Famous for his ambient anthem 'Go!', which filched the strings from Twin Peaks, Moby has been at it again. This time out, he's mixed up elements as diverse as techno, hardcore and grunge for the album, Everything is Wrong. A tour de force of grinding beats and heartfelt vocals, it brings together Vegan and Christian philosophy. With styles ranging from old skool to grunge, how hard was it fitting all of those diverse elements together?

"It took a long time. The non-linear access of mini-disc made it easier to put together, and deciding on the final track sequence much easier. Normally I guess what would happen is you'd use Sound Tools, but the problem with things like that is you're chained to the computer. With my JVC Mini Disc machine I could take it home and listen to it in a practical listening environment. To me, it's the ideal format. I think they should just get rid of CDs, vinyl and cassettes and switch over en masse to it. They're small, they're light, it's linear access, you can name all the tracks, you can do so much with it. There's no bumping either, thanks to the 12 second RAM buffer."

Do you work with D-to-D recording exclusively then?

"Most of the time, as far as the virtual tracks are concerned, everything is mastered direct to DAT straight out of the mixing desk. I have three ADATs for the vocal stuff, and for sequencing I use Cubase Audio on the Mac. I use the usual samplers, synths and my guitar of course. The guitar was my first instrument, then I picked up bass. Ten years after I picked up my first guitar I got into keyboards and sequencing.

"At that time my musical knowledge was a bit of a liability, but now I think it makes life a lot easier. Often I'll start writing a track by playing acoustic guitar, but I don't really have any one set way of working. I don't work with any other musicians in the studio when I'm writing stuff, it's all me. The production, engineering, writing, it's all me."

What guitar do you play on the album, and how do you get that distorted grunge sound?

"An Ibanez Roadstar Pro Two. I got it when I was about eighteen years old. It's terrible, but it serves its purpose. I just run that through one effects pedal called a super backwards distortion and then I run the signal through a Boss SE50 which has really nice distortion. I record them to ADAT.

"The synths on this album were mainly Yamaha digital synths like the SY22 the SY35 and SY85. And the Roland Juno 106 and Jupiter 6. I think analogue has gotten a little much attention over the last couple of years. I don't really want to get into that whole debate though. The only thing I care about is what comes out of the speaker, that's my only criterion for judgement."

The two albums, Everything Is Wrong and Underwater, the ambient one, they both seem like very strong, very personal messages which is unusual in techno.

"The album is partially religious, and partly about the part of me that is desperate for attention, whether it's from a woman, or God, or life itself. I'm not a conventional Christian. About ten years ago I'd been at school studying philosophy, and I was sort of an atheist. I was having an argument with a friend of mine, and he somehow convinced me to read the New Testament.

"So I did, and it impressed me as being the 'rightest' thing I'd ever encountered. My faith is based on looking at the world around me and realising that I can't really know or understand everything. On one level, Christ's teachings are a basic orientation as to how human beings should deal with themselves and each other. It's not anti-philosophical, it's just saying, you know, until you can learn to deal with each other, how can you begin to deal with bigger issues?"

So where does something like Everything Is Wrong fit into that? It seems such a negative statement.

"Empiricism! Walking around looking at the world around me. Realising that although I'm accustomed to seeing the things that fill up modern life, I can still every now and then have this flash of objectivity, and see that they're all wrong. The way we treat each other, the way we treat ourselves, the way we treat other creatures, the way we treat the environment, and the things we just get used to, being part of a system that's phenomenally destructive and not particularly healthy or helpful to anyone.

"The ambient CD Underwater arose out of trying to achieve a symbionic sound. A lot of ambient is very cliched or not very practical, there's too much emotion, too much ego in it. I wanted to make something that if you put it on, it would become part of the aural environment you were in. Everything Is Wrong is definitely all me personality-wise, whereas in Underwater I tried to lose my ego. Either music is valid, I think that listening to music is good as long as the music is good. I like personality-oriented music, I like music that has that emotional component to it, one of my problems with a lot of emotionless techno is it just doesn't do anything for me emotionally, I can't connect with it."

Do you approve of the raw emotion and all-out passion of jungle then?

"I like jungle, but I like more what you'd call happy hardcore, derivative really, but obvious rave anthems. In terms of dance music I just think that's the most exciting thing going on. It's tacky, and no-one in the music business will take it seriously; obvious piano breaks, female vocal stuff, I love it! I think the style fascists have done more to hurt dance music than anybody else, because they're evaluating music from very unmusical criteria. A record will cross their desk and it's like, 'Oh, it has vocals, therefore it can't be hip!', or its from Germany or Belgium it must be hip. None of that should matter. It should be like whatever your original emotive response is. Just saying, 'Oh, it's a tacky rave anthem, therefore it's no good', I refuse to accept that. Take your subjective response seriously, and don't worry about conforming to the party line."

Buyers of Moby's new single here in the UK will, of course, get to hear the UK winner's remix, but what of the American winner? Here, exclusively for our readers is the mix by John Blackford, with which Moby has kindly supplied us. Thank you to a real gent and a true Christian!