Just Back From London: Moby

What do you always take with you when you travel?
I don’t want to sound like too much of a geek, but the most essential thing I have is my Powerbook laptop—it does everything. It stores all my photographs, keeps me informed, it’s how I communicate with friends, I listen to music on it, I make music with it. I also always bring a pair of Sony noise cancellation headphones, which on airplanes are the greatest thing in the world. I mean I know how they work technically, but they work so well it’s kind of miraculous technology. When you’re flying and you just push a button and suddenly all the airplane noise just disappears.

Where do you go on vacation?
When the Hotel tour ends in December, I’m hoping to take some time to travel for fun. Places on my list that I’d like to visit: Patagonia, Antarctica, Papua New Guinea. I’ve flown over Micronesia a bunch of times but never actually stopped there, so I’d love to spend some time there. I’m also interested in going to Nepal, but politically it’s such a troubled place that I don’t know if I’d be able to go there anytime soon.

Does a country’s political situation ever affect your travel decisions?
I’ve been to quite a few trouble spots in my life. I was in Israel during the intifada. I remember before I went there I was very apprehensive, but when I finally got there it was, for the most part, a very safe place. I was also in Serbia and Kosovo and Bosnia during their wars, so I guess trouble spots don’t bother me so much. But when something is so egregiously unstable as Nepal is right now—I try to stay away.

Why did you name your most recent album Hotel?
On the one hand it was the fact that I stay in so many different hotels and have such a love/hate relationship with them. If you fly from New York to Australia, by the time you finally get to your hotel you’re exhausted and the hotel represents everything you want—a bed, a shower, Internet access. But after a while, the sterility and anonymity of a hotel can drive you crazy. Hotels are strange places, where people do very public things but they also do very intimate things—it’s such an odd contrast.

Have your travels shaped the type of music you create?
Music in different countries has become a lot more provincial. It seems like 90 percent of the music that’s popular in the United States doesn’t really make it overseas. Sometimes things that are really successful here just don’t translate. And vice versa. For example, a lot of German music never leaves Germany. As a musician you end up immersing yourself in each country’s regional music culture and sometimes it seems depressing and provincial but other times it’s a source of inspiration.

What’s your favorite concert location?
The most spectacular venue in the world is the Gorge in Washington State. It’s about three hours from Seattle and it’s an outdoor stage facing the Snake River Canyon. And it’s huge—it’s something like 15 miles long and about five miles wide and it’s just this really dramatic, spectacular canyon.

—HILLARY GERONEMUS