Moby

Richard Melville Hall was born in 1965 in New York, grew up in hippie communes, played in several hardcore bands in the city (Vatican Commandos, A.W.O.L.), and finally embarked on a career as a disc jockey in 1984, adopting the name “Moby” in honor of the narcoleptic Herman Melville.

He rose to fame with a series of singles released as Moby or under other pseudonyms (Barracuda, Brainstorm, Mindstorm, UHF, and Voodoo Child): Mobility (November 1990), Voodoo Child (January 1991), Go (March 1991, his first major hit, which used the theme written by Badalamenti for “Twin Peaks”), Rock The House (April 1991, as Brainstorm, also including the other classic Help Me To Believe), Drug Fits The Face (May 1991, as Barracuda), UHF (October 1991, also featuring the classic Everything), Drop A Beat (June 1992, one of his fastest tracks), Next Is The E (July 1992), partly collected on Moby (Instinct, 1992), Early Underground (Instinct, 1993), and Rare (Instinct, 1996).

The rave scene enthusiastically embraced his hypnotic, velvety techno, which seemed like a transcendent version of Detroit techno. Highlighting the hedonistic, anti-establishment, and communal spirit of the rave counterculture, Moby filled the moral void that had emerged in that scene. Moby did for the raves what Dylan had done for folk singers: he offered himself to the crowds as a generational spokesperson.

Moby established himself as an “author” and not just a DJ. No DJ before him had imposed such a personal style and such a forceful personality.

His stature as an artist was particularly highlighted by the EP Move (Elektra, 1993), which also contains experimental tracks like The Rain Falls And The Sky Shudders (a dizzying minimalist piano figure in the style of Terry Riley over a martial double bass tango) and Unloved Symphony, along with the frantic “trains” of Move and All That I Need Is To Be Loved, and by the album Ambient (Instinct, 1993), devoted to atmospheric compositions like My Beautiful Blue Story that have little in common with the wild and creative techno of the singles. Moby was the first techno DJ to be invited to an avant-garde music festival.

Those experimental ambitions fully blossomed on his first true album, Everything Is Wrong (Elektra, 1993). The breakneck dances (like Anthem and Bring Back My Happiness) are cold and predictable, while the most evocative moments are Hymn, which originates from a cross between a new-age sonata and an “ambient” watercolor by Brian Eno, Good Moving Over The Face Of The Waters, which mimics Philip Glass’s symphonic minimalism, and the ethereal odes of Into The Blue and When It's Cold I'd Like To Die, which owe much to the angelic soprano of Mimi Goese (Hugo Largo). The single First Cool Hive continues to traverse the territory of Badalamenti/Morricone, not at breakneck speed but rather at a shuffle pace, letting sampled vocals and electronic melodies float Enigma-style.

The experiments continued on the following singles: Feeling So Real (1994) uses a “symphonic” effect of arpeggiated synthesizers (somewhat in the style of OMID) to launch into hyper-frenetic techno; Everytime You Touch Me (1995) dives into shameless disco music for a female singer, yet is nonetheless driven by an irresistible melody and piano counterpoint.

Meanwhile, Moby had withdrawn to a “Christian” life on an old farm without water or electricity.

That schizophrenia became his trademark and also permeates Animal Rights (Elektra, 1996). The album begins with ambient music inspired by the adagio of 18th-century classical music (Dead Sun). A series of classical-style interludes like this—from the African percussion trance of Alone to the romantic piano sonata of Old, from the trembling new-age serenade in slow crescendo of Living to the medieval Celtic madrigal of Now I Let It Go, culminating in the symphonic finale of A Season In Hell—adorn the work (and would alone justify a separate album), yet in reality Animal Rights is something else entirely: it is Moby’s rock album.
Someone To Love plunges him into the infernos of Ministry, with a full-volume heavy metal riff, machine-gun-like drum patterns, and furious vocals worthy of the worst punk rock. Heavy Flow charges forward like a rampaging tank, opening terrifying chasms of riffs, as if Black Sabbath had turned to speed metal. And the colossal riff of Face It, with Black Sabbath roots, shakes the foundations in a twelve-minute delirium where Moby vomits his inner demons. In the hammering drive of Come On Baby, one can hear echoes of Led Zeppelin’s orgasmic energy. The melodrama of Say It’s All Mine harks back to David Bowie’s decadent ballads, with a touch of Kim Fowley’s mental instability. Moby seeks visceral impact—and he finds it, more so than many of the gory rock bands.
The biggest surprise is Moby’s singing, one of the most powerful and expressive voices of recent years. His primordial scream comes from an extremely desolate intellectual landscape, where existential drives marry with metaphysical yearnings. Moby shouts at the top of his lungs, convinced that no one can hear him—a singular fact for a declared believer like him.
In the end, one almost forgets the other Moby, the one who provided the interlude throughout the album’s demonic journey, the one capable of sculpting tenderly enchanting melodies in wildly glittering landscapes. The Moby of Living and A Season In Hell is a modern composer in the mold of Philip Glass.

