THE NIN HOTLINE

nin.com had been online for a few days, and every night it was updating at midnight with new images and sounds, but there wasn't anywhere keeping track of that kind of thing. I was sitting in IRC channel #nin99 on DALnet trying to keep up with everything, and at some point asked Paul LaBarbera and John Sampson if they'd help me to maintain a news site tracking all this information down. Not long afterward, I asked a guy named meathead if he'd do a biweekly humor column to keep things interesting. As the cliche goes, the rest is history.

If I weren't so busy putting things together for The Gonzales Cantata, I'd probably have cooler stuff to throw online tonight, but I'm missing a spindle of CDRs with my older archives, so I did some outsourcing to make up for it.

Wallpapers

Malechite (whom you may know from NINwiki.com put together a package of wallpapers for iPhones and computers - some based off original NIN Hotline designs by j. sampson, and some wholly original designs.

Music inspired by Know the Score

Back in 2005, we ran a contest revolving around Know the Score, a site we host where mormolyke has posted transcriptions of various NIN songs into proper sheet music. The contest required that entries be acoustic performances -- and while we got a handful of entries, there were only a few that really stood out. I notified
Rebecca Roth that her harp renditions of Adrift and At Peace and Gone, Still took the cake, but for one reason or another, she never did get her prizes - though I did get in touch with her last week, and there's a package of goodies from Goodrock coming her way - better late than never I hope!

Coming in a very close second was Jul DuCamp's minimalistic piano performance of A Warm Place, inspired by Philip Glass, which Jul was awesome enough to send the score in for.

One of the earlier pieces written and posted on Know the Score was A Warm Place arranged for a string quartet - and ever since that page went live, the last bullet point read "Studio Recording (MP3) [coming soon]" - well, Melissa recorded that years ago, using her viola, violin, and then pitch-shifting a viola to emulate the cello. We never posted it, hoping to instead get a real quartet to play, but it's always been one of my favorite tracks in my collection - and now you can listen to it too (please, right-click to save). I'll post the multitracks later in the week.

More to come (if I find it)

I'll be posting more as I dig it up throughout the week. Specifically, I've got a copy of the Fragility 2.0 Tour Journal that was created as a collaboration between the Hotline, TheFragile.com, and SmashedUpSanity.com.