Includes liner notes by Moby.

PLAY was nominated for the 2000 Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Performance. "Bodyrock" was nominated for the 2000 Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance.

"Natural Blues" was nominated for the 2001 Grammy Award for Best Dance Recording.

The Limited Edition packaging of PLAY: THE B-SIDES includes new essays, photos and drawings from Moby.

Personnel: Moby (vocals, keyboards).

A marked departure from the sound of his groundbreaking EVERYTHING IS WRONG and his subsequent hard-edged output, PLAY finds Moby charting new territory. Abandoning the breakneck drive of techno punk for looser, groovier structures entrenched in dance-oriented hip-hop brings a whole new feeling to Moby's vast and varied sonic canvas. Several songs, including the hit single "Honey," are distinguished by the appearance of early American field recordings, looped bits of African American spirituals and folk songs culled from the Alan Lomax catalogue.

Moby's penchant for complex composition is in evidence here, as layer after layer of keyboard ornamentation, percussive effects, guitar, vocals (Moby sings and also plays all the instruments), and pulsing, echoing beats create a rich, deeply textured tapestry. PLAY shows that Moby's sophisticated sense of sound collage hasn't dulled, and the combination of these wide-ranging sonic experiments with unique historical samples and rootsier, more accessible beats indicates his ever-changing vision as an artist.

Moby broke new ground in electronica with the 1999 release of PLAY, which found him delving into old field recordings of gospel singers, blues shouters, and work songs, while adding his own electronic wizardry. This mix of past and future spoke solidly to the present, and cast Moby as an individualist in a field too often filled with lemming-like trend-followers.

This limited-edition version of PLAY is a two-CD affair that contains not only the original album tracks, but also a wealth of B-sides from PLAY's single releases. On the latter, Moby experiments even further with his unique mixture of organic and electronic sounds. To sweeten the pot still further, photographs and new essays by Moby are included in the elaborate package.