Moby and Mute are pleased to announce details of Destroyed, a new album and book of photography set for release on May 17, 2011. Destroyed the album will be available in CD, vinyl, and digital formats and will be included with the Destroyed book of photography. Published by Damiani/D.A.P, the book is 128 pages and features 55 photographs taken by Moby all over the world.
To celebrate the new album and his ninth studio LP, Moby is making a free digital EP available featuring three songs from Destroyed. Additionally, Moby also directed three short films to accompany each track. Visit moby.com to download and view the videos.
Destroyed takes us behind the scenes on an international journey with Moby, introducing us to the strange and disconcerting life of touring that is often not exposed; the time spent isolated in anonymous, mundane spaces like hotel rooms, airports, and backstage waiting areas. These experiences are juxtaposed with moments and places of intense beauty in the world and the excitement and connection with audiences. From the absurdly empty to the absurdly full, Moby captures the universal situation that so many musicians and artists undergo living nomadic lives. The combination of the album and book of photography, created while touring, provides an intimate look at Moby’s world and his creative process.
Songs on Destroyed were written by Moby mostly late at night, in hotel rooms around the world when cities had gone to bed and the insomnia that worldwide travel can induce fueled his need to create. A soundtrack for empty cities at 2 A.M., Destroyed fluctuates with nocturnal feelings of anxious isolation and comfort in quiet solitude. The result is a 15-track collection that conflates the atmospheric and the disconcerting with the enveloping and beautiful – a record rich in the kind of melodies that are lodged in the brain by stealth rather than with a bludgeon. Destroyed is an album that changes and evolves, exploring time, expectation, and ultimately the tension it creates.
Destroyed was produced by Moby and mixed by Ken Thomas (Sigur Ros, M83) on old analog equipment and mixed on a 1972 Neve analog mixing desk from Abbey Road. A cohesive body of work, Destroyed is to be listened to in its entirety and, preferably, as it was made; late at night when your city has gone to sleep.
Moby has been taking pictures as long as he’s been making music, or ever since he was nine years old when his uncle presented him with an A Nikon F camera. To this day Moby carries a camera wherever he goes. “Touring is all contrasts and strangeness, and that’s what I’m trying to convey in these pictures.” The title and front cover of Destroyed, both album and book, is the product of Moby’s keen photographer eye. The eye-catching image depicts the final part of an LED security warning: Unattended luggage will be destroyed, which Moby snapped as it flashed up, one word at time, in a deserted hallway at New York’s La Guardia airport
