POP MUSIC REVIEW : ‘New World’ More a Rant Than a Rave

O Rave New World that had so few people in it, and held so little interest for so long.

“Rave New World” is a touring package of emerging “techno” acts from England, New York City, and Detroit that stopped Friday night at the Coach House and was scheduled to move on to the Hollywood Palladium on Saturday. For its first three hours plus, this rave was a desultory, colorless, headache-inducing waste of time.

But leaving early would have been a mistake. The closing set by Moby proved that it’s possible to infuse a soul into this new machine music.

Before Moby came to the rescue, the sparse audience of about 150 people spent most of the rave being pounded by recorded tracks, most of them nothing more than a horrid, anti-melodic, anti-pop thud. The sound had its obnoxious visual equivalent in the incessant ricochet of blinding white light off a mirrored ball that hung over the fairly expansive dance floor cleared in the middle of the normally sit-down Coach House. In a program that eventually stretched to four hours, only 90 minutes was devoted to performances by the three acts on the bill.

There was little to choose between the recorded filler and the mercifully brief 15-minute set by Cybersonik, a duo hailing from the Detroit area. Of those 15 minutes, only a fleeting moment when the promise of a melodic riff arose drew an eager flutter from the audience. But Cybersonik’s two knob twiddlers, Richie Hawtin and John Acquaviva, quickly resumed generating bass-heavy beats and computerized blips that could have been the soundtrack to a nightmarish chase sequence in which the action has no direction, meaning, context or episodic variation.

The Prodigy, in contrast, served up festive music that kept the crowd hopping. But aerobic success wasn’t accompanied by much musical value. The 37-minute set was dominated by the barking of Keity Palmer, a reggae-style toaster who mainly served as a cheerleader, showing little flair or imagination as he spouted slogans and roused the crowd to dance. The band’s designated dancer, Keith Flint, didn’t need any rousing. But his display of energy wasn’t accompanied by the least hint of skill or athletic grace.

The band’s musical mastermind, Liam Howlett, busied himself with two racks of electronics. When Palmer finally piped down during the closing “Fire,” one could at least appreciate Howlett’s knack for turning out lightweight but well-designed electronic collages. “Fire” was an amalgam of reggae, speeded-up comic voices a la Alvin and the Chipmunks, and a repeating sample of ‘60s rocker Arthur Brown roaring his famous refrain, “I am the god of hellfire, and I bring you. . . .” In the set’s only interesting visual, a projection of a demon’s face appeared each time Brown’s voice came around.

With his jug ears, balding pate, mild between-songs manner and wispy build, Moby (whose real name is Richard Melville Hall) seemed more like a clerk out of a Charles Dickens novel than one of the seafaring Ahabs or Billy Budds created by his distant ancestor, Herman Melville (Moby has said that his father nicknamed him in infancy, after uncle Herman’s big white whale).

But Moby was a frenzied performer who easily carried his one-man show. As his machine-driven beats and programmed sequencer patterns intensified, Moby jerked, jumped and flailed to the music in a simultaneous display of alarm and release that mirrored the mixture of foreboding, yearning and affirmation that was at the core of his nearly non-verbal compositions.

At one point, Moby jumped on one of his keyboards and toppled it, a la Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. Later, while the music blared and churned like an onrushing train, Moby stood high on a keyboard and assumed a heroic pose with arms outstretched, while light swirled around him (the accompanying light show and film effects were far more colorful and involving during Moby’s 40-minute set than they had been earlier). Moby could get away with that inflated gesture because it was so unexpected coming from such an innocuous-looking performer.

If Reznor embodies techno music’s rage-filled, demonic side, Moby came off as its sorrowing, aspiring good angel. Compulsive, oppressive rhythms surged darkly through most of Moby’s songs. Rather than erect a nightmarish monolith and leave it at that, Moby layered in contrasting passages of luminous, melancholy synthesizer music that conveyed a reaching for beauty, or introduced determined surges implying an effort to transcend. “Next is the E,” his most fully realized composition, found Moby and a sampled disco diva crying “I feel it” in a way first desperate, then sadly ecstatic.

There is a threatening otherness in machine-made music used to evoke the dystopian, sci-fi sounds of computers and machinery. But Moby didn’t leave a listener stranded in a grim new world without a lifeline. His set implied that the ability to feel is our most precious safeguard against forces that would crush us or turn us into automatons.