Finally, Trent Reznor is free. After fifteen years with Interscope, the slave has desperately tried, in his way to be free. Since 1992, the world has changed. The Internet happened. No longer do artists need or even want the conduit of  a major label to press their records, to sell their material. The choking stranglehold over the media that previously was dictated to by  the capitalists owning the means of manufacture and supply are over : finally, to misquote the old Communist cartoon, Worker Destroys Parasite.

To make a record you don’t need a studio, or a record contract, or an advertising budget. Register a website, make the songs at home, press the button marked “upload”. The slave owns only himself. And with this, the both superfluous-and-necessary remix album, Nine Inch Nails finally release themselves. “Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D” is a collection of remixed versions of the preceding album (the rather excellent, paranoid, and intriguing “Year Zero”). Following in the tradition of “Fixed”, “Further Down The Spiral”, and “Things Falling Apart”, the newly prolific Reznor appears to have kicked the flab of addiction and is now heading straight on a path of unbridled creativity. (This year alone has seen a full length concert DVD, a new studio record, this remix package, and the free download release of “Niggy Tardust” - the album he made in collaboration with Saul Williams, as a free download)

But is “Year Zero Remixed” actually any good? Well, I would hesitate to say it’s good. As a listening experience, it follows the template of the previous NIN Remix albums by being a frustratingly uneven collection of alternate versions that sounds like a compilation instead of anything as cohesive as an ‘album’. Artists selected to remix include - in some instances - the rare epitome of people following the remixers remit and reworking material to sound like a brand new song. In other cases, as is more often the situation, the existant material is reworked to create gloomy and extenuated mood pieces of minimalist repetition or moulded into a largely monotone selection of dated industrial grooves : Bill Laswell’s vinyl only remix of “Vessel” is a bit of a dull dirge, to say the least.  Intruigingly, possibly the most interesting, and least typical remixes come from Stephen Morris / Gillian Gilbert from New Order (and lesser known pop act The Other Two), who present ‘God Given’ and ‘Zero Sum’ in a miserablist pop mould. But it still sounds like Nine Inch Nails.  Ultimately as soon as you put Reznors voice onto anything it automatically sounds like Nine Inch Nails : even if he were singing “Shiny Happy People”.

Which he isn’t. “Year Zero” was one of the albums of 2007 : a political, literate work of science fiction styled fantasy that acted as the soundtrack to an imaginary tale of ruthless paranoia and tinfoil hat conspiracy. “”Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D" meanwhile, is just a different look onto the same scene, a new frame for a work, a revised, reworked, rethought approach to the established knowledge. As an album, it’s not quite an artistic success, but a selection of largely interesting revisions. Think of it as a extended selection of remixes, an additional, interesting curio, and you will be pleasantly surprised. Interesting, but inessential.

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