Music and Recording Features

"As for worst there are two albums, 18 [2002] and Hotel [2005]. They're not technically bad, but boy, there's sterility to the way in which they were mixed and edited and processed. I wish they had a little more space."

Although in the recording studio the loudness war has been lost, if only for the moment (though that may be my naïveté talking), what most concerns Moby is the far larger issue of humanity's current path. The multi-talented musician, songwriter, remixer, and deejay became one of the biggest names in dance music in the 1990s, when his albums Play (1999) and 18 became international hits that respectively sold ten and four million copies worldwide. Ever busy, he also founded a music festival; formed a rock band, The Little Death; composed music for films and promoted Degenerates, a series of New York City nightclub events. A supporter of animal rights, he is a vegan who once owned a tea shop, Teany, and a clothes-and-comic-books store, both in New York. He now owns Little Pine, a vegan restaurant in the Silver Lake suburb of Los Angeles.

To describe the mood and purpose of his new album, he's even using the word eschatology, defined as "a belief concerning death, the end of the world or the ultimate destiny of mankind."

"There are several different ways we can look at this weird apocalypse that we as a species keep creating: politically, socioeconomically, hysterically. What really interests me is looking at it almost anthropologically. Like, who are we as a species, and why did we, as individuals and collectively, keep making these terrible, terrible decisions and choices? So this record, thematically, it's not looking at things politically, it's looking at what in our heredity and our history keep compelling us to be so stupid.

"It's the most baffling question. I just wrote an essay about how, a couple hundred years ago or a hundred years ago, we basically defeated all of the things that had been making us miserable for the longest time. We defeated famine, war, bad teeth, bears eating us. All the things our ancestors had problems with, we defeated. And then, when confronted with this victory, we just went out and created our own horrors that were so much worse than the adversity we'd just defeated."

The kind of horrors Col. Kurtz (via Marlon Brando and Joseph Conrad) whispered about in Apocalypse Now?

"Famine, genocide, climate change, deforestation, obesity, cancer, diabetes, heart disease—these things that have nothing to do with natural world and everything to do with us."

So does the new album's tone reflect the fact that Moby views humanity's current predicament as essentially hopeless?

"I think we're at the place where, if someone is dangerously obese and they go to the doctor, and the doctor says, 'Hey, look, you're dangerously obese—you have heart disease, hypertension, etc.,' the question is, will that person change, and will they change in time? Are we going to change our behavior, and even if we do, will our past kill us?

The music that Moby chose to carry this message can be classified, perhaps not surprisingly, as down-tempo trip-hop. It's the kind of music that made him famous, that filled albums like Play and made his music a mainstay of dance clubs all over the world. Usually bass-heavy, and moody if not doleful, trip-hop incorporates slowed-down hip-hop samples and is most often sung by women. The predominant instruments are keyboards, though horns often appear. Moby wrote, performed, recorded, and produced all of Everything Was Beautiful in his home studio, playing all the instruments—most of them computer-generated—by himself.

For Moby fans, Everything Was Beautiful is a welcome return to form. As major influences on this album he rightly credits Smith & Mighty, Sly & Robbie, and Wally Badarou. While it could be played in dance clubs, it's actually more of a chill listening record, though it's hard to judge as I only heard an MP3 stream. The vocals are sung by five women: Apollo Jane, Mindy Jones, Julie Mintz, and Raquel Rodriguez. In "This Wild Darkness," Jones and Jane are joined by Brie O'Bannon.

As he's aged, Moby has begun to fleck his music with references to great literature. These Systems Are Failing (2016) was made with a group he called The Void Pacific Choir, a name derived from a D.H. Lawrence quote. In Everything Was Beautiful he quotes the poetry of William Butler Yeats, specifically "The Second Coming." Two songs are titled with phrases from that poem: "Mere Anarchy" and "The Ceremony of Innocence." The poem's famously apocalyptic tone—"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold"—hovers over the entire album.

In perhaps his best-known record, Play, Moby used samples of blues and roots music. Here he returns to a classic American Negro spiritual, "Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child," aka "Motherless Child," and transforms it into a Mobyized electronica exploration. "The original is probably 200 years old," he said. "It's one of those pieces of music that's from a gospel tradition, it's from a field-holler tradition, it's from a bluegrass folk tradition. I don't think it would be possible to count the number of people who have covered or sung 'Motherless Child.'

"I was out to dinner one night with Lou Reed and Bill T. Jones and a few other people, and Bill stood up and sang 'Motherless Child' and did this spontaneous choreography. It really struck me, because these older pieces of music can be really sad, and I guess a lot of musicians are uncomfortable making them sadder, so they try to lighten them up and they become kind of jaunty. The way Bill sang it, it was really dark and morose, and so when I had my friend Raquel Rodriguez sing it for the record, I wanted it to be that. I wanted it to be austere and dark, without even a hint of levity to it."

With his wealths of fame and talent, Moby could take his career in almost any direction and be a success. He's clearly conscious of good sound, but his primary fame comes from working in a genre known for compromised sound—so where is he headed these days?

"So you're asking: As a musician making albums at a time when very few people pay attention to albums, why in the world do I keep making them? Being 52 years old and hating touring has forced me to have more purity around the process of making music. I don't expect anything from it except to love the act of making it—and, hopefully, someone somewhere will be willing to listen to it.

"And there's no commercial pressure. There's no need or desire to compromise. Why would I compromise? So I could get a few more downloads? I'd rather just go hiking. On my deathbed, I don't want to look back at compromise. I want to look back at aspiring to do things that, at the very least, tried to be beautiful and aspired to integrity."

Despite Moby's ominous outlook on the future of well-recorded music—not to mention the prospects of humanity itself—his worldview and music still contain sparks of optimism and passion that make his artistry vivid and meaningful.

"The strangest thing about music is that, technically, music has never once existed. There's no such thing as corporeal, physical music. It's just air molecules moving around. But if it's a jackhammer pushing air molecules around, it's annoying. If it's a cello pushing those same air molecules around, it can beautiful. Making it, listening to it—even talking about it—is in service to that weird magic."