Moby – original hand-drawn DJ demo cassette, c. 1987–88

One night at a short-lived Tuesday party in Tribeca, a man Dylan Hundley vaguely knew brought a friend over to meet her. The friend wanted to DJ at the club. He handed her a cassette.

"I was a kid myself, so I wasn't hiring for DJs," Hundley says. "But I was really charmed. He was super sweet. And nobody had ever given me a cassette before."

The friend was Moby. He had recently come down to New York from Connecticut and was working the rooms with tapes like this one, trying to talk his way behind a pair of turntables. By his own account in his memoir, one of those cassettes found its way to the management of Mars—and Mars gave him a shot. That booking is where he started to emerge, and where the line runs from a homemade demo to a recording career.

What survives here is one of Moby's hand-made demos. The J-card is drawn in blue and red ball point pen: turntables, a mixer, and a scatter of small drawings around them. It also gives instructions. One side is marked to be played; the other is marked not to be. "He wanted us to listen to merely one side," Hundley says.

The irony is that the side he flagged is the ordinary one—straightforward, track to track. The side he told her to skip is the reason this tape matters. "Not this side, when you flip it over, is this absolutely incredible," she says. "It's him DJing. It's a series of mashups and remixes and samples from a wide range of artists, from R&B to early house to new wave and odd samples." She names Adonis, the Specials, Syndicate Sound Labs, and New Order among the sources, cut together years before mashups were a form anyone had a word for. Threaded through it is an old spoken-word sample she has never been able to place—a man's voice saying, "So you're a DJ, huh? Get up, it's your turn."

Heard now, the genre-crossing is the tell. The rhythmic architecture of hip-hop is there without the MC; house, new wave, and electro run into each other. It is recognizably the instinct that would later produce Play.

Hundley kept the cassette through decades, many homes, and several states. "I was just always so charmed by the whole vibe of it," she says.

Dylan Hundley is a musical artist, fronts both Lulu Lewis & Darling Black, and was cast in the NY classic film Metropolitan which was released around the same time as this tape.