Moby

He went from living in poverty and writing songs in his bedroom to achieving two number one albums in the UK, producing for Britney Spears, collaborating with Public Enemy and living in an apartment across the street from his hero David Bowie. His 1999 album ‘Play’ sold 10 million copies and was the first in music history to have all of its tracks commercially licensed. More often criticised for his outspoken, activist views, there’s no denying that Moby is in fact an inspiring figure in electronic music. His simplistic song arrangements and unrefined production give a glimmer of hope to all those amateur electronic recording artists, that with relatively few tools, some healthy ideas and a bundle of energy, it’s still possible to be a self-made success.

Still living in New York, is it easy to get around being Moby? Oh yeah, for a variety of reasons. One, there’s no shortage of little bald guys in Lower Manhattan, and we do kind of all look the same. And also, New Yorkers aren’t really too fussed about celebrity; the degree of fame that I have is nothing compared to the real celebrities who live here. I mean, Bill Clinton lives here, Robert De Niro, Bono – even someone like Robert De Niro can walk down the street and people don’t bother him. So if he can walk down the street and not be bothered certainly I can. I’ve lived here for such a long time that for a lot of people it might have been a novelty to see me once or twice but it’s hard to get too excited when they’re seeing me for the 400th time. Your new album ‘Last Night’ I’ve read is a homage to New York hip hop and dance music, but for me, Disco, stands out as the overriding theme. Would you agree? Well that was a big inspiration. In making the record, especially once it was done, I realised that the perception of Disco in New York is quite a lot of different than the perception of Disco in the rest of the world. Disco in New York was Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol and Liza Minelli going to Studio 54 dancing till 5 in the morning, taking tons of drugs and having a really glamorous time, whereas Disco in Germany for example would be fat guys in leisure suits at a bar in Stuttgart. You were born in the mid-sixties, so I presume by the time you were 10 disco was in full swing and therefore one of the most influential forms of music for you growing up? Yeah, I mean I still remember hearing Donna Summer on the radio when I was 10 years old and really loving it. I mean, there’s that fantastic time when you’re like 9, 10 or 11 years old, and you don’t know about musical genres and you don’t know what you’re supposed to like or not supposed to like, so you just end up liking everything. So I remember hearing Donna Summer, The Clash, Kraftwerk and Elvis Costello, but also a lot of the pop music of the day, like The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, and to me everything that I heard was fantastic. When did you notice that disco was dying? I remember in about 1979 or 1980 they started having these “Disco Sucks” rallies, and at one rally in Chicago, 80,000 people turned up to burn disco records – that’s a pretty good sign that a genre’s on its way out. Disco in New York never died, it came from the gay clubs and the Latino and African American clubs. Disco died in the rest of the world but dance music in New York was just as strong as ever. So you’d go to NY clubs in the early-to-mid eighties and they’d still be playing electronic dance music when that wasn’t being played anywhere else in the world. So it just mutated into house music? Yeah, House music started with Frankie Knuckles who was a DJ here in New York. I guess he couldn’t find work so he moved to Chicago and started DJing in a club called The Warehouse and that’s where House music started. In Europe electronic music refashioned itself as new wave and the new romantics, who from that era inspired you? Oh it was hugely inspirational, some of my favourite records came from the late seventies/early eighties European electronic period, whether it was Cabaret Voltaire or DAF. Test Department and Einstuerzende Neubauten was harder, but Voltaire and Meat Beat Manifesto also got tagged as ‘Industrial’, which I never understood, because to me it just sounded like dance music. Human League when they were still Heaven 17, Being Boiled – I loved that, but the album Dare, I wasn’t such a big fan of that, it was a little too poppy for me. Your new album ‘Last Night’ kind of harks back to some of your previous albums in that many of the tracks seem to have a more simplified approach, was that what you were trying to achieve? I wanted to try and do two things. I wanted to make a record that sounded like the music I was hearing when out in New York now, because a lot of the DJs in New York have this really eclectic approach to music, where they’re play old disco but new hip hop, minimal electronic and old rock and roll. So I sorted of wanted to make a record that was inspired by that, but also a record that when I listened to it reminded me of the almost 30 years of going out to night clubs in New York that I have experienced. The track ‘Everyday It’s 1989’ in particular struck me as one that could easily slip onto your Everything Is Wrong album? Oh yeah, there is definitely a nostalgic bent to the album, but what’s strange is that so many of the DJs in New York are in their twenties yet playing records that were made 20 or 30 years ago. So on the one hand I’m being nostalgic, but hopefully it’s not a po-faced, reverential nostalgia, it’s more just sort of a fun and light-hearted look back at these different dance genres that