The Orb - Sounds from the Otherworld

The Orb deserve credit for reopening the ears of the mainstream rock audience to purely electronic sounds. Before them, only Pink Floyd and Tangerine Dream had managed to do so. At the start of the 90s it was as if the energies accumulated over ten years of experimentation had finally taken concrete shape in something truly impactful. Steve Hillage and Jah Wobble had tried throughout the 80s to highlight the importance certain sounds could have on the consumption of music meant for more than just dancing, but they hadn’t managed to reach the masses. Things changed with the arrival of the Orb and their alluring chill out music. The success was enormous.

In 1992, first a single running a full 40 minutes (!), “Blue Room”, and then the album containing a long extract of it, “U.F.Orb”, topped the British sales charts. From that moment on, terms like “ambient” and “trance”, partly emptied of their original meaning, entered the vocabulary of popular music. The term ambient-house was coined specifically for the Orb’s music, to underline both the strongly rhythmic aspect typical of the music born in Chicago and Detroit in the second half of the 80s, and the broadly stretched-out melodic openings used by Brian Eno on some records of the 70s, aimed at creating a sort of interactive backdrop for moods. To understand where the Orb's music comes from, one could start with Alex Paterson’s desert-island records: “E2=E4” by Manuel Göttsching, Brian Eno’s instrumental box set, and “Africa Dub 3” by King Tubby.

1988-1993: the spaceship enters orbit

The Orb were formed in 1988 in Jimmy Cauty’s (KLF) studio, where the latter, together with Martin “Youth” Glover (Killing Joke) and his childhood friend Alex Paterson (a former roadie for Killing Joke themselves and at the time an A&R man for EG Records), recorded the track “Tripping On Sunshine” for the compilation “Eternity Project One”.

The following year Paterson and Youth founded WAU!Mr.Modo to release the Orb’s first EP, Kiss Ep, four techno tracks built from samples “stolen” from New York radio station Kiss FM. The decisive encounter came shortly after: Paul Oakenfold hired the two Orb members as DJs for the chill-out room of his London club Heaven. Chill out rooms are spaces where the heart tries to return to a more natural rhythm after being bombarded with BPMs on the dancefloor. An ideal spot for Alex Paterson’s psychedelic imagination, who began playing all kinds of music during his sets there. John Peel soon took notice too, inviting the Orb at the end of 1989 to record the first of a series of “Peel Sessions”.

For the occasion came what would become the Orb’s first hit, “A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Centre Of The Ultraworld”, not without legal consequences, since the first version of the single contained an undeclared sample of “Lovin’ You” by Minnie Riperton.

Despite the copyright issues and its unusual length (22 minutes!), the song made the British singles chart, and the Orb were commissioned for their first major remixes by Erasure, Dave Stewart and Steve Hillage. The former Gong guitarist met Paterson in person during a night spent listening to his music in the chill-out room at the Heaven club: it would be the start of a fruitful collaboration.

Meanwhile Kim Watson, sound engineer at one of Youth's studios, joins the Orb, while Youth himself drops out due to other work commitments. Not before writing with Paterson, though, one of the Orb's most representative tracks, "Little Fluffy Clouds", built on a sample of Steve Reich and an interview with Rickie Lee Jones (which caused further legal trouble), later placed as the incipit of the album The Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld. Things don't go much better with Cauty either, and Alex Paterson finds himself alone at the helm of the Orb spacecraft.

In 1991 the Orb produce "Higher Than The Sun", a track featured on "Screamadelica" by Primal Scream, a landmark album in the acceptance of house codes within the world of indie-pop. In the same period, collaborations intensify with Steve Hillage (System7) and German producer Thomas Fehlmann. These encounters give rise to most of the tracks that end up on the debut album The Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld. The Orb's debut is a double album, one disc called "Orbit" and the other "Ultraworld": a long two-part suite in which dub, Eno's electronic ambient, the pulses of the most refined house music, and an avalanche of incredible samples find an original synthesis.

