Musician Filmmaker Alex Moulton to release debut album, Exodus, summer 08
“Exodus” is an epic sci-fi/fantasy concept album that falls between the classic synthesizer palette of Vangelis and the future disco of Daft Punk.
NEW YORK – This summer, musician, producer, DJ, music video director and CEO of the Expansion Team media production company and record label, Alex Moulton sets the release of his sprawling solo debut Exodus. This is Moulton’s retro-utopian vision of a happier time, when albums were real albums and music was presented not just as disembodied chunks of digital information, but as a full-on experience.
Trained as a filmmaker, Moulton wrote Exodus with a visual in mind. In this case, he actually created a full-realized storyline—an epic sci-fi adventure, or a space-opera, if you will—that builds in a climactic arc with all the plot twists and turns. The songs are presented continuously like a DJ set, but they’re also like key scenes for a film. And even though Moulton knows what the characters are doing at every moment of each song, he hopes listeners will create their own story.
The fun begins when Exodus initiates lift-off with “Overture,” a churning, gurgling orchestral piece that morphs into a Blade Runner-like soundscape just as Daniel Correa (from the New York-based Colombian fusion band Samurindo) crashes in on a duly echo-kissed drum kit. As he does throughout the album, Moulton taps into a litany of Moog, ARP 2600 and Yamaha CS80 synth patches for a lush and endlessly layered sound. It’s a richness of analog synthesis that recalls the best work of Klaus Schulze, Kraftwerk, Can, Neu! or any of the coolest motorik groups you can name, but when tracks like the trunk-bumping “Out of Phase” or the whimsical trance rocker “Flaming Swords” bang into the mix, it becomes clear that Moulton is equally enamored of the latest in minimalist techno and the psychedelic rock resurgence—and much more.
“All my inspirations get channeled through what feels right for the dancefloor today,” Moulton says, citing the mixing acumen of two-time Grammy-winning engineer Marc Urselli and the mastering stroke of Nilesh Patel (of Daft Punk and Chemical Brothers fame), “so there are some very modern elements to the music, and it’s mixed and mastered the way a record needs to be now. But again, it’s a total concept album. I wanted to make something like a Pink Floyd record, where you put it on and you listen to the whole thing all the way through and it takes you on this crazy journey. It probably has no place in a singles-driven market, but I’m doing it because when I was a kid this is what I had imagined music would sound like at the dawn of the 21st Century.”
With so many ideas to convey, Moulton couldn’t resist inviting a few other musicians and fellow travellers to the party. Along with Correa (who plays drums and percussion on over half of the 14 tracks on Exodus), Groove Collective’s Jonathan Maron adds an envelope-soaked wah bass to the disco-funk workout “Meridians,” while José Luis Pardo (aka DJ Afro of Los Amigos Invisibles) drops some slinky guitar riffage on “Paradise”— which surges into the sublime thanks to a murderous keyboard solo by Roger Joseph Manning, Jr. (known for his stints with Beck and Air), who invokes Herbie Hancock and The Isley Brothers with some smoke to spare.
Album artwork painted by legendary fantasy artists Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell
Exodus is released this summer on Expansion Team Records.
Digital Release Date: Summer 2008
Tracks
1. “Overture”
2. “Out Of Phase”
3. “Flaming Swords”
4. “The Prophecy”
5. “Meridians”
6. “Together”
7. “The Sacrifice”
8. “Paradise”
9. “Vicious”
10. “Together Again”
11. “Pandemonium”
12. “Exodus”
13. “Ad Astra”
14. “L’Arc En Ciel”
ABOUT ALEX MOULTON
As the guiding force behind Expansion Team and its label, Expansion Team Records, Alex Moulton continues to make waves as a music producer, DJ, video director, and media consultant.
In the four years of crafting his debut release, Exodus, Moulton scored a film (“Descent” starring Rosario Dawson), executive-produced seven albums, supervised the music production of over 150 commercials and network themes (for a client list that includes Nike, Motorola, American Express, Microsoft, Pepsi, jetBlue, Adidas, Vh1, and Comedy Central), directed several music videos (Tiga, Funkstörung, Mocean Worker), released a handful of remixes, DJ’ed in New York, Tokyo and Cancun, and became the first to DJ at La Fenice, the Venice Opera House.
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