inspired me. Has your studio set-up evolved a great deal since those first albums that you wrote? Y’know, it hasn’t much. I mean, I still use a lot of equipment that I was using in the late eighties, whether it’s a TR-909 or 106 or 303. I also love working with some of the newer software programs like Reason and Ableton, but I still keep making my records with Cubase and Pro Tools and I still mainly use outboard synths. I love plug-ins, they sound great and can be really fun to work with, but I still like doing as much as possible in the analogue realm and being able to move slide faders around and craft sounds that way. I love the fact that you can now make a record from start to finish on a laptop, but I still like the old way of crafting a record in a studio with outboard gear and patch bays and synths. As of late, I have actually found myself buying up more and more analogue gear. What sort of things have you been looking for? A lot of really odd stuff [laughs]. I have this strange obsession with old drum machines and so I’ve been going online for years now trying to collect as many as possible. I try to restrict my collecting to just analogue drum machines, like Roland and Rhythm King – every year they came out with a different one. The CompuRhythm CR5000 is a good one, then there’s the CR-68 and 78, the Roland Rhythm Arranger, in fact the Rhythm King Maestro series was really good. When you’re messing around with these do you discover sounds from your favourite old electronic records? Well yeah, one of my favourite electronic records of all time was the first Suicide album, which was just, as far as I know, Martin Rev playing around with a Korg drum machine and an old organ. I love the versatility of plug-ins and doing everything with software, but what I love about some of the old equipment, and I’m sure a lot of people agree with this, is old synths, organs and drum machines all came with such innate character. Sonically, they didn’t have too much high end or low end, but they had a really distinctive character, which is one of the reasons why I collect them. How would you normally build up a track, from a beat, a sample, or a synth sound perhaps? Every song starts differently, some songs start really conventionally with me sitting down in front of the piano or guitar. Some songs start with a drum loop or with a synthesiser patch that I really like, so it’s hard for me to generalise on the genesis of a song. When making the album, are you motivated by the fact that millions will hear the record, or is it purely for the enjoyment of making the record? Making music is the only thing I know how to do, for better or worse it’s what I’ve devoted my life to. When I started making music, no one was interested in listening to what I was doing, and I assume that time will come again - when only my close friends will want to listen to it. But that’s what gets me out of bed every morning, I don’t want to sound overly-dramatic but I don’t really see the point of being alive if I wasn’t able to make music. There are lots of other things I enjoy, but nothing even comes close to spending a day in the studio. Did you cherry pick the vocalists for the album yourself, and leave them to write the lyrics? Well on some of them the vocalists wrote the lyrics and some I wrote the lyrics. What I wanted to do with this record is avoid the clichι of only working with celebrity guest vocalists. I feel like too many electronic music producers choose vocalists based on their marketing value and not their talent – not that there’s anything wrong with that, I’m all in favour of electronic musicians doing whatever they can to get their music heard, but at the same time I wanted to make a record with just talented singers who might not necessarily be famous. A lot of them are friends of mine; one of the singers is someone I met at karaoke one night. Living in New York I’m constantly running into people who have good voices, so I just invite them over to my studio. You don’t sing on this album at all do you? Why did you disembark from that role this time around? I do a little bit, but my voice is barely recognisable. There’s a song called Alice, where I sing the chorus with my friend Amelia. It’s sort of a single – I mean one of the nice things about the demise of the record business is the old conventional ways of doing things, like putting out a single and hoping that radio’s going to play it to death. Those days have kind of flown by the wayside, and so now for this record and picking the singles we’re really just choosing the songs that we like and if radio want to play it that’s great and if they don’t that’s ok. Is the album mixed at your home studio too? No, I recorded everything at home, but I really don’t like mixing in the box – I very much like to mix through an analogue mixing desk. So I went to a studio that had a big, beautiful Neve mixing desk. At what point do you know that a record’s completely finished – do you ever have to let go of a record with reservations that it could have been perfected even more? I don’t think I’ve ever genuinely finished a record. I get a record to a point where I’m moderately comfortable releasing it, but with any record I’ve ever made I always think if I’d worked on it longer and harder I probably could have made it better. A record for me is like a time capsule, so when I make a record I’m kind of documenting the period in which the record was made. Part of that process involves accepting the flaws, so if I’m making a record I know there are going to be things that could have been done better but at the end of the day you kind of have to accept that.

