Moby

From underground electronica producer and punk rock activist to blues-sampling, chart-topping pop star, Moby's career is known for being varied. A New York native, he was born in Harlem as Richard Melville Hall on 11 September 1965. He began playing guitar in punk bands in the late 1980s and received his big break as an electronica producer when his Twin Peaks-sampling song "Go" hit the Top 10 in the UK. His 1992 debut album, Moby, established both his club credentials and his alias, and he returned in 1996 with the snarling protest punk record Animal Rights. It was 1998's Play that turned him into an unlikely global sensation. The album sampled vintage blues and gospel recordings by American folklorist Alan Lomax, which Moby layered into euphoric dance pop hits like "Natural Blues," "Honey," and "Porcelain." Topping the album charts in multiple European countries, Play soon became the best-selling electronica album of all time. Moby then experimented with a range of musical styles on the albums 18 (2002), Hotel (2005), Last Night (2008) and Wait for Me (2009), but failed to repeat the meteoric success of Play. Nonetheless, he remained prolific with albums like 2010's Destroyed, 2013's Innocents, and a 2016 record of ambient music entitled Long Ambients 1: Calm. Sleep. After releasing more albums rooted in electronica and hip-hop, he explored ambient music once again with 2019's Long Ambients 2 and 2020's Live Ambients - Improvised Recordings Vol. 1. He then worked with a string quartet and a European orchestra for 2021's Reprise, an album that featured symphonic and acoustic versions of previously-released material. Since then, the prolific artist has released three more studio albums: 2023's Ambient 23—inspired by ambient figureheads such as Martyn Ware, Brian Eno, and Jean-Michel Jarre—Resound NYC—comprising orchestral arrangements of songs—and 2024's Always Centered at Night, which was marked out by its collection of vocal collaborations and included a contribution from the late Benjamin Zephaniah.

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