Dance stalwart Andy Moor has taken a while to drop his new album, ‘Zero Point One’, but for fans of emotive trance it’s been a body of work well worth waiting for...
Words: ANGUS PATERSON
ero Point One’ is the name of Andy Moor’s long-awaited debut artist album, a title that he’s cryptically described as an equivalent to the drawn-out process of
putting the album together. It’s actually a term used in tech circles as slang for software that hasn’t yet left beta, or had all of the final kinks ironed out. The album is a project that the UK progressive trance DJ/producer has been talking about for years, but after a quick listen to the final product of what ‘Zero Point One’ turned out to be, it’s not hard to understand why it might have taken Moor a little longer in the studio to put the finishing touches to it. Crafted from the framework of the adventurous progressive trance sound he’s made his name with over the years, there’s a confident sense of experimentation that runs through the album. It’s full of epic sweeps through ethereal landscapes, abrasive industrial grinds, chunky broken beats, plus a fair share of those trademark massive basslines that he helped bring to the genre via some of the iconic anthems he’s listed on his resume, like ‘Air For Life’ with Above & Beyond and ‘Faces’ with Ashley Wallbridge, along with his own many solo singles and remixes. On top of that, ‘Zero Point One’ is packed with some beautifully detailed production, skilfully mashing together the conventions of trance with plenty of unexpected sonic surprises. It makes for an impressive flag in the sand for a stalwart with over a decade in the game, but Moor says there’s plenty more to come. When DJ Mag USA caught up with him, he was situated in Ibiza, there for his Tuesday night DJ residency at Colors at El Paradis. “We’ve got a place out here for the summer,” he says. “We’ll be based here instead of cold England. It could be worse.”
The new album has been a long time coming. You must feel a sense of excitement that it’s finally coming out?
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“Yes, excited. Anxious. Definitely relief. I’m quite nervous to some extent, because of the high expectations due to how long I’ve been talking about it. But I’m definitely excited.”
How much of the delays were due to the DJ’s touring lifestyle keeping you from the studio, and how much of it was due to perfectionism? “It’s been a combination of many reasons, really. A lot of it is due to a touring schedule, and some of it is due to the fact that it takes me a while to produce, I’m a bit anal with my productions. But a lot of it also comes down to the fact that to get this far, I probably made about 50 to 60 tunes, and I would get bored of those tunes. And if I get bored of them myself, then I think the listeners will also get bored. So I might decide not to use a particular track, and to start producing a different one instead. I just really wanted to make sure the tracks I ended up using on the album fit in the context of the flow and the storyline that I was trying to create. “You’ve got to finish something off, you can’t keep carrying on like that forever. It’s been a big learning curve to be honest, but I’ve found a good workflow now that is going to make it a lot easier and quicker for me to get to this stage in the future for my next album. It’s been a long process to get here, but enjoyable at the same time.”
The extra time you spent on it comes across; the production is very dense and perhaps a little deeper than your recent club material, which might have had more of a tough element... “The intent was, the album wasn’t going to be heard in a nightclub, so I didn’t want to have too much of that aggressive sound that I like to play in my sets, and that I like to hear in clubs. That will come in the future, possibly with different remixes, but at the end of the day this isn’t a club album. I’ve never been overly impressed with dance albums, just the fact that there’s no real thought or flow to it, compared to what you hear from a lot of pop or rock artists. So there was
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definitely the intent to create some kind of flow or structure to the album.”
Some of the album’s effectiveness comes from the fact that there’s some of what you expect, in terms of the conventions of progressive trance, but there’s some experimentation too. “I think it’s important to experiment a little bit. I would have liked to experiment even more, but you’ve also got to fulfill what people expect of you at the same time. I like to play around with different things, but I then also draw it back to what people know.”
One of your main characteristics over the years has been your sense of adventure... “I definitely like to create that. I don’t know if I
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