A few years ago, Michael Gira's Young God Records released a remarkable record by a previously obscure Italian musical collective named Larsen. Gira tells a long story about the recording of the record, but, like most of Young God's releases, the record can stand on its own, without any folkloric originary tales to back it up. Rever has passed the initial test of time to become one of the most compelling and strange records to come out of the post-rock universe, and is the best record Young God has released that wasn't penned by Michael Gira himself. It is by turns a soothing, ominous, creepily intimate, and jarring exploration of musical terrain that can only loosely be called rock. It's still in print and can be ordered from Young God's website, and is a record I recommend highly to anyone with adventurous tastes.

The follow-up to that album is finally out, and, like the previous record, it's placed within a strongly conceptual frame. This time, instead of being the product of an anonymous, quasi-mystical process, the record documents Larsen's attempts to transpose a very different band's sensibilities into their own style. What makes Play so interesting is that the band they chose for inspiration was pop electronica's most adventurous and abstruse explorers, Autechre. I first heard about this record from my friends at Aquarius many months ago, and as soon as I heard what they were trying to do, I wanted to hear it very badly, even above and beyond how much I loved Rever. I don't think there are many musicians with the intellectual horsepower to take Autechre's jagged, intricate sound and do anything constructive or interesting with it (even Autechre seem to have forgotten, based on their last few efforts), but I have faith in Larsen.

My faith was not misplaced, as even the first listen of this record revealed. Play is a less flowing and more immediate record than Rever, and feels more like a rock album, with its assertive percussion and thicker sound (the accordion and harmonium are back, augmented this time by more synthesizers and electronics). I also think it may be better than Rever, which is surprising and impressive. The human voice plays an even less prominent role on this record than on the last one, and when vocals are used, they're used in even less conventional ways than they were before. The songs are tightly defined—they begin and end, rather than abruptly jerking in and out of focus—but the album as a whole feels very closely packed and cohesive.

I ascribe this to the shimmering ghost of Autechre, which hovers over the proceedings, adding texture and strangeness where necessary, but rarely breaking out into anything so obvious as a direct quote. Only one song, “G”, bears any overt resemblance to an Autechre song, being as perfect an interpretation of Autechre's “Vletrmx” as one could hope for, but mostly this album just reminds you how beautiful those long, dreamy fadeouts that end Autechre's tracks really are. “Vletrmx”, more than any other Autechre song, shows how the combination of pastoral ambience and knotted, difficult rhythms can create something more engaging than either alone, coming as it does at the end of the Garbage EP, which strikes the best balance Autechre ever achieved between the smooth and the crunchy. Larsen understands this, and takes the shimmering rhythmic absence of the original and couples it with a taut, post-punk rhythm workout, producing something that sounds more like Godspeed You! Black Emperor on an especially good day than anything rooted in the techno diaspora.

I didn't start getting into the sounds of the early 80s until the 80s were almost over, and it's been a little dispiriting to watch bands like Franz Ferdinand and Interpol sand the rough edges off the more exploratory aspects of artists like ESG and A Certain Ratio, Gang of Four and Arthur Brown. Recently, though, I've started to hear that post-punk / disco sound pop up as an influence rather than a sound to be copied, and it's made for some beautifully textured, rhythmically interesting music (an album that did interesting things with that last year was an album to which I didn't give the credit it was due, the Liars' They Were Wrong, So We Drowned). It's inspirational to hear a band like Larsen almost effortlessly show how powerful that old sound is when it's used properly, even in the service of doing something completely different. Here is what I am saying: this is a complex and multi-dimensional record. Here is what I am also saying: it is very good.

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