Ghosts I-IV Review

Ghosts I–IV (also known as Halo 26) is the sixth studio album by Nine Inch Nails and was released on March 2, 2008. It contains 36 instrumental tracks and was recorded in ten weeks of autumn 2007 and is the first Nine Inch Nails album outside of a record label contract. Initially intended to be a five-track EP,[2] the album is presented in the form of four nine-track instrumental EPs. The tracks do not have names, and are only identified by their track listing, position, and album art. The team behind the project included Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, and Alan Moulder, with instrumental contributions from Alessandro Cortini, Adrian Belew, and Brian Viglione.

The album was released under a Creative Commons license, and in a variety of different packages at different price points, including a US$300 "Ultra-Deluxe Limited Edition". The album was initially released digitally on the Nine Inch Nails official website, without any prior advertisement or promotion. Via the official Nine Inch Nails YouTube profile, a user-generated "film festival" was announced, where fans were invited to visually interpret the album and post the results. According to Reznor, the album was stripped of much artwork and accompanying visual interpretation for the purposes of the film festival.

Critical reception of the album has generally been favorable, with many news agencies commenting on the unorthodox release of the album. Much coverage of the album has compared Ghosts I–IV to Radiohead's In Rainbows and Saul Williams' The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!.

In 2007, Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor announced that the band had completed its contractual obligations to the band's record label, Interscope Records, and had split from the company. Reznor also revealed that Nine Inch Nails would likely distribute its next major album independently, possibly in a similar fashion to Saul Williams' 2007 album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!, which he produced. The last Nine Inch Nails release on Interscope was Year Zero Remixed, a remix album based on material from Year Zero.

According to the official Nine Inch Nails website, Ghosts I–IV arose from an experiment: "The rules were as follows: 10 weeks, no clear agenda, no overthinking, everything driven by impulse. Whatever happens during that time gets released as... something." Reznor explained that "I've been considering and wanting to make this kind of record for years, but by its very nature it wouldn't have made sense until this point".

The music arose improvisationally, and the band's initial intentions of releasing a single EP of the material was expanded to include the increasing amount of material. The core creative team behind the project was Reznor, Atticus Ross, and Alan Moulder. Live-band member Alessandro Cortini, Adrian Belew, and Brian Viglione also contributed instrumental performances on select tracks.

Viglione, who contributed percussions to tracks 19 and 22, revealed in an interview that Reznor's instructions to him were to "build a drumkit. Piece together any stuff that you want to bang on; rent what you want to rent. Have fun and ... be creative—See where your mind and your ideas take you." Viglione's makeshift drum kit included a "50-gallon trash can ... two empty office cooler jugs, and ... a cookie tray with a chain laid across it."

Ghosts I–IV was released online on March 2, 2008 on the official Nine Inch Nails website, without any prior advertisement or notice. Physical versions of the album were released via RED Distribution on April 8, in both double CD and 4-LP formats. Reznor has also stated that "more volumes of Ghosts are likely to appear in the future."

The album is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license, in effect allowing anyone to use or rework the material for any non-commercial purpose, as long as credit is provided and the resulting work is released under an identical license.Reznor explained this move by saying "It's a stance we're taking that we feel is appropriate ... with digital technology, and outdated copyright laws, and all the nonsense that's going on these days". Jim Guerinot, manager of Nine Inch Nails, explained the unconventional release of the album as "[not] a reaction to what doesn’t exist today. ... it’s more just like, 'Hey, in a vacuum I can do whatever I want to do.'" Guerinot went on to say that "[Reznor's] appetite is such that: 'I want a little bit of everything. I’m not content with just a singular experience.'"

The album's initial release on the official Nine Inch Nails website suffered problems as the website was inundated with traffic, and was not fully operational until March 4 because, according to Reznor, extra servers were needed to handle the influx of downloaders. A 40-page PDF document of the album's liner notes was included with official downloads of the album, and is also available from the band's official website. A week after the album's release, the official Nine Inch Nails site reported over 750,000 purchase and download transactions, amassing over US$1.6 million in sales. Pre-orders of the $300 "Ultra-Deluxe Limited Edition" sold out in less than three days of its release.

Release versions:

Ghosts I–IV was released in a number of different formats at various price points:

Ghosts I (no halo number) – free
Contains the first nine tracks, available for free online from either the official Nine Inch Nails website or officially from various BitTorrent trackers, including The Pirate Bay. If downloaded from the official site, it also includes a 40-page PDF and additional wallpapers, web banners, and icons.

Digital release (Halo 26) – US$5 to download directly from NIN
The entire album in DRM-free formats, including high bitrate MP3 (320kb/s), FLAC and Apple Lossless formats. Also includes the same extras as the free version.

Two-Disc release (Halo 26 CD) – $10
Includes two audio CDs and a 16-page booklet. Also includes a web key for immediate access to the digital release.

Vinyl release (Halo 26 V) – $39
Standalone 4-LP 130 gram vinyl set in a double gatefold package.

