Orbital - When time becomes a loop

Orbital's career lasted fifteen years, from 1989 to 2004, before the reunion that in 2009 sealed their unexpected comeback. Fifteen years in which electronic music definitively worked its way into the fabric of pop. And mainstream music absorbed its DNA, metabolizing both its form and content. For the third time in the history of popular music, a British invasion spread like wildfire, in exactly the same fashion as the two previous times. Just as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton had brought Chicago and Detroit r'n'b back to America (and spread it around the world), and just as the new romantic wave of Duran Duran, Wham! and Spandau Ballet had done the same with New York pop-art, so at the start of the Nineties an entire generation of English kids raised on new wave and struck by the house music of Chicago and Detroit was creating a new code for the pop of the new millennium.

Orbital played a fundamental role at the start of this revolution. One of their earliest tracks, “Chime”, recorded and first released in 1989, took them to Top of the Pops, the most-watched music show on British television. The TV appearance did nothing to dent the popularity of Paul and Phil Hartnoll, who were already huge among rave audiences, illegal parties fueled by dance music and synthetic drugs (their ties to the English anarchist and hippie scene continued and never broke off, even once Orbital shot to the top of the charts).

The first two self-titled albums, The Green Album and The Brown Album, named after the colors of their respective covers, didn't crack the British top ten – unlike the albums that followed – but they laid solid groundwork for modernizing indie audiences' tastes. Chemical Brothers, Prodigy and Fatboy Slim owe part of their success to the Hartnoll brothers. There are a couple of (poor) compilations that line up these early hits: “The Moebius” (where the sampled line from Worf, the Klingon from “Star Trek”, “Time Becomes A Loop”, appears for the first time), the irresistible “Chime”, the equally famous “Belfast” and their biggest hit single, “Halcyon”, which samples an earlier hit by Opus III.

Success arrived with their third album, Snivilisation. Released in the summer of 1994, it shot straight into the English top ten (debuting at number four) and went on to appear in many year-end playlists of music magazines. Through Orbital's lens, the album reflects the success of the ambient/trance sound of Future Sound of London and Orb: “Forever”, the track that opens the album, is like a swim in a pool full of clouds. Orbital's talent bursts through on tracks like “Sad But True”, “Are We Here” and “Klein Trink Wasser”, a classical-electronic hybrid that anticipates by a few months the silicon waltzes Aphex Twin released on the “Richard D. James” album.

A very young Alison Goldfrapp, now launched on a brilliant solo career, makes her first appearance on Snivilisation. Meanwhile, Orbital found time to release their Peel Sessions and make their first appearance on the stage of the legendary Glastonbury Festival. The following year they were even headliners, earning unexpected acclaim. Orbital turned a DJ set into a genuine musical event. Spanning everything from stagecraft to pure musicianship, their performances went down in history: oceans of people dancing together without any distinction – indie nerds, ravers, b-boys, metalheads and freaks all alike, eyes glued to the glowing antennae on the Hartnoll brothers' headphones. The only surviving record of the legendary, unmissable mash-up version of “Halcyon” with vocals from Bon Jovi and Belinda Carlisle is contained in the live box set Live at Glastonbury 1994-2004.

After a remix for Madonna (“Bedtime Stories”) and a track for a Playstation video game (“WipEout”), Orbital released the EP Times Fly in 1995 and the triple CD single Evil Santa/Satan Live, featuring several versions of “Satan” plus other older live tracks, foreshadowing the following year's album, In Sides, their masterpiece.

The cinematic turn taken on Snivilisation is heightened here, and the tracks grow ever longer. “The Girl With The Sun In Her Head” opens the album on a scene worthy of the best J.G. Ballard novels: dark solar rays warm an enveloping melody over a sinuous rhythmic bed that seems to echo the geometry of desert dunes. The track was recorded using a solar generator built by Greenpeace. The anxious atmosphere of “P.E.T.R.O.L.” gives way to the enigmatic “The Box”, a true electronic symphony worthy of the best Vangelis, whose first part serves as prologue and intro to the second. Scenes straight out of “Blade Runner” resurface in the pitch-black electronic funk of “Adnan's”, a track already included on the War Child charity compilation “Help”.

By now Orbital were recognized stars even in Hollywood, where they were commissioned to create a new version of the theme from the TV series “The Saint” for the film remake directed by Philip Noyce (the track was later included on a special edition of In Sides).

The final years of their career held no surprises. Orbital kept playing live at major festivals (in 1997 they took part in Lollapalooza), but on record they could no longer reach the heights of Snivilisation and In Sides.

On 1999's The Middle Of Nowhere, only the two tracks sung by Alison Goldfrapp, “Nothing Left 1 & 2”, stand out.

On the following album, Altogether from 2001, not even the returning Kirsty Hawkshaw of Opus III manages to salvage the fortunes of a mediocre record.

Orbital had lost touch with the countless small revolutions happening within electronic music. What they still manage to pull off at their best can be heard in the soundtrack to Marcu Adams's film Octane, and in their swan song, The Blue Album, privately released in 2004. The strings in the intro "Transient" recall the wonderful "Kein Trink Wasser" (from Snivilization); the Schulze-like progressions of "Pants", "You Lot" and "Lost" recalibrate the neurons to the frequencies of the dark epic of "The Box" (from In Sides). On the album's closing track, "One Perfect Sunrise", the ever-divine Lisa Gerrard softens the farewell.

