The remix album of The Downward Spiral, carrying Coil's deepest single presence on a Nine Inch Nails record alongside Foetus and two original Aphex Twin pieces.
Further Down the Spiral is a remix album by Nine Inch Nails, released in May 1995, reworking the 1994 album The Downward Spiral. The archive documents Nine Inch Nails at industrial rock and holds the commercial-wave catalogue at limits; this disc is here, like Fixed before it, for the company across it rather than its standing. The reason is Coil: this is their deepest single presence on any Nine Inch Nails record.
Coil, with their engineer Danny Hyde, supply four of the reworkings, more than any other hand on the disc. For these sessions Coil were John Balance, Peter Christopherson and Drew McDowall, working at a New York studio on commission. Their reading of the title track is the one listeners most often single out, a slow build of layered vocal lines on shifted timing toward the moment the original drives at; I note it as the clearest demonstration on record of what a Coil remix does to its source, which is to find the mood under the noise. These are the finished, commissioned masters, and they should not be confused with the looser mixes later gathered on Recoiled, a separate Cold Spring record drawn from the same broad period.
Coil are not alone among the underground here. JG Thirlwell, as Foetus, supplies two reworkings drawn from Mr. Self Destruct, the second time on consecutive Nine Inch Nails remix records that Thirlwell appears; the pairing of Coil and Foetus across both discs is the personnel pattern the archive documents for. Rick Rubin reworked Piggy, and Reznor and the band recreated other sections in-house. The disc is a spread of hands rather than one remixer's statement, which is exactly what makes it useful to the archive: it is a record of who the project reached toward.
The most-discussed contributions are also the strangest. Two pieces are credited to Aphex Twin, and neither is a remix. He said plainly that he never heard The Downward Spiral and did not want to, and submitted two original compositions instead; both later turned up in shorter form on his own collection 26 Mixes for Cash, a title that makes the position clear. I keep this without complaint as a documentary fact of the disc: two original Aphex Twin tracks sit inside a Nine Inch Nails remix album because the arrangement allowed it, and they are among the record's most-valued moments regardless of how they got there.
What the disc documents, then, is the same thing Fixed documents at greater length: the underground worked across a major-label record. Coil's four tracks, Foetus's two and the Aphex Twin pieces together make this the widest single point of contact between the founding tradition and its commercial inheritor. The archive holds that contact at arm's length elsewhere, holding the commercial wave at limits; on this disc the contact is the whole reason for a record page.
Where it sits: a Tier III record, included for its personnel rather than its standing; the widest point on the industrial proper-into-industrial rock bridge, with Coil deepest here, Foetus alongside, and two outside compositions folded in. It reworks an album the archive documents at limits, and it is here for the hands that did the reworking. The finished Coil masters live on this disc; their rougher cousins live on Recoiled.
VAGO · c. the Anthropocene