Trent Reznor discussed Nine Inch Nails musical ideas he has written in the last couple of years in a new interview with Zane Lowe. Alternative Nation transcribed his comments.
“Well the last couple of years, we got off tour with Nine Inch Nails. Atticus [Ross] was working on some projects of his own, I had set up a new studio and was working on a variety of tangents really. Not focused on songs necessarily, but 20 things of a certain direction, to explore it and try out, different genreish type experiments. It was while I was working heavily with Apple, so it was a bit of a distraction. My brain was kind of split between the more technological execution thinking, then I had these musical experiments to kind of ground me.
Earlier this year, 2016, Atticus and I spoke about, let’s take the next few years and commit to working together on a variety of projects, keep it interesting. Included in that would be Nine Inch Nails, as well as film work, and anything else interesting that comes up. So we started going through this pile, maybe 80 things that I had accrued of these exercises.”
“They were musical experiments, so they were different A-B sections put together. They varied, but some of them were pretty full, fleshed out.”
“So we went through them, and mainly threw most of them out. You realize okay, that served its purpose, I was learning something new, or I was excited. For example, I got excited by some minimalist techno, some thing like Plastic Man, and really studied what that was about.”
Reznor added that ‘98%’ of the ideas had been thrown out.
