Cold and Black and Infinite

May 20, 2020 7:47 PM

Nine Inch Nails - Live: Cold and Black and Infinite 2018 [1h30m] is a fan-made multi-cam document of NIN's 2018 tour. As Trent himself says about the project, "P.S. HOW IN THE FUCK DID YOU PULL THIS OFF??"

Setlist:

00:00 Intro
00:28 Branches/Bones
02:19 Wish
05:58 Less Than
09:36 March of the Pigs
14:04 This Isn’t the Place
19:11 Reptile
25:40 Sin
29:56 The Perfect Drug
35:36 Shit Mirror
38:42 Ahead of Ourselves
42:13 God Break Down the Door
47:34 I Can't Give Everything Away (David Bowie cover)
52:41 Subterraneans (David Bowie cover with Bad Witch lyrics)
56:58 The Frail
58:10 Help Me I Am In Hell
01:00:37 Happiness In Slavery
01:05:35 Head Like a Hole
01:10:44 All the Love In the World
01:15:55 And All that Could Have Been
01:22:15 Hurt

posted by hippybear (18 comments total)

Phone cameras have gotten good enough that getting a decent quality, stable image isn't difficult. Get a few folks to agree to film from their seats, and in the pit, and you're good to go on the video front. The audio definitely sounds like someone got hooked into the soundboard, though. If Trent didn't have such a lacksadaisical attitude towards bootlegs (which is a good thing in my book), he might want to have a chat with his live sound person.
posted by SansPoint at 8:02 PM on May 20, 2020

Ilan Rubin must be one hell of a drummer or has found out how to use electronic support in a really good way because Trent always said he'd never put The Perfect Drug in a live show because he feared the drummer's heart would explode.

Ilan did a solo project I got one album from and really enjoyed. And so did Allesandro. (Well, 3 EPs.) They're a creative bunch!
posted by hippybear at 8:06 PM on May 20, 2020

I checked out a bit of the beginning to see how good this is and yeah, it's definitely the audio quality that's most surprising. I look forward to watching the rest of this.

The footage reminds me a bit of the Fragile DVD they put out where they'd given out cameras to various audience members so they could get good, visceral video from inside the crowd and create a more intense concert film. Now that's happened without the band having to do anything!

I'm glad to have seen NIN live as many times as I have (seven) but I haven't been to a show since 2009 and I regret not going to this tour. Looks like it was a lot of fun.
posted by acidnova at 8:07 PM on May 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

This is amazing! Thank you for posting this.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 10:00 PM on May 20, 2020

Jeez, this is surreal.. it's like being there, but better.. and worse... for better or worse. This is fantastic!
posted by urbandude at 10:01 PM on May 20, 2020

1992-3 me is plotzing. 2020 me could possibly be plotzing as well.
posted by joseph_elmhurst at 11:01 PM on May 20, 2020

So NIN was supposed to tour this Fall but that's been set aside (hoping for 2021) but since merchandise was already being produced with the 2020 cities and dates, that merch is being sold with the profits going to food banks in those cities.

Here's a link to one of the items
posted by acidnova at 12:49 AM on May 21, 2020 [4 favorites]

Ilan Rubin must be one hell of a drummer or has found out how to use electronic support in a really good way because Trent always said he'd never put The Perfect Drug in a live show because he feared the drummer's heart would explode.

I think I originally got this link from someone else on mefi, but yeah his drummers seem to work pretty hard.
posted by yeahwhatever at 12:59 AM on May 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

I never had much time for NIN.

I do now.
posted by chavenet at 5:36 AM on May 21, 2020

I've still never seem NIN live, and taking a pass on the NIN/Bowie tour when I was in college still ranks up there with the dumber decisions I've made.
posted by Ghidorah at 6:42 AM on May 21, 2020 [5 favorites]

Ilan Rubin must be one hell of a drummer or has found out how to use electronic support in a really good way because Trent always said he'd never put The Perfect Drug in a live show because he feared the drummer's heart would explode.

I had a friend who got really into Rock Band, which at least for some songs offers an accurate transcription of the real drums at the hardest level. He was getting quite good at it, with 90%+ accuracy, so I bought him The Perfect Drug. As he sat there panting at the end with about a 60% accuracy rating, he shot me a look of, "WTF did you just do to me?"

Back in the day when it was new, there's was a rumored Goldie remix of it that'd I'd love to be real.

But going back to the using recordings mixed intro live performances, he's been doing that for decades. In the 90s (IIRC), he was using Tascam DA-88s to play the click track for the drummer plus assorted pre-recorded tracks and using the SMPTE timecode to drive the lighting, which gave him a really impressive for the time/budget light show that was dead on with the performance.
posted by Candleman at 7:49 AM on May 21, 2020

Whoa, this is great.
posted by desuetude at 8:25 AM on May 21, 2020

dat perfect drug drum solo, tho. I remember that song coming out during the long drought between TDWS and Fragile when I was at the height of my middle school NIN infatuation. I couldn't imagine it ever being played live. So cool to hear it done with so much love.
(digital mixing has been super cool for NIN, tho I do sometimes miss those sludgy 90s bootlegs)
posted by es_de_bah at 11:33 AM on May 21, 2020

They were going to play 5 nights in Toronto?!
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 3:00 PM on May 21, 2020

They were going to play 5 nights in Toronto?!

It wasn't an arena tour, it was a mid-size theater tour, I think 1500-2500 size? So they were doing multiple nights in a lot of cities. LA had 5 night during the tour that actually happened in 2018.

It was also not one of their big "let's show off our amazing technology" tours like several had been. It (as documented by the video) was very much a Band On A Stage tour.
posted by hippybear at 9:19 PM on May 21, 2020 [1 favorite]

I queued for and caught one of the LA shows, and compared to the last tour, it was very stripped down and intimate, and experimental.

The experience of standing in a queue for 8 hours was novel to me. Is that really what y'all used to put up with for tickets?
posted by inpHilltr8r at 9:09 AM on May 22, 2020

For the really big names, yeah. People would start queuing in front of Ticketmaster outlets around 4-8 hours out for stuff like Metallica.

For Pink Floyd tickets in 94, we had to camp out for them for around 24 hours. Which was actually a good deal of fun for the most part - people were pretty chill and obeyed the rules that were established that would let you physically leave the line for an hour or so and still keep your place.
posted by Candleman at 10:31 AM on May 22, 2020

I camped out for two days on concrete outside the local arena to get tickets for Prince's Purple Rain tour. It was enormous fun. A giant community of like-minded people all wanting to be peaceful together and share and friends were dropping by to run errands for us (because we were buying tickets for them) and the whole thing turned into sing-alongs at times and card games and a general great time.
posted by hippybear at 8:03 PM on May 22, 2020 [1 favorite]