Features

[EDC 2016]

Electronic music icon Moby reflects on EDC and his career

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Moby will deliver an EDMbiz keynote talk Thursday at Caesars Palace.
Deanna Rilling

We spoke to the prolific and pioneering electronic music producer (and sometimes DJ) ahead of his appearance at pre-EDC conference EDMbiz, where he’ll deliver a keynote talk and sign copies of his just-released memoir, Porcelain (which also inspired a companion best-of/mix compilation, Music From Porcelain, available separately).

What was the process for you when writing the book? This was such an interesting process because, to state the obvious, it was actual writing— hundreds of thousands of words. What I found is one of the things that made this type of writing different from the world of music: You can never fake anything. What I mean by that is if you’re writing a song and you come up with a really good chorus, you can just repeat the same chorus a few times and it sounds pretty good. But if you’re writing a book, you can’t copy and paste paragraphs and keep repeating them.

There’s an aspect to it because it’s a memoir, and it’s a memoir that’s written about this very specific time, this 10-year period from 1989 to 1999. It was almost a form of self-therapy or self-diagnostics because what I found is if you’re writing about yourself 20 to 25 years ago, you have sort of an objective sense of yourself that you can’t really have in the present. Like now I’m 50 years old, looking back at my life when I was 24 and I see myself with this sort of objective clarity that I certainly didn’t have at that time. So in a way it’s almost like you gain this sort of omniscience because I’m looking back at myself and remembering what it was like to go through all the things that I went through and the hopes that I had and the fears that I had and insecurities that I had, and you almost as the writer want to reach through time and pat myself on the back and say, “Don’t worry, everything will be okay.”

You’ve said the music is a time capsule reminiscent of New York from 1989-1999. What do you remember most about the spirit of that era? Clearly the club scene or the rave scene or whatever you want to call it nowadays is so huge—just go to EDC and look at the 500,000 people there and the level of production and how much money is involved with it. The difference between now and then is back then, everything was truly underground. I know that’s a word that gets used a lot and overused, but back then, there was no Soundcloud and there was no Spotify, there was no World Wide Web. So to make a record, you had to cobble together all this weird equipment, and then you had to figure out how to press it on to vinyl and you had to figure out how to start a record company, and the only promotion you could ever do was talking to people running fanzines on Xerox paper. … It was this very self-generated underground scene and as a result, there was something very endearing about it because there weren’t that many people involved and we all kind of knew each other and every aspect of it was new: The clothes were new, the music was new, the drugs people were doing were new—every part of it had only been invented in the last couple of years. There was such an innocence and freshness to it that, as much as I love the current state of dance music, I wouldn’t describe it as terribly innocent or fresh.

You’ve said music is another character in your book. How did the track “Porcelain” end up being the memoir’s namesake? On one hand, in the course of the book, somehow in a weird way that song just seemed very fitting because it has a sort of elegiac quality to it and the book, in a way, part of it almost functions as an elegy of sorts, so that was one reason why. The other is because porcelain is white and fragile and I’m white and fragile, so it sort of made sense.

What was it like to revisit the music for this project? Re-approaching the music was like an interesting form of psychedelic time-traveling and what I mean by that is some of the songs that are on these records I hadn’t listened to in a very long time, especially some of the songs written by other people. Going back and listening to an iconic house song from 1990 just reminded me of everything. It’s almost like the book Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. In the beginning of the book, he eats a madeleine, and it triggers this cascade of memory. For me, listening to these old house and hip-hop records sort of had an effect where I didn’t just remember the music, but I remembered the environment in which the music was being played, I remembered what the vinyl smelled like, I remembered what New York was like in ’89 [and] ’90. They served as these really profound mnemonic devices, so going back and rediscovering them was really fascinating.

I saw you at EDC in LA in 2010. What are your thoughts on how it has grown? As someone who lives in Los Angeles, I wish EDC were here so that way afterwards, I could get in my car and drive home and sleep in my own bed. But apart from that, from a sort of aesthetic perspective, EDC makes sense in Las Vegas, because Las Vegas is this city of spectacle and EDC is a festival of spectacle. When you look at just the lights and the pyrotechnics and the lasers that happen at EDC, it just makes such perfect sense for it to exist in Las Vegas.

Will you solely focus on Porcelain for a while, or do you have anything going on in the studio currently? I’m going to put out a new record in September, but at this point, I’m a 50-year old man who makes records in his bedroom. I hate touring, so when I make a new record I really don’t expect people to pay that much attention. I love making records, but I don’t expect too many people to buy them. … If someone does pay attention to something I’ve done, it’s a really pleasant surprise. But I feel like with all the music out there, it’s a little presumptive and absurd for me to expect that many people to pay attention to what I’m doing, especially because I sort of categorically refuse to go on tour.

Will you release it on vinyl? I like putting records out on vinyl, but the truth is at this point in my life, the joy that I get from music is making music and listening to music. If I make music and put it out into the world, I don’t really care too much what happens to it. I don’t really want to think too much about monetizing it or promoting it. The joy that I get from making music is enough. If it goes out into the world and people listen to it, that’s really nice, but my satisfaction comes from just the act of making it.

EDMbiz Keynote June 16, 2:45 p.m., Caesars Palace’s Palace Ballroom, Salon III. Book signing June 16, 4 p.m., Caesars Palace’s Prefunction I. $319-$399; more info at edmbiz.com.

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