The Smashing Pumpkins' Machina II rework is finally finished and in the process of being mastered, according to Billy Corgan. He told Radio.com that the project “reconstituted comes in at about 50-plus tracks” with the entire album containing “somewhere in the 80-track range.”
Corgan said, “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.”
Machina/The Machines Of God was The Smashing Pumpkins' fifth album which was released in February 2000. In September of that year, the band released Machina II/The Friends & Enemies Of Modern Music online only. According to Corgan, the project was not what they had intended it to be but rather what their label, Virgin Records, insisted on. A mere 25 physical copies were made of Machina II at the time of its initial release.
Corgan said, “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.”