The companion remix EP to Broken, opened by Coil and worked over by Foetus. Filed not for its commercial standing but for the underground figures it pulled inside a major-label record.
Fixed is a remix EP by Nine Inch Nails, released in December 1992 as the companion disc to the Broken EP. The archive files Nine Inch Nails at F·16 industrial rock and holds the commercial-wave catalogue at limits; Fixed earns a record page here for a specific reason, which is the company it keeps. The interest is not the release itself but who is on it: Coil open it, Foetus works across it, and the underground the rest of this archive documents is inside a major-label disc.
The route by which that happened is worth setting down, because it is the same route that produced several later records. Reznor hired Peter Christopherson to direct the film that accompanied the Broken EP; the two became friends; and Reznor, a Coil admirer, then asked Christopherson's band to remix a track for Fixed. That track, a reworking of Gave Up, opens the EP. Coil and their engineer Danny Hyde ran the vocal through a sampler and fired it back at random, re-sequencing it into something frantic and jumbled; John Balance disliked the chorus and pushed the piece away from the original's shape. It is the first of the Coil commissions for Nine Inch Nails and, two decades later, the seed of the Recoiled record.
Fixed is also, by Reznor's own account, not a remix record in the ordinary sense. Where a remix EP of the period usually meant dance-floor edits, the sleeve states that the Broken songs appear in their proper form on the parent disc and that what is here is a reinterpretation: a deconstruction built from tape manipulation, backmasking, sudden time changes and grinding repetition, made to confuse rather than to fill a floor. That intent is what makes the underground personnel a natural fit rather than a marketing gesture; the EP wanted exactly the kind of work Coil and Foetus did anyway.
JG Thirlwell, as Foetus, supplies two of the six tracks, including a second Wish remix titled Fist Fuck that folds in samples of Timothy Leary. Thirlwell is another figure the archive files in its own right, and his presence doubles the EP's underground weight. The one outside hire, Butch Vig, then fresh from Nirvana's Nevermind, sits oddly against the rest: he remixed Last, Reznor cut almost all of it and kept only a fragment at the end of Throw This Away, and the reason given was that Vig made it rock, which was not what the record was for. The anecdote is small but it marks the line the EP is drawing.
The closing track carries the EP's darkest tie to this archive. Screaming Slave uses recordings of the performance artist Bob Flanagan captured during the filming of the Happiness in Slavery video, the same body-and-machine work through which a great many people in the scene first encountered Flanagan. The Bureau notes the connection plainly and without dwelling on the material; it is a matter of record that the EP reaches into that work.
Where it sits: a Tier III record, filed for its personnel rather than its standing; an early point on the F·11-into-F·16 bridge, with Coil, Foetus and the Flanagan recordings all inside a major-label Nine Inch Nails release. The commercial wave is filed at limits, as the archive files it elsewhere; this disc is filed here because of who walked into it.