Moby gives 'Area:One' the edge that 'EndFest' used to have
"Area:One" is the most interesting, most diverse tour of the summer. It defies conventional wisdom in the music industry, which divides listeners into strict demographic groups and ignores the fact that most fans have wide-ranging tastes.
The tour was put together by the headliner, Moby, who originally gained widespread recognition as a solo electronic artist but now has a band and singers, which enables him to create music with a wide sphere of influences. He has a great sense of rhythm and style, a subtle sense of humor and a mind open to all kinds of music, from the past, present and future.
Moby used to be an obscure artist whose music mostly got played at discos. He had a cult following, big enough to get on the Lollapalooza tour in 1995 and to get his videos played on MTV.
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But in the past year or so, he's broken through to the mainstream, thanks to his most recent album, "Play," released in June 1999. Several of the atmospheric, instrumental cuts from it were used in commercials, and it yielded a hit single, the rocking "Southside," featuring a guest vocal from No Doubt's Gwen Stefani.
Born in New York and raised in Connecticut with the prosaic name Richard Hall, he studied classical guitar as a child, played in rock cover bands in high school and was in a series of punk bands as a young man, notably Flipper and Ultra Vivid Scene. Drawn to house music in the '80s, he changed his name to Moby and created the rave dance hit, "Go," by himself, using mostly synthesizers.
He soon became a leader in electronic music, helping develop it into a major part of the dance-club scene. In the late '90s, he began adding more and more instruments to his recordings (playing all of them himself), so that now he's more like a rock star, performing on stage rather than just manipulating machines.
The Atlanta hip-hop duo OutKast is going all out for this tour, bringing along a 10-piece band to create a P-Funk-like extravaganza full of potent dance beats, screaming rock guitars, R&B harmonies and songs that range from silly to serious.
The Roots is a more politically oriented, streetwise hip-hop band, whose music is leavened by touches of jazz and funk.
New Order straddles British punk and dance styles, creating an intense alternative-rock sound.
The air-conditioned, 2,000-capacity DJ tent will feature some of the hottest disc-spinners in the genre, including Paul Oakenfold, whose easy-flowing sound is making him a star, and The Orb, which updates '60s-like psychedelia with hip-hop and punk influences.
"EndFest," which plays the Kitsap County Fairgrounds in Bremerton tomorrow, used to present the kind of cutting-edge music that "Area:One" is offering, but this 10th edition of the festival, sponsored by Seattle modern rock station KNDD-FM (107.7/The End), has the weakest lineup yet.
Offspring, the headliner, is fun, but its joke-rock has lost its zip. There are a couple of energetic new young bands worth checking out, although both have familiar, non-challenging, mainstream sounds: Sum41 and American Hi-Fi.
Patrick MacDonald can be reached at 206-464-2312 or pmacdonald@seattletimes.com.