It has always been frustrating for me to read new CD reviews … What are the critics saying about ____? The more important questions have always seemed to be Who are these critics and Why should I be interested in their value judgments?

So much of modern culture revolves around codifying, describing, and categorizing art products, arguing for the supremacy of one product, one CD, one painting over the other. We send our opinions into battle as logical concepts with Kant smiling in his grave over our ambiguous taste; we too smile – smiles of silent contentment about knowing the truth, understanding the right answer, possessing good taste, having a better appreciation of the artistic facts than the man next door.

It’s unavoidable, really, both the observation and experience of these phenomena, but today let us appreciate the fact that we will not have to do this with the new Nine Inch Nails material. I won’t tell you that the songs are good or that the songs are bad, that NIN has improved over time or has become rubbish. I won’t write that way because Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts doesn’t ask to be critiqued in such a manner.

Nine Inch Nails, oh, Nine Inch Nails. We’ve seen you practically establish the industrial rock genre. We’ve been wowed by your live performances. We watched as you won multiple Grammy Awards. And, now, seven studio albums later, we’ve witnessed you really and truly probe the creative process. And that very idea is what this article focuses on: the artistic process entailed in producing Ghosts, NIN’s latest work. And, reader, you will soon understand why… why this thematic focus is practically necessitated.



The material was released on March 2nd via NIN.com. That website has also recently announced some dates for an extensive tour that begins in July and will be promoting the new tracks.

These songs. How were they made; how did they come about? Well, Trent Reznor has released several audio clips of him discussing that very process. The tracks certainly weren’t intended or anticipated; they just happened. “Much to our surprise,” Reznor says, “we ended up with thirty-six tracks.” Thirty-six tracks. Thirty-six tracks in ten weeks. TR had given himself a ten week timeframe within which to create, essentially, anything. One song might have come out, or one hundred. With the time period as the only structured preconception, Reznor was free to create. Free to do as he pleased. And a significant portion of this freedom is attributed to being without a record label, as he states, “I wouldn’t have been as comfortable trying to pull [this] off on a major label…something I wanted to do…that felt exciting and different and kind of fun.” This album is the band’s first that has not been released by Interscope since 1989’s Pretty Hate Machine. Without limitations imposed by a label, TR was able to avoid the effort of funneling his music into a pop song mold.

The freedom involved in the composition process, which engendered songs that may likewise be described as free, went something like this… Reznor would sit down and picture a visual image; he would conjure up some vision and then attempt to create it with sound. The end results, he says, “[are] basically soundtracks to daydreams” that formed as he “just pictured something in [his] head.” This idea is similar to European classical program music that intended to suggest extra-musical ideas, images in the mind of the listener by musically representing a scene, image or mood.

The new Nine Inch Nails songs weren’t created in an effort to fulfill some externally imposed expectations; they were made out of pure spontaneity and enjoyment of the creative process. To me, this is an example of subverting the contemporary cultural machinery that has been established for distributing popular music. Reznor’s is a process that very much reminds me of Jacques Attali – the French economist and scholar – and his hope for saving music from the harrowing grips of capitalism wherein all art becomes interchangeable and of equal value.

In his book, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Attali theorizes that the trend of promoting bad music that merely fits a certain popular image can only truly be obstructed when “the musician plays primarily for himself, outside any operationality, spectacle, or accumulation of value…[when] music extricates itself from codes and emerges as activity that is end in itself and creates its own code with each work.” And so we hear Trent Reznor similarly discuss abandoning major record labels and creating music for the pure pleasure of the endeavor, describing his experimentation with “different sounds and textures and feelings” as “the most fun [he’s] had in the studio in a long time.”

To make Ghosts, yes, Trent Reznor was free from a label and its prescriptions, but he also worked to liberate himself from his own mind. What he wanted to do was to make a record without using “the editorial brain.” He “never switched that brain on” and, instead, just let his “ideas turn into whatever they turn[ed] into.” He wasn’t critiquing every idea or painstakingly writing out melodies note-by-note; he was simply letting the music effortlessly arise from within him. Again, Reznor impresses me with his discussion of the creative process and reminds me of another theoretical dialogue. In the cross-section between psychology and Buddhism, there is a concept called flow.

Mihaly Csikszentmihaly wrote a book describing this idea wherein to truly and intimately experience life, we must engage in activities that we are able to lose ourselves in. The theory explains that, whether it be sex or painting or physics calculations, fully engaging ourselves in activities allows for the most valuable and meaningful experiences in life. These are the endeavors that we devote ourselves to without concern of anything else, that we use to distract ourselves from the humdrum progression of daily routine, that we look up from after an hour thinking that only a minute has passed… And this is exactly what Trent Reznor seems to have done in the creation of Ghosts. He says, “If I didn’t think about it…music just started to flow out…effortless, sort of formless.” TR lost himself in the process of creation, not overanalyzing the sounds that he was creating, and ended up with a concept album that gives credence to the marksman’s idea that if you focus too much on a rifle target, you won’t hit the bull’s eye; instead, you have to let go and lose yourself in experience.

The thirty-six songs created in this manner are all without titles, merely numbered tracks. This was a purposeful choice by Reznor so that the names wouldn’t taint a listener’s response to the music. Instead, he wants you listen to the songs as if you were on a journey, imaging scenes as the music carries you to someplace else. Though TR had specific images in his head as he created the tracks, he wants listeners to summon their own scenes to accompany the music. In fact, Reznor is calling for submissions to a Nine Inch Nails film festival.

And that kind of creative exploration is what this album is really about…at both the level of production and at the level of listening. So, I’m not going to end this article with a summary of the motifs or the sounds of the styles of the new tracks, I’m going to have to leave those judgments up to you. NIN.com has tracks available to download and purchase, in addition to various CD and limited edition sets. There is also a streaming player here.

The Ghosts tracks really seem to be ghosts – amorphous, nameless, formless entities asking only to be defined by the imagination of the observer. And that observer is you.

Fatality secretly knows that I Ghosts 6 is actually the best track. Obviously and objectively so.