Play - Moby (1999)

ideated from: My birthday looms, so I’m just serving up some comfort food this week. All stuff that lives rent-controlled in my head.

It’s not like nobody had ever sampled old records as part of new tracks. But this was special in how forward it was, and how well it was executed.

Rather than the plunderphonic aesthetic popular a decade earlier, Moby picked a few key melodies and bits out of a collection of soul and gospel records (and one old school hip hop track) and then weaved them into his own increasingly unique form of space-glam-techno-pop.

Some of the tracks are the mostly uninterrupted vocal tracks from the samples with entirely new music laid down underneath. Others are Moby himself singing his own lyrics on top of the samples and beats. There are also a handful of non-sample-based tracks that are just as strong as the others.

It was a unique record at the time that has aged very well even if a lot of newer music sounds like it.

Tracks I Liked

There’s nothing bad on this record, really, but some standouts:

Porcelain - a gorgeous lyric and vocal performance

Natural Blues - recontextualizes Vera Hall’s Trouble So Hard into an other-worldly celebration of melancholy

Run On - This one is based on a gospel vocal called “Run On For A Long Time” that is itself re-adapted from the same folk fragment as a Johnny Cash track

The Sky Is Broken - the end of the record is some introspective stuff that adds another dimension to what Moby was doing at the time.