Billy Corgan has announced that The Smashing Pumpkins’ Machina II rework is complete and in the process of being mastered. In an interview with Radio.com, the singer/guitarist says that “the album reconstituted comes in at about 50-plus tracks” with the entire project clocking in at “somewhere in the 80-track range.”
The new release of Machina II has been reworked to represent the band’s original idea, with Corgan explaining, “Machina II was written to be kind of like a musical, but because it was never finished, it was like shooting a movie that wasn’t fully edited.”
The Pumpkins put out their fifth album Machina/The Machines Of God in February 2000 and followed it up that September with an online release of Machina II/The Friends & Enemies Of Modern Music, which was not what the band intended, but rather, what their label, Virgin Records, mandated. Apparently, only 25 physical copies were made of Machina II at the time of its initial release.
“Machina I was like one edit of the footage, and Machina II was some of the leftover footage — but there was even more stuff leftover. So, this was my attempt, 20 years later, to kind of finish the movie and in the process of trying to finish the movie, realizing the movie can never be finished,” Corgan added.
In fact, he noted, “Some are unfinished, almost like a sketch. But in the aggregate of listening to it, you kinda get a sense of the movie I was after. It’s pretty wild. It’s almost impossible to put into words,” he says, adding, “I’m going to write an essay when we released the box set to try to explain what it is.”
Listen to the full interview below.
