![]() ![]() I’d heard music that seemed to not want to disrupt or distract from its own sense of self, but here it sounded like they’d forced a mistake into the composition. I’d never heard an idea like that before. “Ruiner” was also a favorite of mine because of its ultra strange lofi guitar solo section, which all of a sudden sounds like the quality of the record has changed. Even the main acoustic guitar in “Hurt” has this gentle stuttering sound, which makes it feel on edge and unstable - almost to the point of undermining the song, but due to the vulnerable nature of the lyrics, it all ultimately makes sense. Take for example, the middle section of “Mr Self Destruct” - a ridiculous change of dynamics, from violent distortion to a very basic and quiet bass line - or the almost cabaret-style piano break section in “March of the Pigs, which is so unexpected that it almost sounds sarcastic. It isn’t just aggressive though there is softness, and vulnerable, broken-sounding moments happening everywhere. ![]() This kind of abrasion happens across the record in tracks like “Heresy,” “March of the Pigs,” “Big Man With a Gun,” and “Eraser.” The opening of “Mr Self Destruct,” sounds like 20 distortion fuzz pedals slamming out of the speakers. The distorted guitars on this album are like white noise, more so than any others I’ve ever heard. ![]() I’ve always loved that the record cover itself portrays the sounds on the record: the dirty, smudged, and degraded textures. But listening to NIN started to shift my awareness of this, and I became cognizant of all the ways you can treat and shape sounds. At that point, I hadn’t thought about music production - I just thought music was made with instruments and recorded and it sounded like how it was played. I bought it on CD and listened to it to death for the many years that followed.įor some context: I had only been playing guitar for a few years at that point and was playing Radiohead, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Deftones, etc - so The Downward Spiral was totally wild compared to anything else I had been listening to, and changed how I understood you could write music. At some point the same year, a stoner friend of mine showed me the Downward Spiral album in full, and I immediately became obsessed. It wasn’t long before me and my friends were obsessing over the irregular time signatures of “March of the Pigs,” the punk aggression of its stark, basic music video, and the weird, explicit sexual nature of the “Closer” video. I think the first videos I would have seen were “Wish” and “Head Like A Hole” on MTV2 - the latter of which I instantly loved because it was catchy, very heavy, but also had this weird dance music groove and production that I hadn’t heard before (or, at least, that I could only connect to the gritty heavy dance style of The Prodigy). I first listened to Nine Inch Nails when I was at school, around the ages of 12 to 15, which would have been the mid- or late 1990s. ![]()
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