Moby Tricks

With his recent single 'I'm Feeling So Real', New York techno munchkin Moby broke new ground in more ways than one. Rather than serve up the usual eight mixes of the same track, the single furnished the buyer with the raw materials for their own remix, and offered $1000 for the best effort. Behind the desk at his Lower East Side studio, Moby explained where he was coming from.

"I try to be a listener more than anything else," he claims. "It's easy for me to slip into the muso side of things because I've been doing this for such a long time, but I'd rather just be a listener, press the button, see what happens and how I respond to it. If I'm listening to a piece of music I've made and my only response to it is, 'Well, it's impressive that I was able to do that,' then that's bad.

"To me, the best music is when my response, or your response or anybody's response transcends who was playing it, how it was created, etc. All you're aware of is that it's pushing the right buttons inside of you."

However, this ingenuousness doesn't affect his willingness to exploit the available technology when he's remixing.

"I do tend to get pretty heavy-handed with the technology," he admits. "I have a naive listening approach, but a lot of the stuff I do, I guess, is pretty sophisticated technologically. It might not sound like it, but I work hard to make things sound interesting. I have a lot of little tricks."

One of those tricks seems to be not to have any tricks at all.

"I'll listen to some things I've done and not have a clue how I did it" he says matter-of-factly. "I once did a thirty-three minute ambient mix of a song called 'Hymn'. It's actually eight different things linked together, and all it is is very experimental noise processing. I listen to it and I have no idea. I know the equipment I used, but I could never do it again. I do that a lot."

Moby's full gamut of little tricks will be unveiled in full when his new album is released on Elektra early next year.

Beyond Our Ken

For anyone even more confused by Michael Stipe's "What's the frequency Kenneth" lyric than they normally are by his musings, get a load of this: The phrase dates back to 1986 and an incident during which the line was repeatedly fired at CBS News anchorman Dan Rather by two smartly dressed thugs who were, at the time, beating the shit out of him on Park Avenue. Rather has maintained ever since that he has no idea what the ruffians were on about.

However, it is known that in late '86 he was spending a great deal of time hanging out at Columbia University with Kenneth Schaffer, a Manhattan electronics expert, inventor of the wireless electric guitar and mutual friend of Jonathan Sanders, assistant director of the University's Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union. Schaffer is now believed to have stumbled upon a technique of intercepting and bringing down Soviet TV stations while adjusting his rooftop satellite dish several years earlier. He had refined the process to the point where, despite claims from satellite experts that it was impossible, anyone who cared to could view Soviet TV stations unhindered by microwave interference.

Someone (besides Rather) who did care to, was another of Schaffer's acolytes, Sting. After watching a moving production of Porgy And Bess, our Geordie friend felt compelled to write his patronising paen 'Russians' on the spot.

Kenneth Schaffer's current hypothesis is that the togged up heavies were either KGB or CIA intelligence agents who, having got wind of the shenanigans, mistook Rather for him, thus delivering an inappropriate line of questioning and a wholly unjustified kicking. But, it must be said, providing Stipe with another perfectly enigmatic song title.

And if you think that's bizarre, you ain't, as they say, heard nothin' yet. Schaffer is currently involved in a project to send a guitar that he made for John Lennon out to the Russian space station, Mir. The instrument will be played outside of the station on live TV by the cosmonauts, who have then been entrusted with flinging it into the void of space, there to circle the globe as a registered satellite Imagine-1, broadcasting by short-wave transmitter Lennon's song 'Imagine' for the cultural edification of the cosmos. Well, if you believe they put a man on the moon...

The Eagle Is Candid

With the unprecedented success of the Eagles reunion tour and the likelihood of similarly boffo returns when the new album (their first in over fourteen years) hits US shops this week, it all seems to have gone to Don Henley's head. In a recent interview Stateside he burbled thus about Hotel California':

"I don't think people ever realised that song is a reggae song, with Spanish influences, about the state of America. Talk about multicultural, it really was."

