Moonshine Over America: The Documentary Moonshine 2000

Half tour diary and half label promo piece, The Documentary doesn't really have enough of a narrative structure to be a true documentary. It's more of a travelogue. Intended to promote the 2000 Moonshine Over America tour -- the largest multi-artist electronica tour in the US -- it mixes 1999 tour footage with label history and artist spotlights.

The first five minutes provide a potted history of Moonshine, the label. This bit could actually have run a bit longer, as it's interesting. Label founder Steve Levy comes off as an industry outsider, and the label's meteoric growth in the nineties must have yielded its share of interesting stories...but this isn't really the place for them anyway.

The rest of the video details the tour. Each artist is introduced, and talks a little bit about his past experiences touring, his background as a DJ and so forth. The DJ/artists run the gamut, personality-wise -- a few are buffoonish, but most seem surprisingly well-spoken and interesting. Frankly, the video could use a few more talking heads, as the artist segments are separated by several minutes of music and multi-windowed video, purportedly showing the various venues on the tour. While it's interesting to consider the logistics of the tour's route on a day-by-day basis, you get little or no feel for the individual locations. From town to town, the audiences are mostly sweaty white kids and the venues are small arenas or large clubs. DJ Micro spends a little time prowling through the audience with a camera, but in general there's little or no feeling of "motion" or any differentiation between regional audiences. I'm sure there was a difference between, say, the St. Louis show and the Las Vegas show, but we don't see any real change.

Cirrus, who remained on the tour for its duration, provide the best look at the day-to-day lifestyle of touring, but everyone gives the same impression -- it's a weird, blurred lifestyle of sleeping, eating and DJing, while getting to know the strangers with whom you're sharing a tour bus-cum-bunkhouse. There's an intriguing mix of personalities and tastes, too, with drum 'n' bass DJs like Dieselboy and DJ Dara coming across as a little more defensive of their somewhat less accessible art. In terms of introducing the people behind the turntables, the video does a decent job, paying particular attention to "star" spinners like Carl Cox. It also unintentionally highlights the lack of female DJs on the tour, though MOA2000 remedied this omission by adding Misstress Barbara to the tour.

Ultimately, MOA: The Documentary isn't a bad way to spend 45 minutes, though if you're not into watching the aforementioned Sweaty White Kids, you'll want to keep the remote close at hand. If you've been considering attending one of the MOA shows -- or better still, if you're trying to convince your parents to let you go -- the video should prove fairly persuasive.

-- George Zahora