Before his illustrious career took off, Moby was a recent arrival from Connecticut who worked the nightclubs of Lower Manhattan with a supply of homemade cassettes, hoping to persuade someone to hand him a set of turntables.One of those tapes, illustrated by hand and kept for nearly 40 years by the woman who received it, is now up for sale on the auction platform run by Wax Poetics.
The woman is Dylan Hundley, a musician who appeared in the film Metropolitan, released around the time the tape was made.She says she was hosting a short-lived Tuesday night party in Tribeca when an acquaintance brought a friend over to introduce him.
The friend wanted a job as a DJ and gave her a cassette.Hundley said she was young herself and in no position to hire anyone, but the gesture stuck with her.
“I was really charmed.He was super sweet.
And nobody had ever given me a cassette before,” she said of Moby, who has written in his memoir that one of the tapes he circulated reached the management at Mars, a Manhattan club that ultimately booked him.The cassette on offer is a different copy from the one that reached Mars.
Its paper insert is covered in drawings of turntables and a mixer, along with smaller doodles, all etched in blue and red ink.Handwritten notes on the insert mark one side as the side to hear and the other as the side to skip, a directive Hundley said she took to mean he wanted people to listen to only a single side.
She did not follow it for long.The side Moby recommended is a straightforward run of songs played one after another, she said, while the forbidden side contains a live DJ mix stitched together from remixes, mashups and samples that range across R&B, early house and new wave.
Hundley also described a spoken-word snippet, from a source she has never identified, in which a man’s voice says, “So you’re a DJ, huh?” The sale comes with conditions.Winning bidders pay a 20% premium on top of the final price, plus shippi...