Nine Inch Nails Is Back Onstage ⇥ nytimes.com

Jon Pareles, the New York Times:

Mr. Reznor isn’t easing back into performing. Most bands play festivals with a bare-bones production, for quick setup on a shared stage. His is making a far more elaborate comeback. The show brings dizzying visual effects to an idea borrowed, Mr. Reznor freely admits, from the 1983 Talking Heads tour, filmed as “Stop Making Sense.” Mr. Reznor starts out onstage alone, and the band gradually assembles around him. From there, the visuals escalate. […]

After the festival shows, Nine Inch Nails will mount an entirely different production with three weeks of rehearsals in September, to headline arenas through much of the next year. “The fact that we’re doing all this only for these few shows, and then we have to do it over again, throwing all this out to do a completely new thing, with new things that won’t work,” Mr. Reznor said, “that feels a little insane.”

I get to see the second production on the final stop of the tour, here in Calgary.

If you want to see and hear the product of the festival tour, Reflecting in the Chrome has audio and video of the first stop at the Fuji Rocks Festival, in Niigata, Japan.

Update: It’s on YouTube, too.