Love It To Death

Tables sprout candles in the darkened control room as thick and as numerous as mushrooms on a dank forest floor, and miniskirted department-store mannequins are scattered about in various states of bondage. One mannequin has masking tape wound violently around its mouth and a plastic bag pinned over its head; another is gagged and has a pair of silver Lurex panties around its knees; a third has its wrists bound and is blindfolded. Four men huddle around a computer screen that displays jagged green wave forms; several dozen recording levels jerk angrily into the red. Electronic drums as big as redwoods pound from the studio speakers, and the breathy, oddly calm tenor of Nine Inch Nails auteur Trent Reznor sounds as if it were being broadcast by a shortwave radio from halfway across the world.

"Something inside of me has opened up its eyes/Why did you put it there, did you not realize?/Something inside of me, it screams the loudest sound/Sometimes I think I could ... burn."

Nine Inch Nails are in Miami's South Beach Studios putting the final touches on the soundtrack album for Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, which Reznor has compiled from the 70-odd snippets of rock & roll used in the film, and the going is getting weird.

The last time Reznor used this studio — for the clan-destine sessions that resulted in Nine Inch Nails' 1992 EP Broken, which resulted in a Grammy — a studio employee made a crack about the concentration of gay men on the beach. In retaliation, Reznor bought dozens of gay porno mags, clipped out hundreds of pictures of phalluses and hid them all over the studio — some in places where they didn't turn up for months. This time, Reznor screened an extreme S&M video for assistant studio engineer Leo Herrera that still gives Herrera the willies a week later.