of reference that we find his Venice Film Festival shocker, with an aesthete's obsessive fixation on the sensory that Luca Guadagnino delivers his most sympathetic and carnal vision to date. This "extravagant and outrageous movie; scary, nasty and startling in its warped romantic idealism" as Peter Bradshaw calls it in the pages of The Guardian, delivers its viewers a, "Cannibal Romance that is a Heartbreaking Banquet of Brilliance". Enhanced by the talent of its cinematographer, Arseni Khachaturan, and another of Guadagnino's explicit choices in music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, this is  a very different tale about a flesh-eating compulsion than those that have been made popular in recent prestige television. Nor is it another young adult exploration of youthful rebellion, marginalization, or the outsider status of a subset of identity politics, contrary to what audiences might conclude from the casting of its young stars. It is instead a finely tuned fusion of genres, that finesse a deeply sympathetic perspective on the grotesque. In "Bones and All" Guadagnino has tangibly crafted a film that burns with a shame and brand of desperation, born of poverty and homelessness and the tragedy and ruthlessness of survival. Yet underlying these earthly concerns, is a dreamlike pull that somehow both nourishes and cleanses away the horror.

Brett Morgen's "Moonage Daydream" at SIFF Cinema Sept 23 - Oct 20 | "The Final Mysteries of David Bowie’s Blackstar: Elvis, Crowley, and The Villa of Ormen" | The Guardian

Smashing onto screens at this year's Cannes, Brett Morgen's "Glorious, Shapeshifting Eulogy to David Bowie", comes to domestic theaters this month and regionally at SIFF Cinema Egyptian. Consciously averting the documentary format, Morgen's intimate montage of the uniquely influential artist celebrates his career, creativity, and decades of restless self discovery. Given unprecedented access to Bowie's personal archives, "Moonage Daydream" takes a cue from Bowie's own childhood wonder at the "Sound and Vision" experiences of early rock and roll washing over the artist as a young man. Through an assembly of audio-visual collage, this archive of five million items, including paintings, drawings, recordings, photographs, films, and journals, were structured into an experiential cinematic odyssey. The result is a sensory "Tripping David Bowie's Sound and Light Fantastic", as the musical and spiritual journey of the artist's life, featuring Bowie's own narration. Tony Visconti, who spent much of Bowie's career as recording producer, recently completed the massive retrospective box sets for Parlophone, which include "Five Years (1969–1973)", "Who Can I Be Now? (1974–1976)", "A New Career in a New Town (1977–1982)", "Loving the Alien (1983–1988)", and "Brilliant Adventure (1992–2001)", serves as the film's musical director, with a team including Paul Massey, and meticulous musical edits and collage throughout by Morgen. The ensuing audio-visual experience, as described by Robert Daniels, for RogerEbert.com is, "a bombastic, overstimulating, poignant, life-affirming, and risk-taking summation of the artist's ethos and maturation as a person. In short, 'Moonage Daydream' is a film David Bowie would've proudly made." The amassed effect of this "David Bowie Documentary as Dynamic as the Man Himself" is a glorious celebratory montage of archive material, live performance footage, Bowie’s experimental video art and paintings, movie and stage work, and interviews that run the spectrum from the philosophical and revealingly personal, to humorously self-deprecating.

Morgen suggests that David Bowie’s first great period came to an end with the 1970s, but that his intellectual curiosity and creativity continued to have something more than a little heroic and magnificent to it as the years went by. And perhaps his following adventures in other art forms, like playing the "Elephant Man" on stage was slightly misjudged in that Bowie had already absorbed all these things, and was drawing on their energy in his rock persona. His film performances in the late 1970s and early 80s, in Nicolas Roeg's "The Man Who Fell to Earth", Tony Scott's "The Hunger", and Nagisa Oshima's "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" led into his era of super stardom, following the 1983 international pop hit "Let's Dance". The ensuing decade, while delivering massive success and arena-filling performances, where as Bowie describes it in "Moonage Daydream", a vast expanse of uncultivated and barren rewards for the artist. What Morgen shows next, through personal video documentary, home recordings and travel footage is the superstar become "bohemian vagabond" as Bowie entered into a period of restless international travel and personal rediscovery. In one of his most startling and unexpected transformations, (of many), David Bowie reemerged into the 1990s with a set of creative collaborations that directly engaged with the zeitgeist. Enlisting artists and producers, including the return of Brian Eno on the 1995 multimedia concept album, "Outside (The Nathan Adler Diaries: A Hyper-cycle)", Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails on "The Hearts Filthy Lesson" and the video singles and remixes for 1997's "Earthling", and regular Tin Machine collaborator and The Cure guitarist, Reeves Gabrels on the 1999 album, "Hours". More recently on this side of the millennial cusp, both "Heathen" and his penultimate album "The Next Day", acted as a preview of things to come on David Bowie's last and final turn at an artistic metamorphosis. This "rich, deep, and strange album that feels like Bowie moving restlessly forward, his eyes fixed ahead; the position from which he's always made his greatest music." was released as his ultimate swansong, "Blackstar" just two days before his death in 2016. So rich in fact, that it has been half a decade now in the minds of its listeners, that much of the meaning and its inspirations have yielded up, "The Final Mysteries of David Bowie’s Blackstar: Elvis, Crowley, and 'The Villa of Ormen'".