The sci-fi imagery is underscored by the song titles. The opening is textbook, with the already mentioned "Little Fluffy Clouds", then the mood slows down with "Back Side Of The Moon" before coming to an almost complete halt during "Spanish Castles In Space". The ultraworld sets off from Jamaica with the ambient-dub of "Perpetual Down" and reaches the stars with the incredible "Star 6 & 7 8 9" and "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld".

Success comes unexpectedly, and the Orb decide to fly to the United States for a quick tour. No sooner have they caught their breath than the band finds itself back home recording the second album. The first song to be born is a 40-minute track that will become the longest single ever to enter the UK singles chart: Blue Room. In the studio with Paterson and Watson are also former PiL bassist Jah Wobble and Steve Hillage: it's precisely a bassline and an electric guitar solo that make "Blue Room" so evocative. English journalists initially snub the Orb, but the public thinks otherwise, sending "Blue Room" to number one in the charts. The same fate befalls the album, which contains a shortened 17-minute version of it, U.F.Orb.

The Orb's concerts are memorable. The light shows remind some of Pink Floyd, and keeping with that nod, the first (and only) official Orb live album, Live 93, features on its cover a giant inflatable that somehow recalls the pig from "Animals". On record the light shows disappear, but the band's extraordinary ability to reinterpret their own repertoire remains intact. This is thanks in part to the band Paterson tours with across Europe and Asia: alongside Weston, there are producers Nick Burton and Simon Phillips, and sound engineer Andy Hughes. The tracks are enriched with an avalanche of new samples, and overall the heavily rhythmic sections are scaled back in favor of calmer moments. The building blocks of the original versions are distorted and hidden behind a new rhythmic foundation: at times the impression is that of listening to a brand new song, and it takes a while to recognize a noise, a bassline, a melody or a sequence of sounds. These are signs of change: this record in fact marks the end of the Orb's first, "warmer" creative phase.

Live 93 is also the first Orb album to be released by Island.

1993-1995: stationary orbit

The first studio work released on Island is a six-track mini-album, Pomme Fritz, which marks the start of the Orb's experimental phase. The most obvious novelty is the near-total absence of rhythm, but the more striking one is the frequent use of dissonance. Often the tracks no longer have a recognizable structure, and the sounds lack the depth needed to make up for it. "Bay 'Er' 'N Chips" drifts along on a limp dub rhythm and seems like a track left in a drawer for too long, never finished.

In 1994 Paterson releases on his own label, Inter-Modo, an album credited as FFWD. It contains an hour of experimentation alongside Weston, Thomas Fehlmann and Robert Fripp. The news makes headlines, but the results don't live up to expectations. It's background music in the most literal sense imaginable. Fripp's alchemy with Eno from twenty years earlier feels light years away.

Island is discouraged: it seems Paterson has thrown away in just two years what had taken five to build. Weston too can no longer stand the pilot's way of doing things and abandons the spaceship.

For the new record, Thomas Fehlmann is recruited full-time, and Hughes is also credited on more tracks. The three work for over a year on the Orbus Terrarum project, which was intended to be a triple album, but Island decides at the last minute to trim the material down to fit the standard 78 minutes of a single CD. Despite the extensive work, the new record is still full of bleak empty stretches, like the static "White River Junction". Amid so much music, it's hard to appreciate the few minutes in which Paterson's melodic flair finally expresses itself in full imagination – between the eighth and tenth minute of "Plateau", for example. The record's main goal seems to be to astonish at all costs, juxtaposing the strangest sounds: jungle animals, an old music box, military marches, domestic noises… a genuine obsession that Paterson doesn't seem able to climb back out of.

1996-2001: the spaceship loses altitude

In England and Europe the Orb are in free fall. The Americans, by contrast, only now seem to be taking notice of the spacecraft piloted by Alex Paterson. Island therefore decides to focus on the American market. For the follow-up to Orbus Terrarum, old friend Steve Hillage is brought on board.

