Album Description Click yellow EDIT Button add one in English or another language
User Album Review
Talent borrows, genius steals, and then there’s the sleight-of-hand involved in an album like Plays, which flips the anxiety of influence into a kind of shell game. In a few cases, moves are easy enough to follow: The opening “Plays Cornelius Cardew” suite salutes the free-music titan with two cuts of rumbling liquid ambience, and the closing “Plays Robert Johnson 2” (which, as a bumping minimalist house track, is the only tune here that breaks the ambient mold) contains obvious samples of the wailing bluesman.
However, in “Plays Robert Johnson 1,” it’s hard to say whether the reverberant plucks and quivering slide guitar are sampled or played, and Ehlers’ foggy homage only gets murkier from there. A pair of “Plays Albert Ayler” tracks are constructed of slowly scraped cello and warbling digital glitches presumably meant to pay tribute to the saxophonist’s bellowing style; the burbling “Plays Hubert Fichte” tracks make oblique reference to a German novelist while delving deep into freeform electro-acoustic tones. The album’s twin centerpieces are no less inscrutable in their relationship to their inspiration, the filmmaker John Cassavetes; musically, however, they’re so direct that you could hardly care. “Plays John Cassavetes 1” paints on a watery wash of sampled strings with no discernible outline; “Plays John Cassavetes 2” is a single, two-bar loop of strings taken from the Beatles’ “Goodnight," slow and hopeful as a wide river at sunset, that collapses 10 minutes into the blink of an eye. –Philip Sherburne
External Album Reviews
None...
User Comments