SWINGING MODERN SOUNDS #29: The Museum of Broken Things

Rick Moody interviews Moby about his obsession with Drum Machines:
Last year in The Believer music issue (July 2010), I published an excerpt from a long essay I’ve been working on for a year that argues against the use, in contemporary music, of the drum machine. This is a purely rhetorical argument, really, sort of like Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, and totally out of date, because few people really use drum machines anymore. They use samples of drum machines. They use computers to play the drums, to play the keyboards, and just about everything else, including, if you’re T-Pain, the vox. Still, I made my argument nonetheless—get a live drummer!—and I am unrepentant. However, my friend Moby (he and I grew up in the same town, Darien, CT, and were marked by it in similar ways) got wind of this piece, and wrote to me not long ago asking if I wanted to see his drum machine collection. Yes, he collects drum machines, but not the really slick ones that hip-hop producers employ, but the early, cheesy, slightly homely ones first used mainly by guys who played in church basements and in the lounges of Holiday Inns. Moby likes broken drum machines, and ones that were built from a kit, and Moby has a dream… Well, he will tell you about his dream himself in the interview that follows here. While Moby’s collection of drum machines didn’t inspire me to revise my arguments on the subject, I do admit that if there have to be drum machines, they should be like these ones in Moby’s collection. Let me, meanwhile, remind you that Moby is best known as a composer of electronica and popular music more broadly construed, including records like the runaway hit Play (1999), and my personal favorite The End of Everything (under the name Voodoo Child). This interview immediately precedes his new self-released album Destroyed, which comes to light next month (on May 9). The photos and videos contained herein—of Moby in his drum machine lair—are the work of Laurel Nakadate, who also has a career retrospective up right now at MoMA/P.S.1 in Queens, which you should definitely see.  Read more