Moon­boot­ica will be cel­e­brat­ing their tenth birth­day next year. Or rather, they won’t. Con­trary to expec­ta­tions, there will be no mega­lo­ma­niac, orgias­tic über party. Not an echo of pros­ecco. No cheese on sticks or twiglets. Nada. Its busi­ness as usual. In tra­di­tional Moon­boot­ica fash­ion, they sim­ply keep on keep­ing on. As they have been doing since their incep­tion in 1999, the Ham­burg duo have, in the truest sense of the word, kept things sim­ple — guar­an­teed to rock the party and keep­ing on keep­ing on is the Moon­boot­ica mis­sion state­ment that made them great. Onwards and upwards, break­ing the bor­ders and out into the night, the dark­ened hours which need to be saved. Hence the title of their new com­pi­la­tion applies to them and to every­one else. A call to duty and a mass appeal. As the man says at the start of the set: “We need you — you and us, we have to save the night (…) We still have to save the night, save the night, … !” 

The peak­time mix on the first CD pul­sates with bril­liance — a solid slice of Moon­boot­ica funk, laced with their own pro­duc­tions, fit to turn any HGV cab into a hedo­nist sauna club — but its the sec­ond disc, filled to the brim with 76 min­utes and 35 sec­onds of bliss that really does the trick. With­out wish­ing to dimin­ish Moonbootica’s ser­vices to the audi­ence in the slight­est, the two sets can broadly be cat­e­go­rized as the com­pul­sory pro­gramme on the one hand and freestyle on the other. Top marks for both, with the com­pul­sory pro­gramme hit­ting all the right but­tons and the freestyle per­for­mance under­lin­ing Moonbootica’s artis­tic qual­i­ties. As it hap­pens, their fans and friends often ask them about the “in between” albums — dis­man­tling the con­struct of stu­dio album and com­pi­la­tion — to them its all artis­tic freedom. 

Disc two show­cases Moon­boot­ica in more play­ful mood, more per­cus­sive and unpre­dictable, adven­tur­ous and rich in tan­ta­liz­ing sounds of a thou­sand and one nights — strange knocks and futur­is­tic hiss, voodoo queens and par­rots, rit­u­al­is­tic voice frag­ments and party incan­ta­tions, repeated like mantras. In the final third, a new Moon­boot­ica num­ber, “Men Of The Future”, makes an appear­ance, herald­ing a final change of course as we enter the realm of disco. Pos­si­bly the sound of the future as imag­ined by the disco dwellers of the past. An ele­gant, stream­lined struc­ture sparkling in the moon­light, some­where out there in the eter­nal night … 

Epi­logue: A few years ago, Kowe and Tobi were asked dur­ing the course of an inter­view where they were up to in the thou­sand page story of their life. Their answer: page 81. If one were to pose the same ques­tion today, they may well be a few pages fur­ther on, but even if ten or a hun­dred pages have since been turned, the bulk of the boom lies ahead. In these tran­sient times, where age­ing is akin to a deadly sin, in one of the fastest-moving trades around , where activists have half the shelf life of nat­ural yoghurt, Moon­boot­ica stand firm in the cur­rent of fugac­ity, res­olute as ever. The party con­tin­ues. No jubilee. Save the night.