MOBY WAS ON THE VERGE OF PACKING IT ALL IN WHEN ALAN LOMAX’S ICONIC DELTA RECORDINGS INSPIRED HIM TO CREATE A SET OF BLISSED-OUT ELECTRONICA WITH THOSE INCREDIBLE, HISTORICAL VOCALS AS ITS FOUNDATION. REGARDLESS, PLAY UNIVERSALLY FELL ON DEAF EARS, UNTIL – OUT OF SHEER DESPERATION – HE TURNED TO ADVERTISING…

STEVE O’BRIEN

It seems impossible to believe now, but when Moby’s fifth album hit the shelves on 17 May 1999, the recordbuying public responded with one big shrug. But then few people, not even Moby himself, expected much of Play. Just three years before, the man born Richard Melville Hall had released Animal Rights, a blistering, full-assault punk record that was so violently off-brand it earned the one-time techno wunderkind the most dismal reviews of his career Worst still, nobody bought it. So what chance, he reasoned, would any follow-up stand?

“I was opening for Soundgarden and getting shit thrown at me every night onstage,” Moby would recall of this bleak time in his career. When it came to setting out on his own tour, he found himself playing to crowds of 50 or under. Despite Animal Rights attracting a few famous fans (he recalls receiving a letter from Terence Trent D’Arby and taking a phone call from Axl Rose, both raving about the album), Moby found its commercial and critical failure so crushing that he decided he was going to quit music and go back to college to study architecture.

But before he did that, he was going to have one last throw of the dice, one final long-player before he gave up the music game for good.

The origins of Play can be traced to the day when a friend of Moby’s, Dimitri Ehrlich, loaned him a 4CD boxset titled Sounds Of The South: A Musical Journey From The Georgia Sea Islands To The Mississippi Delta, a collection of vintage field recordings made by American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. Moby was seduced by the record’s raw, unvarnished beauty, so much so that he utilised several of its tracks as the foundation for Play. Moby’s new record would fuse those distant, faraway vocals with contemporary, electronic rhythms, marrying the 1920s and 30s to the dawn of the coming millennium.

Not that the album was put together on the most cutting edge tech. It was produced on mostly second-hand equipment at Moby’s Mott Street home studio in Manhattan, New York from August 1997 through 1998. “All together, I worked on it for a year,” the musician told Chaos Control back in 1999. “I mixed it here, then I wasn’t happy with it, then I went to one outside studio to mix it, went to another outside studio, and then I ended up coming back here and doing the mixing myself. So I wasted a lot of time and money.”