Oh, so it wasn't a stick of MOR country rock with an infuriating guitar solo and wacko lyrics about beasts and steely, steely knives at all then? My mistake. Still, good driving music.

Jimmy Miller

The Recording Industry mourns the death of American record producer Jimmy Miller. Miller, who died on October 22 1994 of liver failure, was Island Records' first in-house producer, working with artists like Jimmy Cliff, Spooky Tooth, the Spencer Davis Group and Traffic. He went on to produce what are generally held to be the Rolling Stones' finest albums; 1968's Beggars Banquet, 1969's Let It Bleed, 1971's Sticky Fingers, 1972's superlative Exile On Main Street and 1973's Goat's Head Soup.

Beginning his career as a drummer, he maintained a reputation for having an excellent rhythmic sense and often put his percussive talents to memorable use. He played drums on the Stones' 'You Can't Always Get What You Want', and perhaps most endearingly, provided the opening cowbell pattern on 'Honky Tonk Woman'. More recently, he delivered some of his most memorable work while producing NY alternative darlings, Sonic Youth.

A memorial ceremony was held for Miller on 27 October in Manhattan. Among the mourners were his three children and both his parents. He was 52.

Spooks In The Swim

Eschewing the overkill of a big commercial studio in favour of something a touch more personal is, I suppose, nothing new these days, but US knob twiddler David Briggs really does take things too far. As the producer of albums by Nick Cave, Nils Lofgren and Alice Cooper, and virtually all of Neil Young's solo offerings (After The Gold Rush, Rust Never Sleeps and Ragged Glory among them), Briggs has come to the conclusion that he hates studios and would rather ply his trade anywhere but. Perhaps in some unfeasibly cavernous space which he can use like a live concert hall. And I mean exactly like a live concert hall.

His favourite method of recording is to set up a band in one enormous room, surround them with four large PA sidefills, mike everything up, chuck out the headphones and let them get on with it. For Young's last album, Sleeps With Angels, he even added stage lights to the sessions for extra live ambience.

As well as miking the backline, kit and vocals (all vocals are recorded live) he also mikes the room to capture what he calls "the spooks in the swim." It's an odd phrase, but it captures perfectly the sense of trapping all the unpredictable quirks that occur when interacting sounds are careering around inside a large enclosed space.

Briggs' most recent sessions were with a band called Royal Trax at Kiva Studios in Memphis. He describes them as reminiscent of early Traffic and Big Pink era Band. Scary.

Cruise Control

While more used to accommodating the likes of Madonna, the vast Studio-1 at New York's Hit Factory recently played host to an 80-piece orchestra, there to work on the score for Neil Jordan's Tom Cruise-starring vamp-fest Interview With The Vampire. Nothing remarkable about that you might think, but the orchestra had actually been brought in a mere two weeks before the film's scheduled opening, to rejig a soundtrack that at the very last moment was deemed too 'big' for a monster movie. Under the direction of Elliot Goldenthal, composer of Bram Stoker's Dracula, the players endured the extreme pressure of turning the score around in just one day; all the time that Warner Bros were able to book at the studio. The aim, apparently, was to inject a little 'Saturday matinee' into the unsuitably broad music.

Far be it from me to pre-judge their success in this, but with the alleged disaster-casting of Cruise as Lestat, I just can't get that quip about rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic out of my head, for some reason.

Kitchen Think

On 12 November, New York's the Kitchen hosted a truly extraordinary event in earth-shrinking musical experimentation in the form of The Electric Café. Electronics pioneer Morton Subotnick performed from Santa Monica, California, on an instrument in New York, while Leo Smith and J.B. Floyd improvised from New York with computer wizard David Rosenboom, who was in Santa Monica. Confused? Well, add to that Steina Vasnika controlling laser disc players in New York with her electric violin in Santa Fe, New Mexico, plus the whole shooting match being simultaneously transmitted in all three cities... and you've got a bloody enormous phone bill. Okay, and a precious few steps further down the information superhighway as well.