Short on the cash following a contractual buyout, and artistically beat up after the mostly negative response to flirting with alt-rock on his last album, Moby returned to bedroom production roots and began experimenting again. The Techno guru started building new tracks using samples from field recordings made by Alan Lomax in the late 1950’s. Inspired by what he was conjuring, Moby began adding modern sounds to what he’d collaged.

“I forget who I was working with, but I think I was working in Sunset Sound here in LA and we kept bringing in different pieces of equipment to see if they would be interesting on the track.”

The bass track that he recorded for a song called “South Side” was done live, but Moby wasn’t entirely satisfied with the sound that he’d laid down.

“I’m not the best engineer in the world, so (with) the live bass I recorded the mid-range was OK and it had some nice high end, but it didn’t have a lot of low end.”

As a result, Moby decided to use a technique he’d picked up while doing a remix of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” – the 1983 platinum hit that netted the “King of Pop” two Grammys.

“Every sound on “Beat It” was doubled by something else. So they had a kick drum that had a lot of presence and a kick drum that had a kick drum with a lot of low end. And a bass line that had a lot of attack and a bass line with a lot of low end. I saw that the bass line was called “the Moog bass line” because that’s what it’s known for…having more low end than anything else. So when we were doing “South Side,” I remembered those Quincy Jones multi-tracks that I had gone through and the studio had a Minimoog and they brought it in. I had to play it manually because it was an older one. But it gave us a lot of the low end that was missing in the original bass part.”