From now until March 20^th at 6:00 pm, readers of The Costa Rica Star have a chance to get creative with messages left on our Facebook wall and win two weekend tickets to the 2012 Festival Imperial. There are many reasons to participate, like TV on the Radio, the beautiful and talented ladies who will grace the stages, the onstage antics of Gogol Bordello and Cypress Hill, and many more.

Electronic music will be well represented at the 2012 Festival Imperial, particularly by Moby. Richard Melville Hall, who is a descendant of Moby Dick author Herman Melville, is one of the best-known representatives of the electronic music genre, and his ascent to electronic supremacy has left him destroyed. Tico audiences at this year’s Festival Imperial will get to listen to live tracks from his album Destroyed, released last year.

Moby’s new album was launched along with a photographic exhibit which is now touring in Greenwich, Connecticut, not far from Darien -the city where he spent most of his childhood. The photos, which were taken by Moby while on tour in different parts of the world, are somber companions of a life lived on the road.

Speaking to Connecticut’s newspaper “The Hour”, Moby explained that being on tour is “boring, it’s exhausting and then there’s occasional excitement of performing in front of 15,000 people with that great adrenaline rush, and then it’s back to boring and exhausting.”

Moby has been on the road since the early 1990s, when he rose to fame with the single Go. From that time on, he has been called upon to remix some of the greatest international electronic music acts. Moby has also been called upon to provide music for film scores. The 1997 album I Like to Score features several tracks that have appeared in movies directed by David Lynch and Michael Mann. More recently, Moby’s music has been heard on the Bourne Film Trilogy.

At Home in Costa Rica

Moby’s activism ranges from Christianity to veganism, and from animal rights to conservation. He has participated in concerts organized by the European Union to call awareness to climate change and sustainability issues.

In 2009, Moby and a group of activists, including Lauren Bush (daughter of former U.S. President George W. Bush) and the founder of Whole Foods, wrote a book of essays about the costs of irresponsible livestock farming. Moby is a staunch vegan, but in his quest to provide a fair and balanced view of his opinion. He is mostly against confined animal populations, and for the book -titled Gristle- he even invited pig farmers to weigh in on the issue.

For Tico fans of Moby, the hour is near. A group on Facebook has been calling for his performance since 2010.