I love this song...  I'd love to hear the 8 minute version

‘The Broken Places’ starts off with a vocoder loop. See, when I’m making an album, I’ll tend to write about 300 songs and narrow it down to the 15 songs that are on the album, which isn’t to say that the songs that don’t make it onto the record aren’t any good. It’s not like 300 amazing songs and I have to get rid of 285 amazing songs. Some of them aren’t very good. 

This song ‘The Broken Places’ was a weird instrumental that I’d written that I liked and thus assumed no one else would like it. And I played it to a few friends and they were like “Ah actually that’s interesting”. The more I lived with it the more I liked it. And what I love, it’s quiet repetitive and almost every element in there is broken, which I guess in keeping with the title but it’s an old Korg vocoder that barely works. I forget what drum machine I used but one of those, I think it might have been a home made, there is this company from Ohio called Paia and I got a home made kit drum machine that someone built in the 70’s. Again, it just barely, barely works. 

So I felt like this was a broken down, sort of winsome, endearing, electronic piece of music. I needed to come with a title for it. That’s the tricky thing with instrumentals is what you call them. And this one, there is a Ernest Hemingway quote, which I think I’m paraphrasing but basically says, life breaks most of us and some of us are stronger at the broken places, and I’ve always loved that quote, which I’m paraphrasing. And so I liked that as an introductory album title for the album because it does sort of emotionally set the tone for the rest of the record. 

The one regret I have about that first song is the original version is about 8 minutes long and just keeps repeating for 8 minutes. And I was kind of a sissy and I thought that having an 8 minutes repetitive introductory song in an album was just a little too much to expect anyone to get through. So I was a sissy and I edited it down to 3.5 minutes. If anyone wants the full 8 minutes version I am happy to send it to them. 


The Broken Places

The song ‘Be The One’ also started with a vocoder loop. And it was the same broken down Korg vocoder. One of my favourite ways of making songs is to start with a decontextualised loop and then just keep adding stuff to it. So with this one there is the vocoder loop and I added a crummy, old, organ pad to it and a drum machine and then two live drum tracks, two bass tracks, tons of synthesizers to make this weird Phil Spector minus the wig and the prison sentence, this wall of sound. 

The idea was this, once everything kicks in my hope is that no one really knows what they’re listening to. Like you can’t tell if it is a bass, or a guitar, or a synthesizer, it’s just this gestalt, crazy wall of sound. And the very last thing I added to it, my friend Joe, who I was working with, said, “Oh wouldn’t it sound cool with a bunch of feedback?”. So I took a hollow body electric guitar and plugged it in three old punk rock distortion pedals I have and turned each one as loud as it could go and put an old ribbon mic in front of the amp and recorded the nosiest destructive feedback I could get. So it’s there through the whole track mixed really, really quietly. So it’s kind of inspired by spending too much time in little bars listening to Glenn Branca, Thurston Moore. The noisy sort of sonic youth Glenn Branca inspired wall of feedback underneath the track. 

I don’t really like happy lyrics that much. So the lyrics were never written down. It’s just me sort of singing into a vocoder. So it’s completely spontaneous, just about what I generally write about, which is relationships falling apart. Maybe at some point I will write songs about relationships working out but unless you are John Fogerty it seems like no one’s really good at that. 


Be The One

I’m not allowed to pick favourite songs because it sounds self serving and also I run the risk of offending the songs that I don’t pick, but at present ‘Rockets’ is my favourite song on the record because it just got a winsome, resigned, melodic, emotional quality to it that I really love. 

I also like the way it appears in the record because it’s sort of like the record is building, building and all of a sudden pulls back with this very broken, messed up piece of quiet, pretty, electronic music. 

My friend Inyang sang on that and she sings in about 4 or 5 songs on the record and she is particularly interesting because she is this very tall statuesque African-American woman and she has a perfect, almost like Mahalia Jackson style gospel voice but she grew up listening to Punk Rock. And when I met her she was working at Carnegie Hall in the world of contemporary classical music. So before she and I started working together, she didn’t really know Gospel and Soul that well. So the irony there is like nerdy, middle-aged, white guy introduces tall, beautiful statuesque African-American woman to Gospel and Soul. Because she grew up listening to the Dead Kennedys. 

The moment she starts singing, it just feels like it’s 1945, and you are driving along an empty stretch of the road in Nebraska, listening to some gospel radio station. 


Rockets

The song ‘Lie Down In Darkness’ is named after a William Styron book, and the song, at least for me is a very emotional, sort of mournful, piece of symphonic, electronic music, my friend Joy Malcolm sings on it. 

Right before he died I got to hear William Styron speak at a Paris review dinner, he read from Lie Down In Darkness, I was watching him read and it was beautiful and emotional. I remember looking around to see if anyone else was having the same reaction I was having, and I looked around and it was all this jaded, cynical New Yorkers who were checking their blackberries or their iphones, and not paying attention. It made me so disappointed. I was thinking, here is William Styron, who is this remarkable writer and he is sort of bearing his soul and you could tell he didn’t have much longer to live and most of the people were not paying attention. But I feel really fortunate that I got to see him and meet him right before he died.


Lie Down In Darkness

The xx infinity  rework

Music: 'The Only Thing', performed by Moby, Vocals by Moby and Julie Mintz

Taken from the film 'The Third Person'. Find out more here: http://3rdpersonmovie.com/

Watch the official video here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmnrF7Jz_NU 

Buy / Stream 'The Only Thing':
http://moby.la/theonlythingSo

-------

Paul Haggis sent me a rough cut of 'The Third Person' and i wrote this song based on the movie. Specifically i wrote it about Liam Neeson's history in the movie, which i can't say anything about as it will give away the plot...

-moby

Buy & Stream

The Only Thing (from The Third Person) PREVIEW

http://mind-field-records.bandcamp.com/
Have always loved the Chemical Brothers... Some tracks on the new album (Born In the Echoes) have a great vibe and feel but I am not sure that the album goes somewhere new... What about the experimentation and envelope pushing... Anyway, I made this edit because I love the vibe of the track but wanted to give it that random edge that the chemical brothers can also do so well.. Crescendo ending of course :) I hope you like it....

The Chemical Brothers - Wide Open (Nicholas D Alternative Edit)

UNKLE feat. Liela Moss - The Dog is Black (Denis Kayron Remix)

'Tricky Tricky' taken from the new Röyksopp album 'Junior', features vocals from Karin Dreijer-Andersson from The Knife and Fever Ray. More information at htp://royksopp.com

Tricky Tricky (Original)

Every once in a while we surface to share our music and shed some light in an otherwise bleak reality. And that time is soon upon us, Ladies &amp; Gents. Our third installment, called "Junior", will be out on the 23rd of March 2009.

Röyksopp Forever

music selected by me and mixed by Dj Alexanders

Massive Attack feat. Hope Sandoval - Paradise Circus (Gui Boratto Remix) (1)

Official SoundCloud for recording artist and DJ Moby. Follow for new music, remixes, DJ mixes and more

The Broken Places

Moby

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