Richard Hall grew up a preppie kid in Darien, Connecticut; today he is "Moby," a self-described "radical vegetarian, convinced Christian, and ecological militant" who eats almost nothing and looks it. Eating nothing is only normal in Moby's case, however, because he's a club DJ -- indeed, he's the best-known club DJ specializing in the almost wordless, icy-sounding post-techno genre known as ambient. Because ambient owes much of its taste to acid house, lesser ambient records often duplicate the scratchy, melodic minimalism that makes acid so annoying. Not Moby's ambient, however. Though early Moby 12-inch discs, such as the seminal "Go" (Instinct) cut and slash a bit too hard for today's taste, his newer CDs, like Ambient (Instinct) and Everything Is Wrong (Elektra), feature rich sweeps of fast-tempoed keyboard orchestration that recall the warmest flights of 1970s disco composer Giorgio Moroder. Not since Moroder, in fact, has a keyboard rhythmist evoked the flights-of-fancy version of dance music as seductively as recent Moby. He may not eat much, but he certainly doesn't set a lean table when the menu calls for dance music.

-- Michael Freedberg