Moby

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

First to start with the title, Victoria Lucas was Sylvia Plath’s pseudo name when she wrote ‘The Bell Jar’. I keep going on bay, trying to find an original copy of ‘The Bell Jar’ written by Victoria Lucas and they show up every now and then but they are very pricy. 

A lot of the titles in the record are inspired by either my favourite writers or works by my favourite writers and this one it’s an instrumental. So there is always that question when you write an instrumental, what do you call it? So why not name it after one of my favourite writers? 

The way I write, composing or compiling a song, I start with one arbitrary, decontextualised element and in this case it was a backwards guitar loop. I have a foot switch where you play something into it, you push a button, and it takes what you played and plays it backwards but really lo-fi. I was playing guitar onto it and I ended up with this really weird sounding guitar loop that doesn’t sound like a guitar loop, I recorded that and started adding different elements. 

At first it was this very slow ballad like song and then I added house music drums to it, and house piano to it and ended up with this weird hodgepodge of quiet, disconcerting, atmospheric elements with house music elements. I hope it works. 

The guitar loop for Victoria Lucas was recorded here in New York. I was just living with the guitar loop listening to it over and over again. I had this terrible case of insomnia in Los Angeles. I was staying in a hotel there and so I started adding the quiet atmospheric elements to the song when I was in L.A. and I brought everything back to New York and turned it into a weird messed up, house music song.


Victoria Lucas

right before i left on tour i recorded an instrumental, orchestral version of 'the day'.  i hope you like it.'

The Day (Orchestral Instrumental)

Lie Down In Darkness (Photek Remix)

Wait For Me (Villa remix)

Isolate

There's two kinds of people in this world, there's winners and there's losers. Okay, you know what the difference is? Winners don't give up.

Moby

neon_on_saturn