Live Ambient Improvised Recordings, Vol. 1

Album review

Having been wired up to ambient music since his beginnings (his second album, in 1993, was titled Ambient), Moby is returning to the genre as his career turns 30 years old, taking advantage of the quarantine of spring 2020 to embark on a concept album. For this well-named self-titled album, the American musician set himself three rules. First that all the music had to be improvised and unpublished. Secondly, that he forbade editing the parts that he had already recorded and every part of the process, from recording to mixing to listening, had to be “relaxing”. Because Moby's intention is to cure his fans of the stress of 2020 and offer them an opportunity to escape the ambient anxiety (no bad pun intended). He has more or less succeeded with these ten tracks which average about ten minutes each, carried by a very chill piano and soothing synths, and creating the image of a musician finally at peace, removed from his anti-Trump activism of the last four years, a somewhat chaotic approach that had ended up becoming toxic for him and his music. © Smaël Bouaici/Qobuz