Despite being “disheartened” by the record buying public in January, earlier this month, Trent Reznor, the czar behind the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails circumvented the normal music industry channels by independently releasing the album Ghosts I-IV – a four-disc collection of 36 tracks closely resembling the monotonous, droning sounds of multiple Hoover vacuum cleaners turned on at once – on the band’s website.
Normally inclined to mostly ignoring traditionally recorded music with proper choruses, melodies and lyrics, the public surprised many by shelling out for the album – and its limited fancypants $300 ultra-deluxe edition – in droves racking up Reznor and his co-horts a cool $1.6 million (Reznor publicly disclosed the figures he made almost immediately and then threw Radiohead under the bus for not doing the same).
Then mid-month, Reznor expanded the Ghosts project to a visual domain, partnering with YouTube to create the Ghosts “Film Festival”: essentially urging users to take whatever (usually copyrighted) material they could find and creating music videos for the songs. In a YouTube clip (naturally), Reznor explained the “film festivals” intentions:
“We’ve treated this entire project like it was en experiment. When we started working on the music we would generally start with a visual reference that we would imagine – a place or setting or situation and then attempt to describe that with sound, texture and melody, and treat it in a sense as it were a soundtrack. As we started down that path and it started to yield results that we were pleased with we wanted, we wondered how we could expand the experiment to involve the community.”
Reznor stressed that the festival wasn’t a contest with some “elaborate prize,” but rather a place for collaborative online experimentation stating that the band had visual intention from the projects inception last fall and deliberately left the album’s track names untitled so they wouldn’t “taint” the listeners experience.
Those skeptical of the idea (us) were duly surprised when we checked and found over 450 videos completed just eleven days after the project was announced. This should boost Reznor and company who had some potentially high hopes for the projects expansion.
“We’ve discussed some interesting ways this could go, ” Reznor wrote on his website. “Including multiple installments of the online ‘film festivals,’ to broadcast TV specials, to a one-time live performance of the entire Ghosts record with your visuals involved. It really depends on how this progresses and develops.”
Well, Trent, looks like this things has definitely developed and progressed. Your move. We’ve done the hard work of looking through all of the clips* and selecting the best ones for your viewing pleasure. [ed.* semi-blatant lies].
Watch: Trent Reznor Announces Ghost Film Festival
Sample selections: