David Fisher : What is Noise Blog

Trent Reznor has just knocked the ball out of the ballpark. In fact he has ripped the ball to shreds, and broken the bat in two upon impact and impaled the umpire that is the record industry with it.

This evening Trent posted a series of albums online called Ghosts I-IV. The first album Ghosts I he released as a free download via his website, and also posted it to his favorite site The Pirate Bay. Oh, and did I mention all are released as Creative Commons?

The fun doesn’t stop there.  There’s a wide range of physical purchase options. These range from $5 to $300 for a limited box set of vinyl and CDs, signed by Trent. Unfortunately the site tonight is slammed after the Digg post of it and I’m unable to get in there and drop my cash on the big box set. What can I say? I like vinyl, and I’m into supporting artists directly.

I think the concept that people won’t pay for music is being proven dead, after the Radiohead release, and now with this. People will pay for music. It just has to be good music. This crap that the radio is loaded with isn’t worth paying for. Maybe we need to realize that there’s only a handful of excessively talented people in the world that are making music worth paying for?

I have just finished downloading the .torrent file and I’m giving it an initial listen. Using headphones since my neighbors would kill me. So far it’s sounding very dark, well written, sparse and noisy.  He’s working with some instrumentation that I haven’t heard him use before. It’s really nice. Can’t wait to give a full review.

Update: Torrent file of all 4 albums. Please buy them if you like, but hey… it’s Creative Commons. I for one think he deserves my cash.

Update 2: It gets even better. Boston’s very own Brian Viglione of the Dresden Dolls is playing drums on some of it! Holy Crap! Also, he’s releasing data CDs with full tracks of all songs for remix. More information about the CD’s concept and creation can be found here.

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