Over the last year and a half German composer Ekkehard Ehlers recorded a series of EPs and singles with the same theme. Ehlers would compose two tracks that referenced the work of an artist he admired and release the results under the title Plays. The first clue that these tracks are not proper covers or derived primarily from samples comes from the fact that one release in the Plays series references a filmmaker (Ekkehard Ehlers Plays John Cassavetes) while another pays homage to a writer (Ekkehard Ehlers Plays Hubert Fichte). Only Matthew Herbert could figure out a way to work samples of a book into his tracks; Ehlers interprets.

This release collects all the tracks from the Plays series onto a single CD. It's a varied set-- some tracks are nothing but ambient laptop murmurs, others build on dense drones, and a couple contain beautiful string arrangements that would do the Penguin Café Orchestra proud. The music is accessible without the concept, but still, the first instinct upon hearing it is naturally to try and decipher the relationships between the tracks and the referenced artist.

I know Albert Ayler and Robert Johnson best, so I dug into these first. Both of the two Plays Albert Ayler tracks are comprised of cello samples, played by Anka Hirsch and recorded by Ehlers. It might be the Rorschach effect, but I think I can hear the Ayler referencing in track 7. When Ehlers chops the samples into small pieces and strings them together, they sound to me phrased like an Ayler solo, full of abandon even as they stay anchored to a melodic center. The strings also bring to mind Ayler's band circa In Greenwich Village, when he brilliantly incorporated violin and cello.

The two Plays Robert Johnson tracks make similar allusions. Ehlers plucks, samples and processes a guitar on track 9, referencing the vocal cry of Johnson's slide (and possibly mixing it with hints of the real thing). Track 10 definitely samples Johnson, with a small bit of a guitar riff added for rhythm and a compressed bit of the famous high-pitched vocals serving as a chorus. This last track is an anomaly on Plays, as the lifts from Johnson are inserted into the context of a minimal house track, giving the final piece the feel of a stripped down, easygoing Soul Center.

Whatever references exist for the remaining three artists mean nothing to me. Google tells me that novelist Hubert Fichte was the German Jean Genet, exposing the Rhineland to homosexuality as a subject for literature. The tracks bearing his name are okay, but I like them the least of any here. Both are composed in a glitch style that reminds me a lot of Microstoria, with interesting noises popping in and out of the mix. In a similar style but superior is the first track of Plays Cornelius Cardew, with the warm organ chords Microstoria sometimes indulges in.

The two Plays Cassavetes tracks, by contrast, are stunning. The first is an impossibly lush and vaporous swath of synth chords that should lead off the next edition of Kompakt's Pop Ambient series. The second is a string quartet playing the same phrase repeatedly over the course of ten minutes with only slight variation-- it sounds like a recipe for tedium, but I can't convey how beautiful this track is. And that's the key thread running through all of Ekkehard Ehlers-- it's so easy and so pleasurable to pay little attention to the concept and drink in the crystalline beauty of the sound.

-Mark Richardson, October 18th, 2002