Play (1999)
Play is a 1999 ambient album by Moby.
Moby had decided to stop. Animal Rights (1996) had pulled him toward guitars and away from the dance floor, it found few takers, and the sessions that became Play started in mid-1997 as a last record, made alone in his home studio in Manhattan with nothing riding on it.
The method was sampling, and the sources were old. Moby lifted vocals from blues, gospel and roots recordings, then built downtempo electronica underneath, so a field recording from decades back ends up sitting on soft piano and programmed drums. Natural Blues and Honey run on exactly that. Porcelain and Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad? work the other way, quiet keyboard pieces with his own thin voice near the front. Bodyrock and South Side keep a harder pulse for listeners who arrived through the club records.
Mute released it internationally on 17 May 1999, V2 handled North America, and the album moved slowly before it moved everywhere, carried through films and advertising until you could not get away from it. It remains the pivot in Moby's catalogue, the point where his ambient and downtempo instincts found actual songs to carry. Start with Porcelain late at night, then go looking for the recordings the samples came from.
Official site
Similar albums
Explore Play guides
A few thoughts on Play
The samples are the door out of this album. Greil Marcus's Invisible Republic digs into the Basement Tapes and the older American recordings behind them, the same seam of blues, gospel and hillbilly voices Moby was lifting from, and it treats those singers as artists rather than as texture. Gerhard Kubik's Africa and the Blues (American Made Music) traces the blues further back, into West African tuning and vocal practice, which is the reading you want once you have wondered who was actually singing on Natural Blues. For the ambient half of the record, PixelJunk Eden 2 is the nearest thing in games: slow, floating, built around music that answers what you do, and best played late with headphones on.
Moby albums to play after Play
Play sold on its own terms, then Moby spent the next decade answering it. This row collects the rest of his catalog: the 1999 outtakes released beside it, the follow-up that pushed the same vocal samples further, the guitar record he made before it, the early rave singles, and the disco set he built out of a New York club night.
Electronica albums from the same late nineties run
Play set blues and gospel vocals over programmed drums in 1999 and ended up in every advert of the following year. These albums come from the same stretch, when producers in Paris, Reykjavik and Oxford were writing songs instead of club tools, and two of them sit on the same shelf as Play in most collections.
Ambient records for the back half of the night
Play holds up as background as much as foreground, which is part of why it stayed in rooms and restaurants for years. These go further in that direction: Moby's own ambient sets, the hushed record he made after moving to Los Angeles, the one he wrote in hotel rooms on tour, and an instrumental farewell built from leftover session tapes. None of them ask for your full attention.
Books about sampling old records and building tracks at home
Moby made Play from two libraries: decades-old blues and gospel field recordings, and a rack of samplers in a Manhattan apartment. These books take both halves seriously, from a study of the African roots inside American blues and a history of the old weird America to a Max/MSP manual and a theory primer for people who compose on a screen.