After a long tour of America, Paterson, Hillage and Hughes shut themselves in the studio and soon deliver the master of Orblivion to Island, which however decides to postpone the album's release by a year to wait for U2's electronic turn with "Pop". The first single taken from "Orblivion" is clearly inspired by a famous track by Jean-Michel Jarre: "Toxygene" once again launches the Orb into the upper reaches of the sales charts, but it alone isn't enough to turn around the fortunes of an ensemble increasingly in search of a new mainstream identity still far from being found.

Tired of the criticism, Paterson even goes so far as to talk about the end of the road for the Orb. It will take four years to produce a follow-up to "Orblivion": the embarrassing Cydonia hits shops in 2001, and by now it's clear that the Orb only interest old faithful fans and nostalgics for the first trance season. The record is produced in an attempt to serve dub and ambient-trance in a pop key: the result is dismal, the lowest point of the Orb's entire career.

2002-2007: back to the future

After the flop, the Orb are reborn. Thanks to advice from Thomas Fehlman, Alex Paterson decides to release a series of 12" on Cologne's Kompakt. The end of their dealings with major labels seems to benefit the Orb's imagination, and even though the 2004 album, Bicycles & Tricycles, doesn't reach the heights of The Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld and U.F.Orb, it at least climbs back out of the abyss of Cydonia.

“Orb Is” is the calling card of Bicycles & Tricycles: a deep, cavernous bassline (which will remind some of the dub brushstrokes of Jah Wobble) sinks into ambient-trance textures that lull the listener. “Aftermath” tries, perhaps in vain, to shake things up with a trip-hop cut embellished by rapper MC Shoom T. But it's clear that the Orb are at their best doing what made them famous in the first place: hence the weed-scented trance of “The Land Of Green Ginger”; the dub beat of “Tower Twenty Three (Spud 'v' Kreature mix)”; the bucolic ambient of “Kompania (the grooved wared mix)” and “Dilmun”. On “From A Distance (blast Master 'v' the corpal)” even Jimi Cauty resurfaces, and you can tell the two old friends had fun blending a thousand ideas into something highly enjoyable.

Paterson seems to be living a second youth: with his label badorb.com he releases a flood of 12"s, including the Orb's own EP Daleth Of Elphame.

The news is so striking it has to be spelled out right in the title of the new album: the Orb are on Kompakt. Okie Dokie It's The Orb On Kompakt is composed entirely by Paterson and Fehlmann (who rebranded themselves for live shows as “le petit Orb”). There are no other collaborations on the record. “Okie Dokie” is stripped-down from this very choice onward. A journey split in two: it opens with an incredible run of minimal techno dance tracks (the opening track of the collection, “Komplikation”, is a techno-dub that carries within it all the fruit grown from the seeds Alex Paterson himself planted fifteen years earlier) and closes with a predictable, but no less enjoyable, sequence of ambient trance carpets, among which the intangible lyricism of “Because/Bifore (Sibirische Musik)” stands out, worthy of the best Cluster.

No doubt about it, this time the orbit is the right one.

While Le Petit Orb's live activity continues, Malicious Damage releases, in a metal casing reminiscent of Pil's metal box, a collaboration between the Orb and Meat Beat Manifesto: thirty minutes of raw, minimal electronics, not especially brilliant, but underlining the Orb's wish to once again engage with realities far from the mainstream.

That same Malicious Damage decides in 2005 to dig through the Orb's archives. This gives rise to the first two of three planned volumes of Orbsessions. The tracks chosen for the first volume belong to the shared past with Jimmy Cauty (Klf), Thrash, Andy Hughes, and Thomas Fehlmann. It opens with a raw, but no less engrossing, “Mummie Don't”, ten minutes of cut-up immersed in minimal psychedelic haze that transports the mind back to the days of “Little Fluffy Clouds”. Then comes the most welcome surprise, “Sail”, a classic song (complete with female vocals, guitar, verse, chorus, etc.) running almost six minutes, which sounds like an anthem to the second (acid) summer of love of 1988, the very one that gave birth to the Orb themselves.

Not everything moves in perfect harmony in Dr. Alex's celestial archives, though, and you sometimes end up dealing with obsessions that never quite take off.

