Moby's 'Night' Out
On his new album, the e-music icon shows he still knows how to ‘Play’
Read more of CityBeat's special e-music issue:
Too Much Junkie Business
The Circus Stays in Town
Running the Voodoo Down
Life in the Fast Lane
Something 2 dance 2
The Cool Kids Are Alright
Kazell
If you think it’s been a long time since you’ve felt Moby in clubland, you’re probably right. Although his breakout down-tempo album Play, released in 1999, was rooted in club culture and became the basis for many dance-floor-focused remixes, Moby has spent the better part of the last 10 years touring with a band, appearing at red-carpet events, and generally being a rock star. From feuding with Eminem to singing with Gwen Stefani to pontificating about politics, the New Yorker has created more spin in the tabloids than in the DJ booth.
“I’ve spent so many years doing long promotional trips and long tours, really not being happy,” Moby says as he lounges in his bungalow at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica. “Tons of red carpet events, etcetera, etcetera – asking myself, ‘Why am I doing this.’”
With Last Night, a new long-player due Tuesday, make no mistake: Moby is in the club. In fact, he couldn’t wait for the album to be released in order to shed the band, the entourage, and the backstage treatment. Last fall he started a series of DJ parties at New York’s Hiro Ballroom called Degenerates. In November he took his DJ show on the road to L.A. to tease the release of Last Night – five months ahead of its release. He even gave early copies of the album to a few noted radio DJs such as KCRW’s Jason Bentley.
“The record company is freaking out” about that, Moby says. “Like, isn’t that the point – you make a record, you want people to hear it?”
Moby obviously wants this one broadcast far and wide, and for good reason: Last Night is his best effort since Play. The new collection is, in fact, somewhat like the 1999 album in its use of atmosphere, melancholy, and slow-burning energy. “Love To Move In Here” is the star of the Last Night. Its loungey minimalism underlies a sultry, Latin tech-house groove. “Live For Tomorrow” is a down-tempo torch song straight out of the Play-book. “Degenerates” rides on liquid pulses, metallic percussion, and sweet-and-sour ambience. “Sweet Apocalypse” starts in a wash of white space that is deconstructed and set to a marching tribal rhythm. “Last Night” is a sentimental head trip that pairs beat-less atmospherics and jazzy, trip-hop vocals: “Take sweet memories with you/And plant those seeds somewhere new.” Other tracks, including “Everyday It’s 1989,” and “I’m In Love,” complete with the piano loops, synth stabs, and drum rolls, sound like restored relics from rave-land. Moby pays homage to fresher sounds, however, on “Disco Lies,” an electro-trash number with all the mirror-ball pomp of a night at the 54. Overall, Last Night is infused with fresh chi he has absorbed in his recent return to clubland.
“It’s really nice when you have 20-year-old kids coming into the scene and hybridizing everything,” Moby says. “But this record, Last Night, it’s a concept record. I’m trying to take a night that starts at 10 o’clock and finishes at 6 o’clock and condense it into one, 65-minute CD. It starts down-tempo and lighthearted, then it gets a little darker, a little weirder and, by the end, it becomes sort of blissed out, atmospheric music. Each song represents a trajectory of a crazy night out.”
New York’s top indie-dance acts have joined the artist on the turntables at his Degenerates events in Manhattan. Guest DJs have included electro-clash survivor Tommie Sunshine and DFA Records’ Juan Maclean and Stretch Amstrong. The leader of L.A.’s dance-punk explosion, DJ Franki Chan, helped warm up the decks for the Bald One during his November appearance here. Moby is clearly feeling the youth-fed eclecticism of contemporary DJ culture. “Granted, I’m 42-years-old,” he says, “so I can’t necessarily claim to speak to the day-to-day experience of a 20-year-old as much as I’d like to.”
Moby couldn’t have chosen a better time to return to the beat-driven night: Last year, dance music made an amazing comeback: The Chemical Brothers scored a Grammy, Daft Punk staged a return, and Underworld ruled the Hollywood Bowl. But more than anything, the dance music renaissance has been sparked by a mix-and-match aesthetic made possible largely with the help of push-button DJ technology, mash-up culture, and a feverish demand for outside-the-record-box flavors (LCD Soundsystem, Justice, Digitalism, et. al.). Where Moby’s early-’90s coming out was a time of rigid adherence to genre boundaries and a deep faith in the power of unbroken, linear DJ sets, today’s millennial dance fans expect a sound-clash of styles and tempos.
“Throughout the ’90s, dance music became regimented,” Moby says. “You’d ask someone what they played, and they would name a genre so specific that it only existed in a two block radius of Brixton. And now, at least in New York, you go into a bar, and the DJ’s playing Blur and then Eric B. & Rakim, and then like a DFA record, and then maybe Donna Summer. I really love that type of eclecticism.”
Indeed, if Moby stayed away from the genre-specific DJ boom of the mid-’90s (opting instead to return to guitars on 1995’s Everything Is Wrong), he’s now turning his back on rock bands, even as the dance-punk kids who inspire him are integrating live elements with DJ culture.
“For the last eight years, all I’ve done is tour,” Moby says. “I mean, I love to play live. But the thing about DJing is, in a weird way, it’s all improvisational. You show up and you don’t know what you’re going to play. You respond in an instant. I’m enjoying DJing a lot.”
And so, expect to see Moby supporting Last Night with a CD case, a set of headphones, and nary a roadie. In a way, the artist is returning to his roots.
“When I first started DJing in the ’80s, I started at a tiny little bar called The Beat in Port Chester, New York,” Moby says. “It held 45 people, I worked seven hours a night, and I got paid $25 a night, which works out to roughly $3 an hour. You’d have punk rockers and heroin addicts and students and truck drivers – and everyone wanted to hear something different. So I would play everything from hip-hop to new wave to punk rock to country & western to funk. You’d go from Bronski Beat into James Brown into Hank Williams into Kool Moe Dee – I mean, just really, really eclectic.”
“It’s strange,” he says, pausing for a moment of reflection. “I started playing house music in 1987. And I’ve been involved in the dance scene now for 20-some-odd years. But a lot of people in this new dance scene now think of me as the guy who made the song with Gwen Stefani. More than anything else, I think that’s kind of funny.”
Published: 03/26/2008
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