I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that the upcoming Moby album is going to be pretty good. Maybe after watching the Susan Boyle performance on Britain's Got Talent, I'm just in a mood to root for the underdog.
This song starts out with a guitar part that sounds a little off balance -- which of course it is. The guitar is panned hard right, while the rest of the elements of the song are all hard left -- the other tracks converge on the "chorus" but I think the guitar stays hard right the whole time.
Added to that, it sounds like he uses a combination of volume and mute automation to get it to sound uneven, despite being perfectly on time with the beat. He could also be using a brick wall limiter side-chained to some random, unheard element. This is kind of a cool engineer trick, so I'll explain what that means.
A limiter reduces the level/volume of the sound once it reaches a certain threshold of dB. Once the sound gets loud enough, the limiter kicks in to bring the volume down.
When you side-chain the input to a limiter it means that the limiter is looking at an external source's audio signal, and when that external source reaches the threshold level, then it starts working on your audio signal. So if I have a limiter on my guitar, and I side-chain it to the signal coming off of the kick drum, then every time the drummer hits the kick the guitar signal will go down.
Sounds really confusing, but its a staple of audio engineers. In fact, most half-assed DJ's know how to use this technique as well -- they run their music through a limiter that is side-chained to the input of their mic, so that when they talk into the mic the level of the music is lowered. Moby could be side-chaining a brick-wall limiter to a muted drum loop with a random pattern that effects the guitar sound which gets recorded. Brick-wall limiting just means that instead of just lowering the level of the audio, it basically mutes it.
A third possibility is that he is just sitting there manually pushing the faders and hitting the mutes himself. I'm actually leaning towards this as being what he actually did, because the duration of the fades doesn't really seem uniform -- sounds too human to my ears.
Anyways, long-story-short; David Lynch directs this video...