Two years later, eleven more tracks emerge from the Orb's archives, forming the second of the three planned volumes of the Orbsessions series. The new Orb-branded obsessions are the work of T. Fehlmann, A. Hughes, A. Peterson, Vin100 and Youth. The long opening dance track, “D.A.D.O.E.S?”, depicts a stellar space populated by cheerful alien creatures, amid space pulses, dub echoes and unrecognizable vocal samples. Ten minutes in which the Orb's spacecraft seems to know its way home, navigating by sight without much trouble. The following track, “Ralph's Cupboard”, turns the clock back fifteen years, to when Alex Paterson's ambient-dub was topping the English charts: a lively, light dance track that wouldn't have been out of place on Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld or U.F.Orb, the two masterpieces from the early '90s.

In 2007 the Orb's spacecraft is home again. Back to help Alex Paterson are Martin “Youth” Glover and Steve Hillage. Tim Bran of Dreadzone also joins “Orb this week” (as Paterson himself ironically dubbed it). The new studio album, The Dream, comes out in Japan during the summer and only in 2008 in the rest of the world. Compared to the recent past, there's less minimal-techno and more ambient-dub. The liquid, psychedelic textures that made the Orb's name early in their career are of course still present, but songs like “Vuja De”, “A Beautiful Day” and “DDD (Dirty Disco Dub)” nonetheless expose all of Alex Paterson's limits in the pop field.

2008-2016: le petit orb and the great collaborations

After the third volume of Orbsessions, Baghdad Batteries, containing a dozen non-essential outtakes, in 2010 Alex Paterson fulfills a long-held dream, collaborating with the love-him-or-hate-him David Gilmour. That the Orb had a fixation on Pink Floyd had already been clear when, for their first live album, they used a cover that paid homage to, or according to some mocked, “Animals”. Gilmour apparently didn't take it well, since in an interview some years later, when a journalist asked him if he liked the Orb, he replied that he didn't know the band at all. After many years, and after meeting to work on a version of Graham Nash's classic “Chicago”, Alex Paterson and David Gilmour, with the far-from-insignificant involvement of trusty Youth, decided it was time to record something together. A jam session, the old-fashioned way. Out of it came two long medleys of about twenty minutes each. Just enough to fill a CD. The first track – “Metallic Side” – offers precious little, except toward the end, when the pulses start keeping time following the rubbery rules of dub so dear to the Orb, while Gilmour ventures a couple-minute solo worthy of his reputation. The second track – “Sphere Side” – is much better, even if none of the five parts it's divided into reaches an intensity worthy of the fame of the musicians involved in the project.

The following year Alex Paterson releases yet another dispensable compilation: C Batter C brings together seven remixes and five tracks showing the more underground, less orthodox side of the Englishmen's music. Far more interesting are the two collaborations with Lee Scratch Perry released over the following two years, The Observer In The Star House and More Tales From the Observatory. The first lines up eleven tracks in which the Orb carve out slow, off-beat dances around the increasingly raspy voice of reggae legend Lee Scratch Perry. Helping the doctor in the control room is only Thomas Fehlmann (the two have been performing live for years under the name Le Petit Orb). The result lives up to expectations: the beat(s) are never intrusive and instead seem intent on building a bridge to the history of dub. The only casualty is Paterson's proverbial irony, almost entirely absent. The gem that closes the tracklist is the percussive flight of “Congo”. For Alex Paterson, it's one of the best Orb albums ever. More Tales From the Observatory, released the following year, collects a handful of tracks recorded during the first volume of the collaboration along with an equal number of remixes.

In 2013 the retrospective box set History Of The Future is released, covering the Island period, followed in 2015 by History Of The Future Part 2. The Orb's drive toward self-encyclopedization thus takes on monumental proportions. Once again we're faced with a box set made up of three CDs and a DVD surveying the 2002-2012 period, including work released on various labels, among them Cooking Vinyl, Malicious Damage, The End and the German label Kompakt. Through this selection, Alex Paterson and Thomas Fehlmann show the world why their work manages to be loved equally by fans in indie circles and by the crowds at the hippest clubs in Ibiza or Berlin.

