Moby Biography

Moby

Moby is widely praised for bringing techno music to mainstream American and British audiences. Raised in Darien, Connecticut, Richard Melville Hall was nicknamed Moby as a child because Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, is reportedly his great-great granduncle. As a teen, he played in the hardcore punk band The Vatican Commandos and sang with the group Flipper. In 1991, Moby had a hit in the UK when he set the theme of David Lynch's TV series Twin Peaks to a house-derived rhythm and titled it “Go.” Moby, his first full-length album appeared in 1992. In 1993 came the double-A side single, “I Feel It/Thousand,” which won an entry in the Guinness Book of Records as the fastest single ever recorded, at 1,000 beats a minute. The albums Ambient and The Story So Far followed. Everything Is Wrong (1994) finally earned him the attention of the American press. Moby then abandoned techno to record a heavy guitar rock album, Animal Rights (1995). He made a partial return to techno with I Like to Score (1997). Play (1999), a fusion of hip-hop and pre-1945 folk music, reached No.1 in the UK. In 2001 he launched Area: One, a summer music festival that featured electronica bands.