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We were listening to Metatron and Moby came to mind.
-Oh, but do you know what happened to Moby?- He was always more attentive to the mainstream scene than I was, and I was a bit embarrassed to ask him something like that, but after sixteen years of silence, curiosity got the better of me.
"Play" was the album that, at the end of the nineties, gave electronic music the dignity it deserved as a musical genre, finally eliminating the concept of "computer-made stuff". It wasn't a groundbreaking album, but it unified all the sub-genres of the 2000s into a single thought: "We are art, communication". Part of the success of the album is surely due to the massive advertising campaign carried on national private music networks, but it's impossible not to recognize in that record a first-class emotional-communicative power capable of embedding some of its singles under the skin of an entire generation, becoming, inevitably, culture. Therefore, it's no coincidence if today, in many electronic tracks, you can see flowers that seem to have bloomed from that album: they appear simply because those flowers are there.
Moby's following album timidly continued the path of "Play", merely re-proposing the same patterns under different melodies. At least, that's what I remember, because the album didn't captivate me for too long, and to be honest, I don't recall even a single track from it today.
Since then, my musical education has drifted away from the orbits in which Moby gravitated, and for years his work has been obscure to me.
- Aaah, who knows...He's probably doing his stuff - But I could have reached that conclusion on my own. However, I wouldn’t have found Metatron, so that's fine, but: Moby? What the hell happened to him?
- Search for him on Discogs...Look! He did a lot of live shows, an interview...two years ago a record came out, never heard of it - Indeed, he’s not in the mainstream but in a radical chic/hipster niche populated by unbearable figures. Architects, lawyers, out-of-town university students studying design, posh Milan girls obsessed with money, and gin-tonic and methaqualone photographers.
Awful people. They still listen to great music though. Even they don’t know a damn thing about Moby anymore.
I head home at three, sober as someone about to take their first communion.
I roll one, play Alfa Mist, and scrape information from Discogs.
Eleven untitled tracks of twenty to thirty minutes each for more than four hours of music. Released for free at two hundred and fifty-six kbps. Ambient Drone.
Drone is a musical aspect that has been quite trendy lately. With excellent results by many anonymous experimenters, and particularly anonymous results by experts and professionals. If you don’t believe it, feel free to ask the two fillers of "Hallelujah!...." by GSYBE.
Drone and Moby should go very well together, the genre (the last time I say this: in fact, drone isn’t a "genre", it is an embellishment, like distortion. You could make records only of drones, as you might do only of distortions. And you’d end up with a drone record, by the way. But demanding that raw drone music constitute a genre by itself is a stretch; deceit, non-music, is always lurking around the corner.
Moby makes an ambient record, purely droning, with the experience of someone who has been making music at a high level for decades, and with the dignity of such.
All I have to say at this point is that if you want to listen to a good drone record and you’re completely inexperienced with it (which, in a nutshell and explained to the average person: music that makes drone its main feature is more "experience" than "music"), the first track of this work is one of the best starting points. A warm embrace in a city of glass and concrete. Highly recommended.
As for the rest: the methaqualone photographers, the hopeful architect beauties and wet thighs, the lawyers who go for detox drips, and the entire wagon of reprehensible humans I have encountered to pay January's bills continue to recommend excellent music, Alfa Mist may be a less high-sounding name than Moby's, but deserves a lot of attention, Metatron and the label for which it's signed, as well.
And Moby, too. I regret having lost sight of him for three decades, but it was nice to find him again. And to find him honest.
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