The Null Device

Moby (yes, the purveyor of bland wallpaper music for the upwardly mobile and darling of advertising agencies everywhere) has a cover of New Order's Temptation; and it's actually not bad. Somewhat slower and sparser than the original, and almost jumping on the glitchgazer bandwagon (i.e., he's found the Bitcrusher plug-in). It's better than most New Order covers I've heard (though a lot of them are shockingly bad), and not too unlike his take on OMD's Souvenir.

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A film about Ian Curtis is being planned. Unfortunately, the producer (Amy Hobby, who did Secretary) is pitching it as the story of Curtis as a "tragic romantic", and, even worse, the musical advisor is that purveyor of bland yuppie dinner-party techno, Moby. (via xrrf)

With credentials such as these, you can't hold out much hope for it. Though wasn't there meant to be another Ian Curtis film, based on his widow's biography of him, Touching From A Distance, and produced with the involvement of the members of New Order?

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Best-selling electronica star Moby admits to being a Celine Dion fan. Given that his career also involves peddling bland, inoffensively MOR music to the suburban masses, I'm not too surprised. (via Largehearted Boy)

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Eminem fans bash Moby, put him in hospital. I'm no fan of Eminem, though given the shite Moby has been foisting on the public lately, you can argue that he had something coming to him.

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Pitchfork Media eviscerates the new Moby album. Apparently it's a load of formulaic tosh, calculated to inoffensively pander to the widest possible demographic. Not only that, but Moby's one redeeming feature -- his earnestly idealism, as expressed in his ranting liner notes -- has been similarly homogenised:

Before Play, Moby had earned a reputation for the well-crafted, often persuasive essays he included with each album. He damned cultural conservatism, cigarettes, celebrity and fundamentalism, while promoting an agenda of conservation, vegetarianism, and animal and prisoner rights. 18 has merely two essays: one about the difficulty of writing essays and the process of creating the album at hand, the other politely suggesting that everybody be nice to each other. Can someone please explain to me why, in a time when Moby's voice is louder than ever, and when cultural conservatism and fundamentalist dogma aims to destroy what few freedoms we as a nation have left, Moby would choose to back down?

Somehow I don't think I'll be giving it a listen anytime soon. (via VM)

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Ooh, Moby has a new album out. He's on the cover of today's issue of InPress, posing in a spacesuit, captioned with "I am a space alien". No you're not; you're a boring geezer who makes bland pinkboy techno.

(I did buy a copy of Play when it came out, though it was one of the CDs liquidated in my most recent CD recycling sweep, and is now probably in a secondhand CD shop. I listened to it about twice.)

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Musical iconoclast Moby's latest album, Play, made history by being the first album with every track licensed commercially, and sold almost four million copies so far, quite impressive when you consider that it's not the product of a major label. This article sheds some light on the Moby phenomenon: (via RobotWisdom)

"The irony is that a lot of people who really love music end up working for the creative service branches of a bigger corporation." But not many of them work at major record labels, according to Moby. Instead, he says, you often have "these pencil-pushers at Seagrams, Sony and BMG, who basically see music the same way they see pencils and mufflers. Maintain your quarterly market share so that your stock price is artificially elevated so your CEO doesn't get fired."

"To be honest with you, when the record first came out, having the music used in TV shows, movies and advertisements was the only way we had of exposing it to people. Radio wasn't playing the music. MTV and MuchMusic, they weren't really getting behind it. So we had no way of reaching people except through advertisements and films."

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