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Richard Melville Hall, known as Moby, is someone we all know a little, and it's easy to ramble on about tracks like "Natural blues" or "In this world", which have traveled the globe in much less than 80 days; Moby is a complete artist, the prototype of a "self-made man" who can create a piece without the need for musicians, a decent experimenter, an artist who understands the laws of the market and who has managed to align his interests with those of listeners with more modest tastes. Defining the type of music by the American is not easy, especially when considering that his thirst for research has led him to explore the most inaccessible territories of contemporary music and beyond: thus directing attention to those moments of experimentation that would later give rise, ultimately, to works like "Play" and "18" is not useless at all, indeed, upon reflection, one might wonder if those transitional moments weren't the true essence of Moby, of that DJ who until 1998 produced moderately successful records filled with techno-dance mixed with gospel, hard rock, and ambient: it's worth asking, and given his beginnings, the answer seems to be affirmative; Melville Hall is, before being the Moby of "Play", "Voodoo Child".
Under this pseudonym, "The End of Everything" was released in 1996, one of those CDs whose title alone would already discourage buying a copy: "The end of everything", overt pessimism or secular moralism? It's not given to know, especially since the CD is purely instrumental, a factor that makes it apparently even more unbearable, and the seven tracks, all well over six minutes long, form an exasperated continuum that makes the leitmotif an exhausting repetition: all the components are there to lose patience. "Dog Heaven", the first track, is almost pataphysical: it's neither music nor harmony; it's just an escape of electronic sounds that only at the end of the piece hint at something reminiscent of a melody; this is the music of Voodoo Child: electronic minimalism that aims to evolve into orchestral music throughout the piece. While this reflection is mostly conjecture regarding the first piece, it becomes a clear declaration of style in the "trilogy of love": "Patient Love", "Gentle Love" and "Honest Love", interspersed with the murky "Great Lake", compose the triptych through which Melville Hall's poetic expression unfolds. Of the three tracks, the first is perhaps the most immediate, the second the most uncertain. The most illustrative, "Honest Love", deserves a bit more attention. The track starts quietly on a basic motif where the musical elements (ZONTA PUPPA) gradually assemble in a random order: after a few minutes, there's a small hesitation, and then they flow into an outburst that diffuses into a pleasant and classic piano riff; the piece is gutted of its initial leitmotif and finally proceeds with a piano accompaniment, eventually fading ad libitum: in this little naive enchantment, a musical concept emerges that places theme variation within the track at the center of the melody, a frank and "honest" reason, as the title would suggest. Along the same lines, "Animal Sight", the seventh track, and equally the catatonic "Slow Motion Suicide", a small expressive masterpiece that visually translates the slow agony of a dull pain through aseptic and primordial sounds.
Is the accessible Moby of "Porcelain" better than the exhausting Voodoo Child of "Patient Love"? Buy (and compare) to understand: strange but true, it's the same person.
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