Moby Gets Remixed

At this point in his career, I'm pretty sure that even your grandmother even knows who Moby is. The guy went from being an underground sensation to being the first proper techno superstar. He's seen it all, played it all, and done it all. He was among the first to realize that licensing songs was a quick and easy way to get material out to people who wouldn't normally hear it and make money of top of it all. Remember Play? Everybody does. While his worldwide fame has simmered down his productions have not. If you follow him at all you might remember that Destroyed was a return to form and as if by magic he's recently assembled Destroyed Remixed.

Ok, let’s just get this out of the way very quickly. If you like Moby then you most definitely need Destroyed Remixed. This thing is HUGE in the very truest sense of the word. There's so much material on this set that it's impossible to keep up with. If you were to try and burn it all to disc, you'd need no fewer than FIVE cd's to contain it all. How's that for a remix album? Exactly. Album filler this is not. This is a massive project that contains so much dance music so much earth shattering beat pounding that your feet will fall off. Everyone from Ferry Corsten to your mom makes an appearance here and does a heck of a job while they’re at it. Techno, house, trance, it's all here and in stock and it's almost too much to handle.

Destroyed Remixed is essential it's like a week of night outs all under one roof. If you like to dance, like Moby, or just like massive records then this is the collection for you. The phrase all killer and no filler seems a bit underwhelming when it comes to describing Destroyed Remixed but it would seem to apply. Go get this thing now.

Moby, Wait For Me

Another year and another Moby album, and if you're like me that's not a bad thing. Wait for Me, his eleventh album, was recorded at Moby's home on the lower east side of New York and is decidedly low-key. Taking just over a year to complete, the creative impetus behind the record was hearing famed director David Lynch at a BAFTA event in the UK. It was hearing Lynch talk about how being creative for oneself is perfectly fine as opposed to being creative to accommodate the marketplace. With that in mind Moby set out to make an album for himself rather than what the marketplace might or might not like.

The results of this self-indulgence, if you will, is an epic album that heads the exact opposite direction that his last album, Last Night was headed. Wait for Meis not a dance music album, it is instead an auditory exploration that's predominantly ambient. It's a beautiful record that harks back to some of his older material while still moving forward with rich textures and brilliant ideas. If you can think of Brian Eno meeting Julee Cruise on a quiet night, you can kind of paint a mental picture of what kind of record Moby set out to make. He succeeded in creating something darn near close. Wait for Me is lush, quiet, and subdued and when you consider it was recorded in Moby's bedroom by himself this all makes sense.

Wait for Me was arranged as a cohesive body of work and functions well as a single piece spread out over the 33 or so minutes it takes to listen too. As Moby himself says, "I fully understand that most people listen to individual tracks here and there, but I ask that you listen to the album from start to finish even just once." If you grant him his request, you will be rewarded with a beautifully haunting record that will stir your heart and soul with deeply emotional and unobtrusive songs. Wait for Me is truly angelic and grand.

Orchestral, ambient, and muted, Wait for Me is a nice change of pace for Moby. Wait for Me illustrates that even high profile artists can make fantastic music on their own, in their homes, without multimillion dollar budgets and videos. Moby might not have written Wait for Me as a record for the club, but he seems to have written the perfect record for the morning after and that's not a bad thing.