"I love the fact that you can now make a record from start to finish on a laptop, but I still like the old way of crafting a record in a studio with outboard gear and patch bays and synths."

Your music is primarily focused on writing songs rather than the technical aspect of making electronic music. Is the tech side something you try not to get bogged down in or is it unavoidable? I like everything, I love a good, well-written song, but I also really love an unconventional, experimental piece of electronic music. It’s one of the really nice things about being on Mute Records, because if I write a song that is more of a conventional pop song, Daniel Miller gets excited by that, whereas if I deliver an experimental 15-minute long piece of electronic music, Daniel would get excited about that too. Mute Records for me is just like perfect, because they’re so accepting of whatever their artists do. You’ve been on Mute practically your entire career haven’t you? Yeah, and you’ll find with a lot of the people on Mute that’s the case. Nick Cave’s been on the label since the mid-eighties, and Depeche Mode have been on the label since 1981 – so it’s a label that does inspire a lot of loyalty. What I like about your albums is their simplicity, some of the tracks sound like they could almost be achieved on an 8-track recorder, which is quite inspiring to music makers. Well, a part of that is the product of my musical upbringing, because when I first started playing music I played classical music. I had a music teacher who was obsessed with jazz fusion and music theory and so the first 4 or 5 years that I played guitar it was either classical or I studied music theory. Especially in that world of jazz fusion, it seemed too unnecessarily complicated. So pretty much ever since then all I’ve wanted to do is make relatively simple music. It’s a form of adolescent rebellion. I can read music, but I’m really rusty at this point. If you put a score in front of me it would take me a while to figure it out. But I’m grateful; at the time I hated it and just wanted to play in a punk rock band. A lot of electronic musicians are coming more from a DJ or experimental perspective, which I think is great and applaud that, but it’s really nice having a background in music theory. The critics will no doubt have their pens sharpened for a new Moby release; do you feel they will be in receptive mood to this record? I always say that when I put out a record to me the review process is something to be endured. Some artists are critical darlings and for better or worse I’ve never really been a favourite of the critics. I know that when I put out a record a lot of people, just because for whatever reason they hate me, are going to hate the record. But what’s nice is that once the record is actually out there people can respond to it on its own merits. It must be puzzling that despite being articulate and intelligent you get criticised in a medium where mostly inarticulate artists rule? Well, it is a little bit odd. I do believe that if all I’d done for the last 15 years was date models and take drugs the critics would probably like me a lot more. Will there be a massive world tour to promote the album? For some reason as I’ve gotten older I’ve really come to hate touring. So now, for this record I maybe just want to play some festivals and do some sporadic DJing dates. The last few tours we were playing relatively large venues and I realised that I didn’t really enjoy it; I’m actually a lot happier DJing for a couple of hundred playing than performing for 10,000. I really love going to a club and playing records, and when you finish playing records you have a few drinks and get to hang out with people and actually talk to them. The whole process seems a lot nicer. When you’re playing really large venues, you’re very isolated and you never actually get to have contact with people. On these long extended tours you just feel lonely. One minute you’re backstage by yourself, and suddenly you’re standing in front of 15,000 people, and a minute later you’re backstage by yourself. I think it’s possible for people who are inherently well-adjusted, for the rest of us your options are that you either accept it, take a lot of drugs or surround yourself with sycophants. I hear you’ve been doing a lot of DJing recently, what sort of music are you playing, retro or new stuff? It all depends on the size of the venue. If I’m playing at a friend’s party or a really small bar or club I’ll play a much more eclectic mix of old house music and disco with more new, minimal things. If I’m playing bigger venues I tend to play fun, over-the-top floor fillers, whether it’s old rave tracks or brand new tracks. Is anyone exciting you today in the electronic music world? Well, you know what Beatport is right? It’s a website where you can buy dance MP3s. So I’ll go there and buy tons of music and put it on CD because I’ve started DJing with CDs, but as a result I don’t know who any of the artists are. All I do is burn them to CDs and write descriptions of the music on the CD, like “nice kick drum, good break down”, so I don’t know who the artists is, the label or even the song. As much as I’d like t know who is making the music, what matters at 3 o’clock in the morning is an actual description of the song. What’s your view on file sharing, has this affected you? Well, very simply, I never expected to have a record contracted and never expected to have any success at all, so I’m genuinely flattered and honoured if anyone takes the time to listening to my music. If that means hearing it on the radio, listening to an MP3 or buying a CD, I’m not really too fussed at the delivery vehicle. All that matters to me is that I’m able to make music and someone’s willing to listen to it. Unfortunately, because of my relationship with my record label I’m not allowed to be completely candid on what my viewpoint might be, but it does definitely veer more towards the libertarian vein of things. Part of my ethos when it comes it come to file sharing can be summed up on the website I’ve started called mobygratis.com, where I’ve put about 70 pieces of music up free to non-profit or independent filmmakers. Before you go, I was going to ask you if reports of you going into space are true or as ridiculous as they sound? Usually it’s the case that if there are rumours about me they’re more often that not untrue and are usually a lot more interesting than what actually is true. I’d love to go into space, but the idea of spending $250,000 to just go out of the atmosphere for 30 minutes doesn’t really appeal to me. I should have referred to your website, are you still updating it nearly every day? Yeah, for some reason, whether this is pathology or not I have no idea, I have this need to communicate to people. Whether that’s by doing interviews or making records or writing on my website. I think if I was more well-adjusted I probably wouldn’t need to communicate as much.

Moby interview, Barcode 2008 ©
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