One record at a time: 277. Nine Inch Nails - Quake

Back in the nineties a friend of mine would extol the virtues of gaming on a PC and tell me how good games like Doom, Duke Nukem 3-D and Dark Forces were. I didn't really have much time for playing games at this time in my life so I didn't really pay much attention when the same friend began talking about a new game called Quake. In retrospect, I can see that this was a mistake as not only was Quake a seminal moment in gaming, but the soundtrack was created by one of my favourite groups of the time Nine Inch Nails.

The audio for the soundtrack was included on the CD-ROM of the game but it wasn't made available as a stand-alone album until this vinyl was released in 2020. The music on this record consists of ten tracks of ambient soundscapes that Reznor himself describes as, "not music, it's textures and ambiences and whirling machine noises and stuff."

I think the completist side of me decided to buy this record, but neither the music fan in me or my bank balance have thanked me for it. So maybe it was actually a blessing that I didn't pay any attention to my friend talking about Quake back in the day as it delayed the disappointment of hearing the soundtrack by at least twenty four years. 1/5