Moby moves through static on Wait For Me

By Christopher Morgan
Published: June 30th, 2009 | 7:00am

Somewhere in logic's dustier corners, it is dictated — or more likely scratched upon a wall — that art birthed from an encounter with David Lynch is of a more intriguing variety. As it is with Moby’s art, too, it resulted from meeting Mr. Lynch himself, or at least that was the revelation when he saw Lynch speak during a period between albums.

Up to that point in his life, Moby had gone through most stages of the mainstream music gauntlet — from unappreciated obscurity to commercial licensing to creative implosion to thankless indifference, he heeded the sage decree that art need not subjugate itself to the whims of what he refers to as the “marketplace”; a simple idea that may not have occurred to a man who had been through the rings of the industry. "I had sort of bought into the sad marriage of art and commerce when I was making records that I wanted to make that appealed to me creatively, but also records that I thought would keep a major label happy," Moby (occasionally referred to as Richard Melville Hall) explains as he explores his motivations behind the creating and recording of his latest album, Wait For Me. An ironic admission for one who was in a hardcore band called the Vatican Commandoes before descending into his current pseudonymus state, but then few punks have gone on to dazzle the ears of America's youth and advertising executives on an equal measure quite like he has.

Moby gained sudden momentum in 1999 with Play (V2 Records), his most commercially successful album. His story more or less continued with two more releases on V2: 2002’s 18 and Hotel in 2005, which seemed to hit a brick wall. “With Hotel, I was really more of an engineer than a songwriter. I wasn't thinking about how the music affected me emotionally," he recalls. "I almost wanted people to listen to it and just be impressed with how well it was engineered, and I almost didn't care if people didn't like the music. It's such a technical record." It didn't really pan out that way; in Pitchfork's infamous review, Moby was rendered a "blank manufacturer of rock-by-numbers."

"Compromise" is a word mentioned regularly, particularly in reference to Hotel. "I would get messages from EMI, who wanted radio hits or partnerships with corporations, and there's that part of you that wants to make everybody happy," Moby explains. Hotel did not live up to its potential as a happiness machine, and may very well be placed — as a curiosity of Moby's repertoire — right alongside 1996’s Animal Rights (Elektra Records), which was more of a brief return to punk.

Between 2005 and 2009, Moby was hardly inactive, but also somewhat under the radar. He wrote the score for the cult film, Southland Tales, acted in a movie called Pittsburgh, and even put out the lesser-known Last Night (Mute Records), an urban dance record which was produced in his home studio and returned to his electronic roots. Just as Last Night was released, Moby returned to his studio to assemble material for an album that the masses would be less accustomed to hearing.

Moby's one-bedroom loft in Tribeca houses the studio where he took to writing and recording his new release, Wait For Me. Simplicity seems to be a running theme for the process in which its composition came about. "With Wait For Me: it's recorded unconventionally, it's mixed unconventionally. I wanted to have it more open — have a lot of atmosphere, be more spacious,” he states. "The songs started with a sound, whether it's a synth sound, or a backward guitar, or a drum loop, or a vocal sample, or something that interests me, and I try to write it around that." One track, called "Stock Radio," is just that: the noisy static of a Bakelite radio. Indeed, much of what comprises Wait For Me can be traced to Moby’s appreciation for sound sculptures and atmosphere-fillers like Martin Swope and Brian Eno; it is an album predicated on sound as opposed to melody, and simmering minimalism as opposed to white-hot bombast. Simply put, it prefers to hum rather than rattle.

For a record as quiet as Wait For Me, the track Moby chose for the first single bares a title laden in violence; he has a great sense of pride for "Shot In the Back Of the Head," a song that shares little to no commonalities with standard FM radio fare. Entirely instrumental and featuring a plodding, backward guitar hook on loop, it is representative of Wait For Me’s static ambience. Further complimenting the oddity of the track is the video by his inspiration and now friend, David Lynch, who returns to his short-film animation roots with an eerie montage of a man and his lover — nothing more than a severed head. As someone who sampled the gloomy "Laura Palmer's Theme" for 1992’s "Go," seen Lynch's three-hour digital film opus, Inland Empire, three times, and DJed at his most recent wedding, Moby couldn't be more pleased. "I thought he would send me some footage he just happened to have around. Instead, he taught himself how to use the newest version of Flash and made this animated video for it, and I was very flattered."

Regarding the production of “Shot In the Back Of the Head,” he remarks, "It is the most counterintuitive commercial thing that I've ever done in my life — to the point that a friend of mine jokingly accused me of committing commercial suicide." And so, Moby continues in his Lynchian approach to music, this time searching to satisfy his own appetites rather than those of the music marketing arena.

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