From the sonic assaults of “Suck My Kiss” to the cosmic drift of “I Am The Red Worm”, from the r&b-inflected proto-dubstep of “Aftermath” to the technological dub of “Eurofen” and “Chuck's Peaks”, from timeless dancefloor-fillers like “Le The Music Set You Free” to the acoustic, almost bucolic themes of “Sail”, this box set is a dizzying rollercoaster of genres and influences, a compendium that can be danced to, but just as easily listened to alone in the dark of your bedroom. And then there are the disorienting atmospheres of “Codes”, the Balearic roundness of “Apple Tree”, the repetitiveness of “Cool Harbour”, the experimentalism of “OOPA” and “Shem”, the ambient of “Dilmun”, the drum'n'bass impressions of “Tower Twenty Three” — all of it cementing Paterson's vision as utterly futuristic and always ahead of its time.

2018-2023: time becomes a loop

At the start of 2018, the Orb confirmed their deal with Cooking Vinyl. The first album of this new chapter to be released on the sharp English label is No Sounds Are Out Of Bounds. The most striking novelty is a young producer named Michael Rendall, who steps aboard the Orb's spaceship for the first time, alongside longtime friends of the English group (Youth, Roger Eno, Hollie Cook, Guy Pratt, Jah Wobble, Gaudi and Roney FM). The twelve tracks on the record revisit the Orb's classic sound, alternating between ambient-techno, house and dub passages. The production is first-class, befitting the occasion.

The same emphasis carries over into the following Abolition Of The Royal Familia, an album that lines up a dozen rubbery electronic dances that dust off some of the clichés the English group has deployed over thirty years of career. Andy Cain, whom some will remember from the two dance tracks “I'm Your Brother” and “A New Day” by Mark Ernestus and Moritz Von Oswald, lends his voice to the first two tracks on the record: the funkadelic “Daze (Missing Messed Up Mix)” and “House of Narcotics (Opium Wars Mix)”. The mood turns decidedly darker with the tribute to Steven Hawking on “Hawk Kings”, a Chemical Brothers-style run across deserted highways. Youth puts his stamp on the following “Honey Moonies”, a catchy IDM ballad lined with a faint psychedelic streak.

Midway through, Paterson reminds us of his gorgeous, languid and bucolic ambient side in the four minutes of “Pervitin”. The Orb's love of dub takes shape in the second part of “Shape Shifters In Two Parts (Coffee Ghost Train Mix)” and in the following “Say Cheese”. The album closes with the twelve minutes of the ambient symphony “The Weekend It Rained Forever”. Helping Alex Paterson and Michael Rendall are other distinguished musicians such as Roger Eno, Steve Hillage, Nick Burton and Gaudi.

In 2023, Prism confirms the band's will to stick to the well-established coordinates of the Orb brand, presenting an effective sequence of tracks poised between house, dub and ambient. There's nothing here to catch anyone off guard, but that takes nothing away from the effectiveness of a sound that, at least in flashes, still manages to feel magnetic. “H.O.M.E High Orbs Mini Earths” is the classic soft takeoff built on airy synths and orchestral arrangements, launching into a hypnotic house with deep pulsations, and the same pronounced beats also structure the following “Why Can You Be In Two Places At Once, When You Can't Be Anywhere At All…(Where's Gary Mix)”, which introduces a love of reggae, shown off brazenly on “A Ghetto Love Story”.

In the multifaceted spectrum generated by the Orb prism, there's also room for the instantly catchy pop of “Tiger” and the tight drum'n'bass — with Rachel d'Arcy on vocals — of “Living In Recycled Times”, a prelude to the closing, sprawling atmospheric flight of the title track, whose cosmic feel rounds off the journey through the different souls of a sound that is, and remains, history.

Contributions by Claudio Lancia (“History Of The Future Part 2”), Peppe Trotta (“Prism”)

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