Moby combines beloved buildings with their perfect musical accompaniment in a selection illustrated by New Yorker, GQ, and Wallpaper contributor Adam Simpson. It’s the perfect time to talk to the DJ about structures: in a week in which Moby has released new album Innocents, he is currently in the middle of a residency at LA’s 1920s Fonda Theater, a venue featured on his Los Angeles architecture blog. London-based artist Simpson has imbued today's pictures with a sense of each corresponding track, adding a mysterious figure to add scale and a narrative. “It could be Moby, or it could be us being taken on a journey by Moby,” he says. It creates a solitary feel that matches Moby’s idea for this collaboration: “I have realised in hindsight,” says the star, “that I was imagining every building or location I picked, completely devoid of people.”

1. La Grande Arche De La Défense, Paris and “Tal Coat” by Brian Eno
The structure feels like a mid-1980s version of the future. It couldn't be more different to the old, beautiful, stately Paris: weird and modern and architecturally challenging. The first time I went to the city was in 1987. I stumbled into a gallery and there was a show of Pierre Tal Coat’s work, and then I saw that Brian Eno had this song named after him. It’s a piece of music that would make perfect sense on a rainy Tuesday at La Grande Arche.

2. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House, Los Angeles and “Strings of Life” by Derrick May
It’s the weirdest house I’ve ever seen in my life, like a giant Aztec space ship. From the outside you can’t really see that it has any windows, you just wonder how anyone can live there. Modern architecture became about an absolute lack of ornamentation with Bauhaus, but this is solely against that. It has the same otherworldly quality I hear in this techno anthem from Derrick May, and on an aesthetic level they remind me of each other.

3. Mt. Wilson Observatory, Los Angeles and “God Moving Over the Face of the Waters” by Moby
This song was inspired by a vision I had about the world before there were land masses or life. Imagining the vastness and the emptiness and the strange sense of potential. There’s something about Mt. Wilson that has a similar, wonderful quality about it. Almost no one ever goes up there and it has this unobstructed view that feels like you're looking at the entire world.

4. Kölner Dom, Cologne and “Station to Station” by David Bowie
The first time I saw the Dom, it had about 500 years of accumulated dirt on it. Just the grimiest thing; this enormous hulking cathedral in the middle of a sprawl of much smaller buildings. When I was in Germany I had really bad insomnia, and wandered around it at night, when the junkies hung out. Somehow “Station to Station,” from my favorite Bowie album of the same name, seemed like the perfect song to pair it with.

5. St. Louis Gateway Arch and “Decline of the West” by British Electronic Foundation 
Eero Saarinen is my favorite architect of the 20th century, and one of the most iconic things he designed and built was the St. Louis Gateway Arch, known as ‘The Gateway to the West.’ It almost looks like a strange alien craft that crashed there, and this is just a part of it sticking out of the earth. And this is a beautifully evocative piece of music from 1980 or 81, a period of electronic experimentation that made me the musician that I became.

6. The Manhattan Bridge, New York City and “Retrograde” by James Blake
I don’t think of the Manhattan Bridge filled with cars and tourists, but in the middle of winter when it’s raining and empty. James Blake makes electronic music that is delicate and emotional. I first heard “Retrograde” in LA in bright sunshine, but I could imagine being by myself underneath the Manhattan Bridge with the song as the perfect accompaniment.

7. Griffith Observatory, Los Angeles and “Clair de Lune” by Claude Debussy
There is an unconventional beauty to Debussy and “Clair de Lune” is romantic and disconcerting at the same time. The title means “moonlight” in French; it is why I paired it with Griffith Park, which I can see out of my window. LA is the only major city in the world where its iconic building is an observatory where people go to look at outer space. It somehow seems strangely representative of the sort of naïve, dysfunctional ethos of Los Angeles.

8. Washington Square Arch, New York City and “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer
I don’t drink now, but when I lived in New York I spent most of my time staying out all night. Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” is one of the most perfect songs to listen to at 4am when you’re out of your head, and Washington Square Park is a place I always used to encounter in those days. In the 1920s, Marcel Duchamp and some of the other surrealists found a door into the arch and broke in. They went to the top, got really drunk and then at dawn, very solemnly proclaimed Manhattan to be its own country.