Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts

[Valen]

Mention Nine Inch Nails, and I guess most people's reaction might be "noisy industrial rock", but have any of you tried the album Ghosts, which explores the kind of soundscapes more associated with the music of Gabriel, Eno and Fripp?

It’s a fascinating experiment in ambience and manipulation of sound, and the more I listened to it, the more my respect grew for Reznor as a creative artist determined to follow his own muse.

I've put together a brief blog article to share some thoughts on why Ghosts is worth checking out, especially if you’re into the likes of Steven Wilson’s Bass Communion experiments or the new wave of composers like Max Richter.


https://momentstransition.wordpress....s-ghosts-2008/

[LeFrog]

Thanks for mentioning this.
I'm a long time NIN fan and always thought his music had some progressiveness to it.
Reznor has always included instrumentals on his albums and some of them go through several movements and combine multiple musical ideas in true progressive fashion.
I had always thought he should do an instrumental album so I was very excited when this album was released. One thing that disappointed me somewhat on Ghosts is that most of the tracks are based on a single musical idea that is fully exploited throughout the track. It may be due to the very quick writing and recording process (3 weeks IIRC), but that makes it closer the soundscape music you mentioned, when Reznor's previous instrumentals seemed more complex (by his standards) in terms of composition.
Still an album really worth checking out, I think.

[BrianG]

I received a promo of this when it came out and I would agree with the soundscapes label. Are there even track names?
Didn't they collaborate on the last Todd Rundgren album? Now there's a great pair.

[JAMOOL]

When it came out a lot of people tagged it as "NIN do an ambient album"...but it's really not ambient at all (unless you're using 'ambient' as sort of a catch-all for background-type music). I mean, a few of the 36 tracks are, but a lot of it feels like instrumental NIN tunes, most of which is just improvising around loops. I think for a certain set (who find Reznor too whiny and too willing to give into his pop instincts) it's sort of a godsend. I was expecting to get bored by track 4, wound up captivated by the whole thing. I agree the tunes are sort of underdeveloped and very few have more than one idea, but at the same time they're all 2-3 minutes long, so what can you expect really.

NIN are a neat band for me, I don't really like anything else in that genre but always seem to find time for them. Their latest EP/album series was really great. I like that Reznor still has that New Wave/funk thing going on. He's a pretty great songwriter. Also very cool that Reznor helped revitalize Gary Numan's career, given that Numan was a key influence for him.