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Music

An Interview With Moby: The Man With Two Facebook Accounts

We talk with techno maven Moby about Facebook, David Lynch, photography, and smashing up his equipment.

Moby is a musician most people have heard of, with songs like “Go” he helped define the early 90s dance scene along with acts like The Prodigy, Orbital, and Aphex Twin. With his album Play he found mainstream success and his songs were heard on commercials the world over. His career has been prolific and he’s worked with all sorts of recording artists, from huge stars like Michael Jackson and Brian Eno, to more underground artists. He recently released a new album Destroyed, and an accompanying photography book of shots of his time spent on the road touring.

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We caught up with him in at the Proud Gallery in Camden, London and spoke about important stuff like what his profile picture is on Facebook, why he used to smash up his equipment, and what he thinks of the current state of electronic music.

The Creators Project: I remember seeing you years ago when you used to play your song “Thousand,” which builds to 1000bpm, at the Astoria 2 in London, which has now closed down. Maybe you don’t remember it…
Moby: Oh yeah. I did one show at the LA2 [Astoria 2], I actually headlined there in 1995.

That’s when I saw you and you were into smashing up your equipment on stage.
Oh I had a lot of equipment. It was in the Pete Townsend tradition of breaking equipment, it wasn’t in the interest of being theatrical. It was simply being frustrated that the equipment wasn’t working. Apparently when Pete Townsend first smashed a guitar it was just because the guitar wasn’t working, then people loved it so he did more of it and then it became the thing that he did. For me, when I was touring at the beginning, my equipment broke down a lot. I had this one keyboard that kept breaking and I would get exasperated with it and then after a while it just became almost comical, just destroy, destroy, destroy and then we’d replace it and I’d break that one. So sort of like being a slightly malicious petulant child.

Do you miss those rawer kind of performances?
Well I still do a lot of weird, raw performances. I started a heavy metal band with some friends called Diamondsnake, and my high school punk rock band Vatican Commandos just reformed. And I play bass in a weird blues cabaret band. Because I make my own records by myself, I really love playing music with other people, so that’s what these bands are. They are all very raw and messy and we play shows for 100 people, in New York and L.A.

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So do you have an interest in old blues music, because your album Play sampled a lot of it?
It’s mainly what I listen to. I probably listen to old blues, classical music, punk rock, and speed metal. That’s all I listen to.

You were quite pioneering in the early days of electronic music back in the 1990s. What do you think about electronic music now?
Well the main thing about electronic music is it’s so ubiquitous, everything is electronic music—pop is electronic music, commercial dance music is electronic music, then you still have underground house music and crazy noisey techno. And it’s all made with the same equipment, or at this point it’s all made with the same software.

Is that a bad thing, a good thing, or just one of those things?
I like how egalitarian it is, because it’s quite democratic, you know, anybody with the software can make the music. So I like the democratic aspect of it, but there are two downsides with everybody being able to make electronic music. One is that with software like Ableton or Reason or Logic or Cubase, it’s really easy to make good sounding electronic music, which I think a lot of producers are very comfortable with—making music that’s OK, as opposed to pushing themselves to make something great. The other downside is because everyone uses the same software, it does all sort of sound the same. When I DJ I’ll play 10 songs in a row from 10 different artists and it’ll sound like it might as well have been made by the same person. Like in the old days when you heard a Derrick May track or a seminal house track things were more distinctive, because, say, only Richie Hawtin had a 303 that had been modified to do weird things with the filters so you knew it was him, and that’s changed.

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Richie Hawtin now uses an iPad to DJ, is that something that interests you?
See at the end of the day I’m fascinated by advances in technology, but I don’t really care about them all that much. All I care about is how music affects me when I listen to it. And whether I’m listening to it at the hands of a DJ Djing with an iPod, or a string quartet, or a punk rock band all I care about is my emotional reaction to the music I’m listening to.

Do you think music’s more popular now than it ever has been in modern times?
I think it’s more ubiquitous, it’s a lot easier to carry around. I remember when I was growing up there was nothing portable about music. Because I’m old enough to remember when they invented the Walkman, and pre-Walkman you just didn’t bring music with you when you were out of your house. You played records at home and the radio when you left the house. I’m sure some smart contemporary theoretician like Seth Godin or someone has written about the ubiquitous nature of media and also the way in which we interact with it, because when I was growing up we were really passive. We didn’t have a remote control for the TV and we had three channels, so you’d turn on the TV and you’d sit back and you would accept whatever it gave you. You would get in the car, turn on the radio, and with whatever was playing you’d sit there and accept it. You’d put on an album and it was too much trouble to jump around from song to song, so you’d listen to it from start to finish. It’s certainly quite different now. Like sometimes I’ll listen to a song and a third of the way through realize I’ve heard enough and skip to the next one.

