In the Web 2.0 era, the successor to the concept album seems to be its user-generated counterpart, the mix CD. But for DJ and music video director Alex Moulton, the two aren't mutually exclusive. As the founder of media production house Expansion Team, Moulton lords over scores of tightly wound marketing storylines for corporate clients like Target and McDonald's. His debut full-length Exodus gives him the freedom to confront those filmic aspects while wearing his DJ hat. With Exodus, Moulton constructs an instrumental science-fiction adventure that, unencumbered by lingual constraints, functions as a narrative mirror, its proggy signifiers pursuing only an obsessive sense of escapism.
The single visual that accompanies Exodus, its cover, depicts such a sci-fi scene: A shirtless stud holds a damsel in distress, both suspended in time, frozen in flight from a fiery cityscape. The CD's label is a mockup of printed vinyl grooves. And from the first stabs of Moog arpeggios cutting across "Overture", the proverbial laser-stringed harp of Jean-Michel Jarre looms large. Moulton said of Exodus: "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." The nostalgia that he invokes is clearly the kind that imagined an analogue future.
However, Moulton's idea of psychedelia is more Tangerine Dream's Klaus Schulze than Floyd's Roger Waters, embracing the Berlin school knob-twiddler conflict between man and machine rather than any Cambridge or Canterbury absurdity. In the course of Exodus, he bounces between his retro muse and one of its fast-forwarded descendents, filter disco, and the shadows of Daft Punk and Alan Braxe appear out of his gauzy synthesized lines in "Out of Phase", "Meridians", and "Paradise". Just as often, however, his dance beats give way to live drums and even tribal rhythms. Interludes play a central role in Moulton's story, linking nightclubby action scenes, otherworldly jungle chases ("The Sacrifice") and somber love themes ("Together Again"). Indeed, the mood changes so drastically and so often-- nearly every song-- that it's sometimes hard to feel in tune with his greater conceit.
That's one of the reasons why Exodus leaves so many unanswered questions. "Exodus" sounds like the climactic battle, and the final two cuts, "Ad Astra" ("to the stars" in Latin) and "L'Arc en Ciel" ("the rainbow" in French) hint at some sort of romantic transcendence, but Moulton leaves the details up to the listener. As its conceptual cousin Interstella 5555 visually depicted, the success of an otherworldly storyline can't mask the awkward realities of his medium. Exodus's 14 tracks and 68 minutes rise and fall like 14 little films, with the larger narrative rising almost exclusively from the songs' shared analog antiquity. Moulton's concept falters when the listener tries to piece these sensory experiences into a linear progression, but Exodus is still a fascinating and problematic listen as a whole. It's the individual works, however, that emerge as the stars of their own little show. In that sense, Moulton has not only met his goal of the simultaneous concept album and DJ mix-- he's exceeded it by light years.
