Catching Up With... Moby

In the last month or so, news stories featuring DJ/composer/producer Moby have mostly focused on the artist's unfettered habits and public posture. Recent headlines include "The Box Is Too Degenerate for Even Moby," "Moby: No one buys records anymore," and perhaps the best of all, "Moby: 'I Don't Advocate Sobriety for Anyone Who Can Drink Successfully.'"

And why have we seen so much in print about his predilection for the party? Probably because this year has seen the electronica king's return to the dance music scene. The April release of Last Night, an upbeat love letter to New York City nightlife, spawned a deluge of remixes. November's album, Last Night Remixed, gathers the best of these reinventions on a full-length disc.

Recently, Paste caught up with Moby and talked about his return to the club scene, his plans for the future, and why the music business of yore is dead.

Paste: Well, first, I don’t think Paste has talked to you since March, just before the release of Last Night. Can you tell us how that record came about?
Moby: I’d been on tour for years and years and years. Basically starting about 1997 or 1998, it felt like I went on tour and just never stopped touring. I guess about two years ago I finally came home for an extended period of time and when I was home I found myself going out a lot. And also, I really got back into DJing. And making the album Last Night, I just really wanted to make an album that sort of reflected what I was listening to when I was going out in New York and also that kind of reflected my long and odd history with dance music in New York City.

Paste: And then why the remix album?
Moby: A lot of times, when you put out an album, you end up getting remixes done for different singles, and usually the only people who ever hear these remixes are club DJs. So a remix will come out, it’ll get played in the clubs for a month or two, and then it’ll disappear. And in the case of this album, we had all these really great remixes done by these great producers, and so I thought, "Why not sort of compile some of the best ones onto one record?" I mean, I’m putting out Last Night Remixed. I fully understand that it has fairly limited appeal, you know, because it’s a very straightforward dance record—I mean, straightforward dance record made by some really great producers. It’s almost more releasing this artifact that we think some people might like, as opposed to putting out a record that we think is going to sell millions of copies.

Paste: Could you tell me a little bit about the collaborators in the remix album and why they were chosen?
Moby: In picking remixers, sometimes someone from the record company will come up with a remixer’s name; sometimes someone from my management company will come up with a name. But for this record, most of these people are producers who, over the last few years, have made records that I really like playing when I’m DJing. So very simply, I would buy someone’s record, I would play it a lot, and then I would try and contact them and see if they’d be interested in doing a remix.

Paste: You’ve said that “remixes in 2008 are more important than they’ve ever been.” Could you elaborate on that?
Moby: The primary way that a remix is commissioned is usually taking a song that wouldn’t work very well in a night club and getting someone to do a remix of it so that it would be club-friendly—the DJs would be able to play it. So you can have a lot of songs that might be really nice to listen to at home, but that would just fall apart if you played them in a nightclub. And so the remixer, their job is kind of to recontextualize a song in a way so that someone could actually play it over a big nightclub system. And, not so much in the states, but especially overseas, you know, electronic dance music is bigger than it’s ever been.

Paste: What’s next for you? I read in an interview with Suicide Girls where you said: "I want to make a really emotional, beautiful record. I don't know if I will succeed, but my goal is to make something very personal, very melodic, very beautiful." Could you talk about that?
Moby: That’s all I’m working on right now. I’m just in my studio working on the next record. And, I mean, in some ways the sort of demise of the record business is creatively sort of emancipating. Because, you know, for the last 10 years, if not longer, when I’ve made records there’s always been a degree of commercial pressure from management, from the label—trying to come up with a record that, in addition to being hopefully creatively satisfying, is also something that could potentially sell well globally. And now, records just don’t sell well. As a result, I’m getting almost no pressure from anyone. So I finally feel like I can just make a record that I really want to make without having to worry about any sort of external pressures.

Paste: In March, you told Paste, “I have a tendency to take myself too seriously.” Did you feel that focusing on dance music was a good way to get away from that? And what do you think about that dynamic with the kind of record you’re aiming for now?
Moby: I definitely in the past have had a tendency of taking myself too seriously, so I wanted to make a dance record, just for a brief period, to have fun and to reflect the music that I was listening to in my daily life. The record I’m making now is a much more serious record. At least I think it’s a much more serious record. But it’s not... It doesn’t involve me taking myself too seriously, I’m just working very hard and taking the music itself very seriously. Hopefully there’s a distinction between the two.

Paste: When will we see that album?
Moby: Hopefully either next summer or autumn. I mean, again, with the demise of the record business, there used to be a very standard way of making records and a very standardized way of releasing records. You always had three or four months before the record was released when you would make videos and do press and do all these different things, and that cycle just isn’t as important as it used to be. And, again, there is something sort of emancipating about that. The relationship between the musician and whoever might be willing to listen to his or her music is so much more direct than it’s ever been. In the old days, there were all these gate keepers: there were the people at the record label, and people at radio, people at press, and all these different people who sort of, you know, could either facilitate the relationship between the music—or the musician and the person listening to the music—or they could sometimes inhibit it. It’s really nice now that there’s that much more direct relationship between the musician and the listener.