On his upcoming effort Destroyed, Moby constructs synthetic symphonies out of sounds coaxed from broken-down gear during dead-of-night sessions in hotel rooms.
It's an insomniac artist's way of making sense of the world during a time when the music industry, and everything else, seems to be falling into chaos.
[eventbug]"You ideally make music because you want people to hear it," the artist formerly known as Richard Melville Hall told Wired.com by phone ahead of his Thursday DJ set at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. "But it seems like some record companies wake up in the morning and try to find new ways to get people not to hear the music."
Luckily, today's sonic landscape teems with the work of artists and technicians busy on their laptops, iPads and iPhones, making "good enough" music that works outside the system even as audience expectations and demands mutate.
According to multidisciplinary pioneer Moby, more people than ever are channeling their creative energies into tech-assisted songs that possess the neurochemical ability to literally reshape minds. The bad news is we're living in a world blasted by a light-speed media assault that scares some of us into corners, ducking the latest domestic terror or global catastrophe.
"Every single day the world seems like it is on the brink of falling apart," the soft-spoken 45-year-old musician and DJ said. "But then I look outside my window, and things look about the same as they did a week ago. It's almost a form of cognitive dissonance."
Destroyed, arriving May 16 in an arty deluxe package complete with a book of Moby's photography, capably chronicles that dissonance in disembodied electronic music filled with human concerns like love and hope.
Wired.com probed Moby's deep brain about mass media, free culture, the death of the album and why his Institute for Music and Neurologic Function colleague Oliver Sacks might be too cranky to dig electronic music.
Wired.com: You've been making music for 35 years. What strands of musical and technological evolution stand out most to you, and what do you see developing on the horizon?
Moby: The reason I started making music really young is that no other art form affected me as powerfully. I was a latchkey kid who didn't have a ton of friends and was bad at sports, so that gave me a lot of time to sit in my living room, listen to records and play guitar. And I don't know how to do anything else, which I think is a key component for success. It really helps if you only know how to do one thing, because then you have no fallback plan.
Wired.com: I think you just gave career counselors a collective heart attack.
Moby: But my answer to the question about musical and technological evolution is that basically everything has become less monolithic. When I was growing up, and up until quite recently, there really was a stranglehold on the creation, distribution and promotion of music on the part of major labels, radio stations and media outlets. That has completely fractured and splintered. And personally, I think that is for the best, and has actually improved the quality of music. It has also helped attenuate some of the more pernicious elements of corporate media control.
‘Anyone with a laptop, or even an iPhone, can make decent-sounding records. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.’Wired.com: How about the production of music?
Moby: As far as that, now literally anyone with a laptop, or even an iPhone, can make decent-sounding records. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I mean, it's a lot more egalitarian, but it seems like there is something to be said for spending a long time figuring out how to make a record, and then spending a long time actually making a record.
Now it seems like there is an awful lot of people making records that are quite good, but not an awful lot of people making records that are truly great. That's the downside to remarkable software. You can sit down with Reason or Ableton and literally in a couple of hours make a very good-sounding record. But then a lot of people become contented with that, rather than pushing themselves to making something that sounds great. By the way, I apologize for the length of that Fidel Castro-like answer.
Wired.com: Do you think the audience has assimilated that cultural shift, getting more and more used to less and less incredible work, and shorter work, rather than waiting for what seems an eternity for a world-changing release like Sgt. Pepper's and such?
Moby: Yeah, definitely. The way in which music production has changed has certainly changed expectations for what music can do. I had one of these self-evident epiphanies about eight or nine years ago at a MTV awards show. Alicia Keys was performing, and everyone seemed amazed that she actually knew how to play the piano. People were in the lobby saying, "Wow, she can actually play an instrument!" And I remember thinking to myself, "Isn't that part of the job description?"
I don't think there's anything wrong with not knowing how to play an instrument, but the rise of the nonmusical producer has done away with musicianship and focused attention purely on the song's hook. Again, I'm not criticizing, but when hip-hop producers started making records where the verse and chorus were exactly the same – except maybe the chorus was a little louder, and they said different things – that certainly changed the nature of songwriting. It also made people a lot more comfortable only listening to bits of a song, and certainly more comfortable only listening to a song. The old idea of sitting down and listening to a well-crafted album from musicians who spent years perfecting their craft seems anachronistic at this point.
Wired.com: It's ironic, because hip-hop was started by producers who remixed and rebooted song snippets into addictive beats. But in its early period, those producers still managed to create coherent albums, like Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, which practically mandated an experience in full like Sgt. Pepper's.
Moby: Yeah, the same goes for Eric B. & Rakim's Paid in Full or Boogie Down Productions' Criminal Minded. But I think that's because some of these guys were coming from an album background. If you're talking about It Takes a Nation, Hank Shocklee and The Bomb Squad grew up listening to classic rock and funk records, so they were trying to make cohesive albums. A lot of people do talk about the demise of the album, but I still believe that if an artist tries hard to make a great album, people will buy it and listen to it as an album, rather than just a collection of random songs.
Wired.com: What about releasing an album into the real world? If artists are going to go offline, it seems today that they have to make their material albums a multimedia event, such as you've done with Destroyed's photography book, to offer something that listeners can't get solely through downloading songs.
Moby: You can still just put out an album. But I get excited by the fact that I still have some semblance of an audience. There's a responsibility that comes with that. Ideally, you don't want to waste people's time. If someone is willing to sit down and listen to an album, you want to give them something that is worthy of their time and attention. And for me, if you've made an album that you really care about, then you have to do everything you can to get people to listen to it. Which doesn't mean the end result has to be sales or market share.
