Jul
01
As the NIN Hotline points out, today, the Nine Inch Nails website’s news feed featured a message from Trent Reznor announcing that he and longtime collaborator Atticus Ross have written the score for David Fincher’s new film The Social Network, which is about the founding of Facebook. It stars Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Rashida Jones, and Justin Timberlake.
Reznor writes, “I’ve always loved David’s work but quite honestly I wondered what would draw him to tell that story. When I actually read the script and realized what he was up to, I said goodbye to that free time I had planned.” He also mentions that he and Ross are currently in the process of “distilling the large amount of music we’ve written for this down to a satisfying record (or two).” He adds, “The film opens October 1 in the U.S. with the record likely available a couple of weeks ahead of that.”
Reznor calls the film “really fucking good. And dark!” I gotta admit, I’m extremely curious to see how Fincher turns the story of a bunch of nerds sitting at computers into something that Trent Reznor considers “dark.”
[via Pitchfork.com]
Jul
01
For his Record Club series, Beck gathers friends together to cover an entire album in a day, then posts the results to his website. So far, the Record Club choices have come from canonical or at least critically respected artists: the Velvet Underground, Skip Spence, INXS, Leonard Cohen.
But now Beck and friends have made their first batshit-ass crazy selection: Live at the Acropolis, the 1993 album from mustachioed Greek new age composer Yanni. As previously reported, Beck has enlisted Thurston Moore and Tortoise in his latest Record Club endeavor. (There’s something weirdly appropriate about the idea of Tortoise covering Yanni.)
The first track, “Santorini”, is up now, with a new track to be posted every week on Beck’s website throughout the summer. Tortoise don’t appear on “Santorini”; they won’t show up until later in the album. Beck’s website reports that “several studio musician heavyweights were brought in to read a heavily doctored score with interpolations of everything from Stravinsky to Shania Twain (look for others).”
While that’s happening, Beck runs around making noise and Thurston improvises new lyrics that, per Beck’s website, “give the track an added urgency and pathos.” And since you asked, here’s a sampling of those new lyrics: “Roasted pigs! Roasted pigs! Oinkin’ oinkin’ oinkin’ to the night sky! Orange orange disaster!”
[via Pitchfork]
Jun
30
I’m normally pretty anal (no pun intended. OK, yea there is…) about tagging my .mp3 files with proper names, punctuation, genre, artwork, etc. But the new Scissor Sisters album is seriously trying to make me rethink my ways…
Really? I realize you guys are gay, just like Erasure, Pet Shop Boys, Freddie Mercury, and David Lee Roth, but does your audience really need to see that?
“Scissor Sisters, Night Work: Recent interviews with Jake Shears find him lamenting the fact that he was sliding into the role of the “campy gay,” turning his sexuality into a cartoon and thereby neutralizing it. Night Work is an attempt to reverse that image…” via 17dots.com
Not doing a very good job of it as far as I can tell. Still, a great listen.
Jun
29
Good news for cash-strapped Prince fans in Europe: the songwriter plans on releasing his newest album, 20Ten, by including free copies inside various newspapers and magazines. The Daily Mirror and Scotland’s Daily Record will be responsible for distributing 2.5 million copies of the album, while the German edition of Rolling Stone will offer the 10-track disc in its August issue. 20Ten will also be released in Belgium via the country’s Het Nieuwblad newspaper. Other newspaper deals are likely to pop up in the coming weeks, as are details concerning the album’s release in North America. [Billboard.com via Allmusic.com]
Jun
21
“In an interview on BBC 6 yesterday, Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien said the band are currently in the studio wrapping up album number eight, as At Ease points out. “It’s genuinely exciting. It’s very different from what we did last time. It’s really nice to be doing this,” he said, contrasting the sessions with the recording of In Rainbows, which he referred to as “a slog.”
“Talking about a timetable for the release, O’Brien offered the following: “Ideally, it would be great if it came out sometime this year. It has got to; I hope so. We’re at the finishing line. When you’re making a record, a film, write a book for ages and ages you think the finishing line is miles away. Now it feels it’s in touching distance. But of course, it being a creative process, at the last bit also, you have bursts of energy, you achieve a lot of things in a small period of time and then you’re nearly there. It might slow down. But yeah, hopefully it will be a matter of weeks.”
Via Pitchfork.com
Jun
20
“It took so long to record… It was really hard to approach. We recorded about 140 gigabytes [worth] of songs. And when we started to select the tracks for the album that went down to 60 gigs…”
Hans Joachim Irmler of Faust on the recording of their first album in 39 years, Faust is Last
Jun
14
Writer Alan Moore has left the Gorillaz’ opera about Elizabethan alchemist/philosopher John Dee. Moore was set to write the project’s libretto and completed about a third of it, but when his role expanded to providing set/costume design, stage directions and “the whole story,” Moore pulled out. However, the incomplete libretto will appear in the literary magazine Strange Attractor. In other Gorillaz news, the band’s new single “Melancholy Hill” will be available as a special download bundle on iTunes next month.