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It is kind of the nature of our modern listening habits, like sometimes you’ll watch a video for two minutes and then watch something else. It reminds me of a character in David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest, who’s lamenting about a time when they didn’t have a choice of what to watch on TV. I know it’s not quite at that point now but…
It’s already gotten to that point. For me and most of the people I know, we have a few TV shows we love, like Family Guy, 30 Rock, Dexter, and I have no idea when any of them are on because I watch them on my computer. I haven’t seen an advertisement on TV in years and it’s great. At the same time if you had come to me when I was ten years old and said here’s the future, you have cellphones, you can listen to music anywhere, you can make music on a computer and computers are cheap and everyone can afford them, and you can read any book and watch any movie, I would’ve thought I’m never going to be depressed again in my life. But with all these technological advances, I still figure out ways to be anxious and depressed. It’s fun but it hasn’t really made people happier. It’s made us victim to this technology on demand, but I don’t know if it’s really improved anyone’s life. I think the people whose quality of life it has improved is people who live in really remote places and people who are shut-ins. The very sick, the very old, the morbidly obese, people who can’t leave their house—for them, it’s been a godsend.

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Like on Facebook where they maybe have 100’s of virtual people they can contact. Do you use Facebook?
I have two Facebook accounts. One under Moby, which has about a million odd likes, and I have my own personal one under some weird name I made up. And that’s there for two reasons: One, and I shouldn’t admit this because it’s not very rock ‘n’ roll, but it’s so I can play Scrabble with my friends online. And also, anthropologically, I’m fascinated with this way in which people choose to present themselves. For example, I’ll have a friend who’s maybe 40 pounds overweight but they’ll put up a profile picture like they’re thin. People put up this profile picture in the most ideal sense, how they want to be seen. Like when people change their profile picture and it announces it to you and I always want to go and look at it because I imagine they’re taking the picture, they put it in iPhoto, they change it and they crop it, and present the most perfect them. Even if their friends see them every day they still want to be seen in the most perfect way.

What do you have as your profile picture?
My profile picture on my personal account is of a blind retarded dog, with eyes looking in either direction, and teeth sticking out. There’s this ugliest dog competition and I think it was runner up. My profile picture before that was a naked mole rat and my profile picture before that was Bob from Twin Peaks. So these are portraits of my soul…

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I’ve read online that you’re a big David Lynch fan and you’ve also collaborated with him.
It’s interesting because I’ve met some of my heroes and been disappointed. But David Lynch, he’s my favorite filmmaker of all time, hands down. And I love 99% of what he’s made and he’s also one of the nicest people on the planet. He’s just funny and kind and decent, so actually becoming friends with him has made me like his work more. You would want him to be your uncle, and you’d go over to his house and you’d live in the woods and he would take you snowshoeing and you’d come back and chop wood and make cocoa. He’s just got this old school 1940s-1950s cinematic vibe.

That’s interesting because in his work he kind of subverts that ideal of homeliness. Is there any indication that he has a darker side, this dark creativity?
It’s a dark creativity, but it’s really playful. I was at his house a couple of months ago, he lives in this interesting compound, and we were walking by this studio and there was something disgusting, you could smell it. And I asked him, “What’s that disgusting smell?” He’d taken a bunch of chicken and nailed it to his wall because he wanted to grow maggots. But he wasn’t doing it in any sort of dark way, he was doing it because this seemed exciting to him. He wasn’t trying to be like all evil and nasty, but he thought it’d be really fun to nail a bunch of chicken to the wall to see if he could grow maggots. He was very frustrated because he didn’t grow maggots, the chicken rotted, but no maggots.

Let’s talk a little bit about your photography, is that a new pursuit or an old pursuit?
It’s funny, I’ve been doing photography for as long as I’ve been doing music which is 35 years. I started doing both when I was 10 years old and I started photography because my uncle was a photographer for the New York Times. So he started giving me his hand-me-down photo equipment. So I worked as a photo assistant and shot and developed film, and when I went to university I was a Philosophy and Photography major. So I’ve been doing it for a really long time. Ten years ago I gave up film and started working just digitally, and that was one of my concerns in putting out a photo book. Nowadays, in the age of digital photography, everybody’s a photographer, but the fact that I spent years working in dark rooms made me feel like I’m a little more entitled to call myself a photographer.

Do you use Photoshop or anything like that?
For this show they’re all documents, documentary photography, so I didn’t want to process the images that much. So all I did was use Lightroom, which is like Photoshop for dummies. It’s like Photoshop but it does a tenth of what Photoshop does. Most of the professional photographers I know now just use Lightroom. Photoshop is so good and so complicated I don’t know anyone who uses all of it. Lightroom is just like contrast, blacks, color tints.

So why don’t you like working in in dark rooms any more?
One of the main reasons is the chemicals make you really sick. The stop bath and fixer, these are incredibly toxic chemicals and after spending 6 hours a day in a dark room, your skin gets weird and you’re always sick to your stomach. Basically you’re toxically poisoned. I don’t miss that, but I do miss the magic… like with digital photography you instantly know what you’ve captured and you can shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot with no consequences, but with film you would shoot a roll of 35mm and you wouldn’t know if it worked out. And then you’d develop it, and as you develop it you still didn’t know if it’d worked out. Then you’d look at the strips of film and you’ be able to slightly read the negative to see if there was enough information there. And then when you print it, that was the first time when you’d have a sense of whether you’ve done a good job. And it could literally be weeks after you took the picture. So that delayed gratification was great, but not great enough to make me want to go back to it.