brian hefele's untidy space

So, Nine Inch Nails has slowed down for a while, and for that I am thankful. I know this is like heresy to my fellow electronic and industrial fans, but here's how I see things… NIN released Pretty Hate Machine in the late eighties. It was this quirky, somewhat minimalist, danceable industrial album in the vein of a lot of other work that was going on in the scene. It wasn't revolutionary, except for the fact that it hit the mainstream. That isn't to say that it wasn't a good release, or deserving of its popularity - it was (and is) a great album.

Then things changed a bit, and we got Broken, Fixed, The Downward Spiral, and Further Down the Spiral. I lump these all together because of Flood's influence, there's a very particular sound about these two sets that never quite returns to NIN. Broken is fresh, the start of something new. It has a great cover of 'Suck' by Pigface. But then The Downward Spiral happened, and nothing else mattered. To me, this is the best release in the entire NIN discography. I would not be surprised if up until this point, many would agree with me - NIN had a good start, and got better and better with subsequent albums. But then (and this is where my words get treasonous)…

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How trite to attempt a year in review! But I may as well do it anyway. I didn't pick up all that many albums that were actually released this year, so it's a short, crippled list. My year!

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First, I feel I should state that all of the Russian in this article has been transliterated from Cyrillic into Latin. This makes everything a lot more accessible, but also makes research more difficult, as transliteration is by no means a precise art and standards aren't always followed. Hopefully the links at the article's end will aid further research.

Yanka Dyagileva's music is like nothing else I've ever heard. Her career was cut short by an apparent suicide; in her years on the scene she produced fewer original tracks than there are days in a month. Like so many great artists, she was not well known in life, and her albums were only given 'official' releases posthumously.

I first discovered Yanka via a dubplate I picked up while hunting through some stacks of wax. I picked it up because the A-side had a Siouxsie and the Banshees track on it. At the time I had no idea what the B was - it was scrawled 'Anka Bedeges,' or some similar misrepresentation of 'Yanka Beregis.' Beregis', the track that introduced me to Dyagileva, remains one of my favorite tracks to this day.

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