Traveling the Backwards Path to the Musick of Coil

Like the posthumous novel, there are on occasion albums that appear in the world in the wake of their creators that redefine the artist's trajectory, effectively rewriting their past with it's influence. "Backwards" is such an album. After the rapturous vocal invocations and dream-murmuring of Jhonn Balance ceased upon his accidental death in 2004, his creative partner and ex-lover Peter Christopherson spent the ensuing years having relocated to Thailand, building a shrine to the decades of their shared creative project, Coil. Assembled from sessions ranging from more than a decade old to just weeks before the Jhonn's fatal accident the album was a hauntingly melodic, funereal, maudlin affair. "The Ape of Naples" and it's companion release "The New Backwards" both released in a deluxe vinyl box set in 2007, were the last funereal echo of the dou's decades of shape-shifting psychedelic decadence. Work had also begun on a comprehensive archive of their recorded output, but the "Colour Sound Oblivion" box set was to be the only publicly released artifact of this endeavor before Peter's own demise in 2010. Shortly before his death, in a 2009 interview as part of Resonance FM's feature, "Peter Christopherson on the Hour of the Apocalypse" he spoke to the aesthetic and technical nature of those recordings from a decade before. In the interview he details Coil's choice to never release the fruits born of the sessions spent in the mid-1990s following an invitation to record in Trent Reznor's New Orleans studio. A decision partially born of the recordings being a product of the influences of their time and setting, which as the years passed Christopherson felt Coil had moved beyond. There were also complications with Nothing Records' larger corporate umbrella, Interscope, and the the legal requirements of it's release producing a confluence of factors that caused the album to be shelved. First temporarily and then, as the new century arrived, permanently. Regardless of the the holding field the album itself was contained in, it's mythic status continued to gestate through the decade, occasionally inflated by Coil revealing the inner workings of their "Obscure Mechanics" in philosophical interviews in the pages of The Wire.

At the time a quartet comprising the central constants of Peter and Jhonn, who were then joined by Drew McDowall and Danny Hyde, all involved describe recordings sessions that were fruitful and often inspired. Balance quoted in interviews at the time, spoke of the recordings as a vehicle for exploring the idea of sensory derangement as a path to illumination. In a 2012 in-depth piece for Compulsion Hyde's account of the sessions some 20 years before is that they were fueled by the enthusiasm of travel and the setting of a city abundant with history and it's own richly bohemian pastiche of cultures. As well as the benefits of what he describes as "a very fine studio", there was the intensified blood and passion drawn from working with a crew that were operating in heightened form, particularly he cites; "Geoff Rushton [Jhonn Balance] had been taking vocal lessons as his voice just seemed to project power that I hadn't heard before." Variously titled, "International Dark Skies", "God Please F*ck My Mind for Good", "Fire of the Mind" and "The World Ended A Long Time Ago", the album has gone through as many titles as iterations over the years. From the original 1993 demo cassette leaked from Torso Records to the various tracks appearing via Coil's short-lived Song of the Week series, to a 2001 Dutch Radio4 broadcast containing both demo and New Orleans studio mixes to the aforementioned assimilation of the session's material into the corpus of "The Ape of Naples" and "The New Backwards". The immediate years that followed were prolific as Coil continued into even further-afield esoteric realms of aural exploration, generating numerous side projects and pseudonyms along the way. Their "Black Light District: A Thousand Lights in a Darkened Room", the Scrying Mirror enhanced Time Machines and ritualistic Solstice series hinting at the spectral, haunted atmospheres and semi-improvised, open-ended songforms that would characterize the later Musick to Play in the Dark albums of the millennial cusp. Balance and Christopherson were rarely known to look to their own past, particularly in the throes of this new body of somnambulistic Moon Musick. As Astralnauts making forays into "The Sounds of Blakeness" the hope that they would return to the New Orleans sessions became more and more remote.

This month the decades-long story of the album's abstruse genesis comes to a conclusion amid a flurry of activity. Jon Whitney of the longstanding online music and underground culture entity Brainwashed has issued a statement establishing among other things, the ongoing continuance of his work on their shared endeavor in the wake of Peter's death. Upon the occurrence of the Brainwaves Festival in 2008 he and Christopherson began the assimilating and building of the highest quality materials available representing Coil's recorded history into the intended corpus that would become the Threshold Archives. As the entity sanctioned by Christopherson and the family of Geoff Rushton, the archives have released the first of their proposed series in response to releases of varying propriety issued this month by other parties. Foremost among them, Danny Hyde has produced his personal master tapes of the completed "Backwards" album from the British and New Orleans sessions in a edition newly remastered by Gregg Janman. Hyde's statement on the Cold Spring Records site crediting it's entombment for decades at the hands of Interscope to Universal Music's "grey men", and their legal contract concerning it's initial release. For those looking to explore the 22 years of mystic, psychedelic, rapturously unique and deeply beguiling music Jhonn and Peter created over the decades of Coil's existence, there is no better guide to their cultural continuum than David Keenan's "England's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground". More concise compendiums tend to be on the exiguous side, but few resources online balance Coil's deep plumbing of the esoteric with their occasional alignment with the cultural milieu better than Russell Cuzner's Strange World Of... feature for The Quietus, "Serious Listeners: The Strange and Frightening World of Coil". A more personal take on their latter ritualistic Aural-Astral phase can be had in my own assembly of words from 2008, inspired by what was then believed to be their final recordings, "Remote Viewers of Love's Secret Domain: The Musick of Coil".