Q&A: Bob Moses Lights Up Festival Stages Ahead of New Album ‘BLINK’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY FAITH LUEVANOS ☆
Photo By Hunter Moreno
HOW DO WE CAPTURE FLEETING MOMENTS THAT WE WISH WE COULD HOLD ONTO?—How do we know when the good times are happening right in front of us? Electronic duo Bob Moses is well aware of this dilemma, and luckily, they’ve found a way to capture these moments for you in their new album, BLINK.
Coming off stellar performances at Portola Music Festival and Breakaway Music Festival, the Grammy-winning duo, Tom Howie and Jimmy Vallance, have been laying down the foundation for their next chapter. Known for their effortless capability to capture transcendence through their music, fans have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of BLINK, and are yearning for the next soundtrack to their most coveted moments. Though their festival performances ranged from full-band sets to DJ sets, their music and talent offer a multi-faceted form of communication that transcends standard performance routines.
The Luna Collective received the opportunity to sit down with Bob Moses to discuss their upcoming album, their experiences playing Portola and Breakaway, the evolution of their sound, and more. Read the full interview below.
Photo By Hunter Moreno
LUNA: Coming off of Portola, what were some of your highlights from the day and your set?
VALLANCE: It was awesome to have the band and crew back together! It was our first show in over a year with the whole band. It’s like a big touring family. Having everyone milling about the dressing room, friends dropping in, it’s so fun. The show was awesome, crowd was great, and it was fun to play some of the new songs!
HOWIE: Portola is a dream festival lineup for us, so we had fun watching LCD Soundsystem and The Chemical Brothers, we checked out Mau P, and it was our first and probably only time being direct support for Christina Aguilera! Her show was rad too.
LUNA: Your new album BLINK is set to be released October 17. What can fans expect from this new album/chapter?
HOWIE: BLINK is about moments you wish would last forever, but you blink and then they’re gone. It reckons with the ephemeral nature of life, how you can’t really hold onto anything, and the beauty and the sadness in that. It’s our most focused, honest and vulnerable work to date. The goal of Bob Moses has always been to write the best songs within the coolest electronic production we can, and this feels like we’ve gotten it the most right.
VALLANCE: There is a nice balance of dance floor-focused tunes along with some more heady/vibey tunes to chill out to. It’s a good album for either a party or for vibing out to at home in headphones. We’re excited for the world to hear it!
LUNA: How do you prep beforehand for a large festival set like Portola and Breakaway?
HOWIE: This is an interesting one because the prep for both of those performances is very different, mainly because the type of set we play are our two configurations: band set and club set.
For the band show at Portola, we start by getting together with the band and prepping the set list. We decide what songs to play, and then we come up with a rough outline of the order we want to play them in and write transitions—“jams”, essentially—with the band. Depending on how that all turns out, we adjust and build the set accordingly. Once we’re settled on something we like, we rehearse it until it’s second nature, then get into production rehearsals, then go rock the show!
VALLANCE: And for something like Breakaway, it was our club set, so we approach it more like a DJ would. We prep with a rough idea of what we might want to play, and that is determined by what has been working lately in DJ sets, which new tunes we might want to play of ours and other artists we love, and any classics. We also think about the environment we’re going to be in…for this, we knew we would be on a big festival stage and only playing for an hour, so we wanted to bring the energy. From there, we just wing it. We know what song we want to start with, and we start there, assess how the crowd is reacting, and then react in the moment with what tracks we choose next. It’s a fun and improvisational way to play. We’re very grateful we get to do both!
LUNA: You effortlessly capture feelings of transcendence in your music. What are some things that inspire you to achieve this sound?
HOWIE: Honestly, I think that’s just what comes out naturally. A combination of our influences and the fact that writing music for us is how we understand the world and our place in it. There is an element of transcendence in how we approach the whole endeavor I guess, so perhaps that’s why it comes through in the sound.
LUNA: When thinking of the upcoming album, what sort of visual landscape do you envision?
VALLANCE: We tend to envision a few landscapes, and it’s an interesting question because that definitely was a thought process we went through, specifically when thinking about the performance of the material and designing the live show visuals. We envision epic landscapes—big cities filled with people milling about, epic sunsets and sunrises with big skies and clouds, waves crashing in slow motion on the shore… a combination of big views that would make you stop and go, “WOW.” Racing through city streets and watching leaves fall from a tree in slow motion. These sort of contradictory images and viewpoints point to the ephemeral nature of life and the disjointed feeling of the passing of time. Life in flashes, in slow motion, in moments.
LUNA: This album was created to capture precious fleeting moments. Can you share your personal take on the importance of this?
HOWIE: This album is called BLINK because it’s about fleeting moments that we wish we could hold onto, but we can’t. It always feels like they’re gone in the blink of an eye. The song “Blink” was written near the end of the album process, and when it came out, we realized that was what we were dealing with in various ways with the different songs of this album. We spend all this time yearning, visualizing, working, perfecting, grinding for the future, to bring about some moment that we think is going to solve all our problems, and then once we achieve that goal or make it there, it’s gone in the blink of an eye. We never really arrive at the destination. Can we accept that? Can we still find inspiration to go on in the face of that realization?
VALLANCE: Whether it’s moments we wish could last forever, but we realize we can’t and that breaks our heart (“Last Forever”), or overcoming our current struggles through dreaming about what it’ll feel like once we’ve reached a future destination (“We Made It”), or reconciling with the desire to have a meaningful life but knowing that it’ll be gone in the blink of an eye (“Blink”). In the end, maybe all we can do is be as present as possible for every part of the journey, the highs and the lows, and focus on what we can control in each moment, with as much gratitude as we can muster. Maybe that’s what it’s all about? We’re not sure, but that’s the question this album set out to answer.
LUNA: Since your first release, how would you describe the evolution of your sound that brought you to BLINK?
VALLANCE: We’ve always been super influenced by what is going on around us and also where we are performing the music. We started out in warehouse raves in Brooklyn and were really excited by the sound of Scissor and Thread, Frank and Tony, Nicolas Jaar… so we made music that was slower, brooding, and fit that vibe. We wanted to play those parties so we made music we thought would work there.
HOWIE: We always were into bands when we were younger, and we always imagined Bob Moses as a band as opposed to a DJ duo, and so as we progressed into bigger venues, we envisioned playing with a drummer and eventually other musicians on stage as well. We took the step doing that for the first time at Coachella in 2016, and at each step along the way, the incorporation of more live elements always influenced how we approached songs in the studio. Like our early days, we’ve always been very connected to how we are playing live and what the music feels like live in front of people, ‘cause that’s a big part of how we feel like music comes to life. On Blink, it’s the continuation of that journey. We feel like it’s our best effort yet at combining the worlds of electronic music and DJ culture with pop sensibilities and direct, honest melody and songwriting. In the past, we may have had a tendency to see the two worlds as separate, but this feels like we’ve finally grown into how they fit together and are one, and the music reflects that.
LUNA: As your musical reach constantly grows, what do you see for the future of Bob Moses?
HOWIE: Our goal has always been to make music that connects deeply and meaningfully with as many people as possible, the same way that our favorite music has done with us. So, hopefully our reach continues to grow as far as it can because there’s no better feeling than writing something from your heart and having it connect with other people in a real way.
LUNA: Any final messages for fans before the album release?
VALLANCE: We’re super proud of BLINK and can’t wait for people to hear it, and can’t wait to get out on the road and experience the music with people all over the world!
HOWIE: Amen. And, be good to each other.
