Say And Play - Interactive Learning Toy for Kids | Educational Games for Toddlers & Preschoolers | Perfect for Home, Classroom & Playtime Activities

I love jazz, especially modern contemporary jazz! ECM is in my eyes the best label for contemporary jazz and Jon Balke had his fair share of good albums such as Kyanos, Diverted Travels and Siwan, even Book of Velocities is not so bad. I was excited about a new release from him and bought this album blindly, without listening to it first. Wow, after listening to it I really feel very disappointed and almost angry, having wasted $12 on the Itunes download. The first album with batagraph was already not as good in my opinion as the magnetic north orchestra albums, anyhow it was not so bad either. The last album I bought from him was Siwan, which is simply awesome, that is why I bought Say & Play. You can take the title literally by the way, as there is a lot of songs with somebody talking in a nordic language, I assume norwegian, and probably Jon Balke himself. I don't think he has a good voice, and the way he uses it in those songs sounds more annoying to me than it does any good. I am also missing the musically intriguing aspect of natural noises and analog instruments sampled together to a harmonic composition. This album features mainly lame sounding artificial synthesizer sounds with digital percussion. The compositions sound mostly dull and boring. There are a few songs with a female voice that are not as bad as the rest. All in all I consider this album to be a waist of money and not worthy to be released under the ECM label.