- Aug 23, 2022
- 301 Posts
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Hymn was released on Mute Records in 1994 and would later serve as the opening track of Moby’s third studio album, Everything Is Wrong. Upon its release, the track received considerable critical acclaim. Billboard’s Larry Flick described it as “a brain-tugging effort that combines an insistent house beat with dreamy choral vocals and darkly compelling, faux-orchestral synths,” while Andy Beevers of Music Week awarded it four stars out of five, noting that “Moby can always be relied on to come up with a novel and commercial twist on the house formula.”
The track was released in the UK on May 16 with several remixes, including one by Laurent Garnier and another by Moby himself, the European Edit. Here, Moby reinterpreted his original composition within a trance-oriented, progressive and dreamy framework, stripping away its house foundation in favour of a more atmospheric approach — remarkably similar to what he had done with the Subliminal Mix of Go four years earlier. By the late 1990s, the track had made its way into Italy and became a prominent example of the country’s dream progressive (dream trance) movement, which had exploded in the wake of Robert Miles’ Children. It consequently found its way into the sets of DJs such as Franchino, being played at venues including Matrix and Imperiale.
The track also reportedly appeared in the 2000 thriller-drama Crime + Punishment in Suburbia, which starred Michael Ironside and Jeffrey Wright, later known for his role in Westworld. The European Edit deserves to be regarded as an electronic music and trance landmark — not merely for its aesthetic qualities, but for its remarkably sophisticated production and layering, which stood out even among the era’s leading productions. In this respect, it belongs in the same conversation as Robert Leiner’s The Source Experience and Cosmic Baby’s Fantasia (Celestial Harmonies).