Deluxe Edition (Halo 26 DE) – $75
Includes two audio CDs, a data DVD containing multitrack files for use with audio editing software, a Blu-ray Disc with the album in high-definition 96 kHz 24-bit stereo and accompanying slide show, and a 48-page hardcover book with photographs. Set to ship on May 1, 2008. Also includes a web key for immediate access to the digital release.

Ultra-Deluxe Limited Edition (Halo 26 LE) – $300
Includes everything in the Deluxe Edition, as well as a 4-LP 180 gram vinyl set in a fabric slipcase, and two exclusive limited edition Giclée prints, which are different for each copy. Limited to 2,500 pieces, numbered and signed by Trent Reznor.

Reznor described the music of Ghosts I–IV by saying "This collection of music is the result of working from a very visual perspective - dressing imagined locations and scenarios with sound and texture; a soundtrack for daydreams." PopMatters' review of the album compared its musical style to Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, ultimately describing it as "Dark ambient". The review went on to describe the music as "a tonal painting, a collection of moods and not all of these moods are good ones." National Public Radio and Rolling Stone's reviews also compared the album to Brian Eno, the latter of which compared the album's sound specifically to "the murky instrumentals on Another Green World, [and] the angular rhythm collages of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts."

Ghosts I–IV features a wide assortment of musical instruments, including piano, guitar, bass, synthesizer, marimba, tambourine, banjo, dulcimer, and xylophone, with many of these instruments being sampled and distorted electronically.Percussion instruments, contributed primarily by Brian Viglione, were largely constructed out of house-hold items.

Rob Sheridan, in collaboration with Artist in Residence, acted as the album's art director, as he had with the previous two Nine Inch Nails studio albums, With Teeth (2005) and Year Zero (2007). Phillip Graybill and Tamar Levine provided additional photography. Since Ghosts was released in a variety of release versions, some of the versions feature somewhat differing (or additional) album art and related artwork. The 40-PDF that comes with each version contains a photograph for each of the 36-tracks. These photographs are also embedded into the ID3 tags of every downloadable-track.

Nearly two weeks after the release of the album, Reznor announced via the Nine Inch Nails' official website the creation of a user-created "film festival" as an accompaniment to the album, hosted at the official Nine Inch Nails YouTube channel. It was further revealed that the album was stripped of much artwork and song titles to provide a "canvas as blank as possible" for the project. Reznor stated this endeavor is not a contest, but is "meant to be an experiment in collaboration and a chance for us to interact beyond the typical one-way artist-to-fan relationship." Since the beginning of the film festival in March 2008, over 1,000 video submissions have been posted and over 6,000 members have joined the festival group.

Critical response to Ghosts I–IV was generally favorable, with an average rating of 64% based on ten reviews on Metacritic. Seth Colter Walls of Newsweek described the album as "the kind of absorbing musical experience that the surviving ranks of know-it-all record-store clerks would be pushing on customers, if only they could offer it for sale." IGN gave the album an 8.7/10, and stated that "The music is so engrossing and encompassing that time ceases to be a factor – at least until the music finally stops." Popmatters, who gave the album an 8 out of 10, stated that the album has "36 tracks, but no songs", and went on to call the release "dark, brooding ... haunting." Pitchfork Media criticized the album, however, by saying "...nearly every one of the untitled instrumental sketches here feels emaciated and half-finished", and gave the work a 5.0 out of 10.0. Blender magazine also criticized the album, summarizing the review by saying "Nine Inch Nails return with no label oversight, no boundaries and no tunes." The Washington Post stated "There's too much here. Yet it's the most interesting NIN in years." Describing each track as "the sonic equivalent of a silver orb hovering in your living room [which then] explodes into a million shiny balls of mercury that splash to the floor before trickling, magnetically, back into a large round mass."

The album's unorthodox distribution methods also garnered the attention of various news agencies, such as Wired's Eliot Van Buskirk, who labeled Ghosts as "a remarkably extensive release". Ben Worthen of The Wall Street Journal hypothesized that "most business execs ... could learn a lot from [Reznor’s] experiments with online business models." Many news agencies also compared the release to Radiohead's 2007 pay-what-you-want digital release of In Rainbows, as well as the similar release of Saul Williams' album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! the same year, which Reznor produced. Rolling Stone's review called the album a "A new-media showpiece", while Tiny Mix Tapes said "the circumstances surrounding the release are so forward-thinking that they could be considered just as key to appreciating the album as the music itself." Business website The Motley Fool wrote an article on the album's release titled simply "Music Industry Gets Nailed Again", forecasting that "Innovators like Nine Inch Nails are paving the way for new media business models that may bypass the middleman while making sure artists and fans are happy."

Several tracks from Ghosts I–IV were used as incidental music in episode 352 and 354 of the National Public Radio program This American Life, entitled "The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar", "Mistakes Were Made" respectively.