Hotel

Hotels fascinate me in that they’re incredibly intimate spaces that are scoured every 24 hours and made to look completely anonymous. People sleep in hotel rooms and cry in hotel rooms and bathe in hotel rooms and have sex in hotel rooms and start relationships in hotel rooms and end relationships in hotel rooms and etc and etc, but yet every time we check into a hotel room we feel as if we’re the first guest and we get very upset if there’s any remnant of a previous guest stay. Something about this idea, that these intimate spaces are wiped clean every 24 hours, fascinates me. That we enter a hotel room and it becomes our biological home for a while and then we leave. In some ways it’s similar to the human condition. We exist and we strive and we love and we cry and we laugh and we run around and we sleep and we build things and we have sex and then we die and, not to sound too depressing, the world is wiped clean of our biological presence. This, from my perspective, makes our brief biological time here all the more precious due to its relative brevity. Hotels, in specific, fascinate me in that so much effort is expended to maintain perfect neutrality. And my hope in this record is not to celebrate or represent the vacuum-like neutrality of an empty hotel room, but rather to represent the part of the human condition that compels us to lead big and expansive and messy biological lives. I’m fascinated by the airless and lifeless neutrality of so many man-made spaces (empty airports, empty lobbies, empty office buildings, etc), but I don’t feel like making music that is airless and lifeless because I also really like people and the messy miasma of the human condition and I want to make messy, human records that are open and emotional. Because, whether I like it or not, I’m messy and human too (even though like all good sci-fi geeks I do occasionally wish that I was a robot). Have I said too much? Should I err on the side of cryptic and esoteric explanations? Well, this explanation is neither cryptic nor esoteric, so there you go. And that’s why the record is called “Hotel”. Thanks, and I hope that you like what you hear. Moby