Moby also had a fully electronic and ambient album ready under the name Voodoo Child, and when it was released, The End Of Everything (Elektra, 1997) proved to be a pleasant surprise. Moby creates introspective and impressionistic music for synthesizer that serves as a bridge between new age and classical music. The maturity of this composer (just 32 years old) is truly impressive. The warm embrace of these sounds reflects not only a poetic spirit but also a skillful manipulator of genres.

I Like To Score (Elektra, 1997) is a rather minor offering by Richard Melville Hall, who may be trying to achieve too many ambitious goals in too many genres. His passion and his talent for "scoring" are well known (an improviser he never was), and these scores (for television and cinema) are sometimes quite adventurous, embellished with peculiar and wonderfully bizarre studio tricks. They do include a few of his old hits (namely Go e First Cool Hive), and a new one (the funky I Like To Score), but mostly offer a different perspective from which to taste his art: Melville's collagistic approach to composing as influenced by sacred western music (Novio's choir of nuns, Grace's organ fugue). Best of all, and probably the most compelling reason to purchase the CD, is the concerto for pianoforte and orchestra hidden within God Moving Over The Face Of The Water: calm, transcendent, inspiring. His techno version of the James Bond Theme is not up to his standards, but go tell the crowds of fans.

If Animal Rights was his rock album and I Like To Score was his classical album, then Play (Mute, 1999) is Moby's gospel album. The recurring leitmotiv is the marriage of heaven and hell, i.e. of 1990s upbeat, edonistic, high-tech, yuppie music and 1920s plaintive, rural, simple slave music. Archaic blues songs are the sources for Find My Baby and Natural Blues, and slow dirges abound (Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad). Elsewhere Moby gives a half-hearted nod to his own techno past (Bodyrock, Machele) and his own ambient past (Guitar Flute & String), but his heart seems to be floating towards new horizons. Surprisingly it was this album, full of "pop" songs and influenced by Fatboy Slim and Chemical Brothers, that turned Moby into a pop star.

Moby entered the contest for most dated album of the year with 18 (V2, 2002), another post-modernist assemblage of blues and gospel quotations (such as In My Heart) brought together via a parade of guest vocalists (notably Sinead O'Connor) plus assorted homages to popular styles of the times (the atmospheric ballad Great Escape, the hip-hop Jam for the Ladies, the soul whine of At Least We Tried, the dub trance of Another Woman, the disco-pop of Harbour, and a parody of himself in We Are All Made Of Stars).

Baby Monkey (Mute, 2004), credited to Voodoo Child, is a traditional dance album.

Hotel (V2, 2005) is a shy attempt at copying synth-pop of the 1980s. The bonus disc of ambient instrumentals is simply embarrassing. Few musicians have fallen so fast so low.

Moby's artistic collapse continued on Last Night (Mute, 2008), despite the vain attempt to recapture the style and magic of Everything Is Wrong, which happened way too rarely (Disco Lies, The Stars, and especially Everyday It's 1989) .

A simpler, intimate and elegant style permeates Wait For Me (2009), a sort of bedroom album that dispensed with the spectacular tricks he had pioneered.

Barricaded behind the same solipsistic narcissism, Destroyed (2011) boasted at least two slightly ambitious suites, The Violent Bear It Away and Lacrimae.

Innocents (2013) contains elegant collaborations with vocalists such as Mark Lanegan (The Lonely Night), Wayne Coyne (The Perfect Life) and Damien Jurado (Almost Home).

Hotel - Ambient (2014) and the four-hour Long Ambients 1 Calm Sleep (2016) are devoted to ambient and drone music, with the latter indulging in very long compositions, notably LA1.

Moby then recorded two albums credited to a non-existent Void Pacific Choir, namely These Systems Are Failing (2016) and More Fast Songs About the Apocalypse (2017), on which he attempted a sort of revival of dance-punk of the 1980s.

The melancholic vignettes of Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt (2018) and All Visible Objects (2020) are mostly sleep-inducing.

Reprise (2021) revisits some of his best material.

He returned to long ambient droning music on Ambient 23 (2023), but this was just a self-indulgent project.

Always Centered at Night (2024) is devoted to collaborations with lesser known, underground artists, notably Where Is Your Pride? with the late Benjamin Zephaniah.