Play Time – Magic Object Album Release Show with Ezra Feinberg

Play Time announces their debut album, Magic Object, out on July 3rd via Balmat.

The trio consists of percussionist Booker Stardrum (SML, Photay, Lisel, Wendy Eisenberg, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma), saxophonist Will Epstein (Nicolás Jaar, Photay, DARKSIDE, Dave Harrington), and synth player Ben Vida (Marina Rosenfeld, YarnWire, Lea Bertucci, Tyondai Braxton).They will be joined by Ezra Feinberg, an American composer-guitarist, a practicing psychoanalyst and former founding member of the San Francisco-based collective Citay. The highly acclaimed third album ‘Soft Power’ (2024) saw Feinberg enlist an impressive array of fellow musicians including Mary Lattimore, David Moore (Bing & Ruth), Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Robbie Lee and more.

The sound of Magic Object—a polymetric blend of improv and pulse minimalism for saxophone, drums, and Moog—doesn’t really sound anything like any of their many other ensembles or respective solo projects. It was only while making Magic Object that Play Time realized they were a band at all.

The roots of the trio date to 2020, when Will and then Booker moved to the Hudson Valley where Ben was already living. The three got into the habit of playing together and  soon realized that their sessions felt fundamentally different from making music in Brooklyn. Where those experiences were rushed and cramped, a new sense of time and space now suggested itself. They were improvising, but it wasn’t just a free-for-all; they found themselves listening to each other in new ways. Early gigs yielded similar revelations. A booking at the Kingston venue Tubby’s evolved into a kind of residency. Play Time decided that they didn’t want to play on the stage; they played in front and among the people in the bar. Rather than hogging the spotlight and overpowering the other voices in the room, they blended with the energy of their surroundings and emerged as a sort of minimalist-jazz-krautrock bar band.

“We all have our painterly solo projects,” Will says—where, Booker adds, “we do a lot of studio arranging and thinking and composition that takes shape over a period of time.” Play Time, on the other hand, is all about being in the moment. That spontaneity was key to the process of recording the album. They booked two days in their friend’s studio, a converted wooden barn. They jammed for seven or eight hours each day. They then edited down the portions they liked best, and added very judicious overdubs designed to enhance the original recordings without fundamentally altering them, staying true to the spirit of the sessions.

The result is something like a snapshot and a mission statement all rolled into one. “You’re hearing us discover the voice of the band in real time,” Ben says. “We finished those sessions and we were like, ‘Oh, that’s what our band sounds like now.’” Now, with Magic Object, the rest of us get to find out too.Advance tickets: $20 (plus fees)