Wired.com: I read that you made the songs on Destroyed late at night while the world was asleep. How do you think that solitude plays out?
Moby: To be honest, I don't know. If I make a record, I usually have very little objectivity. When I put out Play, I thought it was a hip-hop record. I'm not being stupid. So with Destroyed, I definitely hear it as being the product of an insomniac playing broken-down equipment in hotel rooms at 3 a.m. in the morning, when everyone else is asleep. But I don't know if anyone else will hear that. You put it out to the world, and the moment it leaves your computer, it's no longer yours.
I usually just give everything away. I recently gave the record to a friend of mine at KCRW. But once he started playing it, the record company called and asked him to stop.
Wired.com: Your site Moby Gratis hands off free music to indie filmmakers.
Moby: Yeah, it's all pre-approved. That started a few years ago, but we weren't very good at promoting it. I sent out some e-mails to friends of mine in the indie film community, and in the process, I sort of forgot to tell other people about it. When we started it, I was signed to EMI, and they had this rule that every single request had to be approved by them. And it would take weeks, with plenty of frustration. Once I left EMI, the rule became that if someone sends a request and we don't approve it within the day, it's automatically approved.
Wired.com: That's awesome. I read that The Beatles had to make everything on a four-track up until around The White Album because EMI had its eight-track hidden in the closet or something. They even put padlocks on The Beatles' refrigerator!
Moby: Yeah, it's frustrating. At the end of the day, you ideally make music because you want people to hear it. But it seems like some record companies wake up in the morning and try to find new ways to get people not to hear the music.
Wired.com: It's a sign of a monolithic model on the decline, as you've said.
Moby: Right. Like King Lear, but on a multinational level. [Laughs]
Wired.com: You serve on the board of directors of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function, which works with Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain author, neurologist Oliver Sacks. What would Sacks think if he heard Destroyed?
Moby: Oliver is an interesting guy, who I hold in the highest regard. But he can be a little cranky. He mainly likes classical music, so my honest answer is I think it depends on if you caught him on a good or bad day or time. If you caught him at a time where he was really relaxed and open-minded, he might take the time to listen to Destroyed's classical and melodic influences. But I have a feeling Concetta Tomaino, the IMNF's executive director, might be favorably disposed to it.
"Music is so ubiquitous and has been cheapened in our culture, but it still has the power to immediately affect people emotionally in ways that really no other art form can."Wired.com: Sticking with the neurological theme, since you're also plugged into the sociopolitical and environmental spheres, are you worried where the world's head is at? And do you think music is up to the therapeutic task?
Moby: I think so. Yesterday, when I was flying to Texas for South by Southwest, I had to deal with all sorts of traffic and flight delays and so on. But I put on Janis Joplin's greatest hits, and instantly every problem or concern I had just melted away. I could almost feel, on a synaptic level, my brain getting happier and healthier. Which is ironic, considering it's music made by a drug addict.
Music is so ubiquitous and has been cheapened in our culture, but it still has the power to immediately affect people emotionally in ways that really no other art form can. To be emotionally affected by a novel, you sort of have to read the whole book. But you can be neurochemically affected by Joplin's "Piece of My Heart" within the first five seconds of the song.
Wired.com: Given the domestic and global turmoil and catastrophes we're seeing now, do you think culture, and especially its music, can help us deal? Or do you think a sense of inescapable mortality has crept into the proceedings?
Moby: That's one of the situations where the question is better than any answer I can come up with. But think of the old print adage: "If it bleeds, it leads." Disaster is compelling, and it makes for good media. And there's a huge danger – and I'm definitely guilty of it – of seeing disaster as the norm rather than the exception.
We're being fed all this remarkably compelling media telling us that every aspect of our lives is a total disaster. We're going to die from obesity, cancer, diabetes, terrorism or radiation from Japan. All of these things are getting ready to kill us, even though most of them are invisible and we're not even aware of them. But then we look outside of our windows and things are OK. And the irony is that the situations in which people experience these media are sometimes incredibly benign. As we speak, someone is sitting in a sun-streaked coffee shop, drinking a soy latte in an idyllic moment, and reading about the world falling apart. [Laughs]
Wired.com: Of course, it depends on which window you're looking out of. If you're looking out of a window in Japan, you're probably seeing catastrophe in real time. Which I think is the point: Looking out the window is a reality-based activity. Absorbing media that filters that reality for you is a hyperreality-based activity. It's when the two meet that we run into the cognitive dissonance you're talking about.
Moby: Right. Not to sound like a crazy old hippie, but the natural world does just sort of sit there. But the media world is moving all the time, with sound, images and pixels jumping everywhere. And the more dynamic media becomes, the more editors and program directors, to compete, feel that they have to make it even more dynamic.
I guarantee you that if you took my great-grandmother, if she was still alive, and sat her for two minutes in front of Fox News, she would go into seizures. There's more information in two minutes of today's mass media now – with all of its chirons, scrolling banners and so on – than I think 10 years of your average human experience lived 500 years ago. I'm not aware of them, but I'm sure that there are some real smart Marshall McLuhan disciples trying to figure out how today's media is affecting us on a neurochemical level.
Wired.com: I'd be interested to hear what Sacks thinks about that.
Moby: Again, he'd probably just be upset. He's a cranky man.
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