After the group disbanded, Paul Hartnoll kept writing music for video games and released his debut solo album, The Ideal Condition, in spring 2007. Despite a cameo from Robert Smith that was supposed to send the album soaring up the charts, The Ideal Condition was a flop with both audiences and critics. Phil Hartnoll didn't waste any time either, forming the electronic duo Long Range with his friend Nick Smith, whose debut album, "Madness And Me", was privately released at the end of that same summer.

But then, unexpectedly, two years later came the news of Orbital's reunion, whose initial purpose seemed to be simply the release of the compilation Orbital 20, a mix of rarities, outtakes, hits and remixes, a fitting commemoration of twenty years in the business. But the album was followed by a return to a steady stream of live shows and a growing wave of rumors suggesting the Hartnoll brothers were also at work on the recording front, on a new album of original material five years on from The Blue Album.

Those rumors were confirmed in 2012 with the release of Wonky, not simply Orbital's new album, but another chapter in a historical journey renewing itself, while reams of print media tried in vain to explain its content to those who were never part of the rave scene. Paul and Phil Hartnoll reopen the pages of a sonic novel never quite finished, blending modern electronics with analog synths. They still hold the secrets of technological shapeshifting: on "New France" they venture into uncharted cosmic spaces in an attempt to generate fresh hype by bringing in the alien-of-the-moment (Zola Jesus), while elsewhere they apply dubstep methodology, as in the excellent basslines of "Beelzedub", one of the best tracks on the whole record.

But the album's real goal is to try to rebuild a logistical archive to start again from: and so the pulsing synthesizers shake the notes of "Straight Sun" with a faint shiver of robotic self-awareness, though without breaking Asimov's three laws, while "Stringy Acid" answers millions of texts from rave diehards, astonishing them with no special effects at all, simply by lining up bright, corrosive harmonies that remain the duo's true asset (as confirmed by the captivating keyboard chord progression of "One Big Moment"). The formatting is almost complete; all that's missing are the files archived in our emotional databases: so we're left waiting for the duo to corrupt them with rage and fury, pushing them towards acid-house shores on "Distraction" or tormenting us with their own doubts on "Where Is It Going?".

Aware that they'd been the victims of a divorce from their audience, Orbital try to win it back without resorting to nostalgia, offering instead valuable clues to new fans of rave and its sub-cultures, and in doing so, across the nine tracks of Wonky, giving us more than one reason to rekindle our faith in them.

The duo reached the third reunion of their nearly thirty-year career in 2018. After the rave era's sublimation, with the anxieties of a self-destructive yet fully dynamic youth serving as its ultimate example, Monsters Exist tries to piece together the fragments left scattered along the way, fusing present and past.

The key to understanding the new record is "Hoo Hoo Ha Ha", a track so kitsch as to be downright indigestible, both for its choice of sounds and for its practically nonexistent melodic construction. "The End is Nigh" fares better, a trance number that sinks into an M83-flavored electro-pop, as does the almost-industrial rock of "The Raid". And while the title-track gushes out glitch-pop sounds, it's in the acid-house of "P.H.U.K" that Orbital return to their roots, at least cutting one joyfully ramshackle track. Unfortunately, the lack of cohesion and the fragility of the overall sound give little motivation to revisit this new album.

It may be depressing to realize that Orbital's music today has lost that necessary thread connecting it to the present. But for anyone unfamiliar with the duo's history, this could be the right moment to pick back up the works of a past that, all things considered, now feels all too distant.

Just as happened for their twentieth anniversary, the celebration of their thirtieth arrived in 2022 — albeit belatedly due to the pandemic shutdown. 30 Something comes as a double release split evenly between specially re-edited reissues of classics and reworkings of those same tracks entrusted to a roster of producers who, in some way, owe a debt to the Hartnoll brothers' work.

Opening the first disc are two new tracks — the enjoyable "Smiley", in perfect retro-Orbital style, and the decidedly less noteworthy "Acid Horse" — along with a new version of "Where Is It Going?" featuring Stephen Hawking's voice, but what clearly dominates are the six reworked tracks revisited by the duo. Cornerstones such as "Halcyon", "Satan" and "The Box" find renewed energy and further momentum, feeding off the booming arrangements tried out during live sets, amplifying the intensity of their remarkable rhythmic/melodic interplay. The opposite is true for most of the remixes, which add little to the original versions and often tend to flatten their elaborate complexity. The exceptions are the cosmic interpretation of "Halcyon & On" crafted by Jon Hopkins, the irresistible groove devised by John Tejada for "Impact", and the ambient coda offered by Lone for "The Girl with the Sun in Her Head".

All things considered, this is a celebration running at two different speeds, one that shows just how hard it still is to outdo the masters on their own turf. What remains to be seen is whether Paul and Phil can find new inspiration to project themselves towards a future as luminous as their past.

Contributions by Gianfranco Marmoro ("Wonky"), Matteo Trapasso ("Monsters Exist"), Peppe Trotta ("30 Something")

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