![[pyramid in green]](g/79bro05.jpg)
excerpt from Rolling Stone about abtu (one of 200 most important albums ever)
orb excerpt from Spin article oct 96.
Steve Reich on the orb [excerpt] from wire nov 96.
orb article from jam (south florida may 95)
orbus terrarum quickie from Rolling Stone #706 (95)
interview w/ Alex Paterson from Keyboard [june 96]
orblivion review from Rolling Stone #758 (96)
log of IRC session Andy Hughes at the Virgin Oxford St. Superstore [22 jan 97]
the orange county register, sunday, 27 april, 1997 (w/ bit from andy)
Melody Maker [15 feb 97] review of orblivion
NME [22 feb 97] review of orblivion
sonicnet chat log w/ Andy Hughes from March 97
Rolling Stone review of the Hammerstein Ballroom, NY, live show in May 97
Lollapalooza program's article on the orb
INK19 review of orblivion
Vibe/Metaverse? interview w/ Andy & LX while touring w/ Chemical Bros
transcript of LX from the BBC documentary Dancing in the Street (picture & REALAUDIO).
live review from The Oregonian, aug 97.
Amsterdam live review from NME, 26 apr 97.
Interview w/ Alex from Phoenix New Times, 24-30 apr 97.
article from westword.com?, 24-30 apr 97.
article about Chemical Bros/Orb tour from SFBG, in 97. [brief orb content]
I.D. Magazine on the Asylum video
Option 77 excerpt: interview w/ Alex Paterson about "minimalists" Glass & Reich
Redhat Linux Unleashed 2nd Ed., page 142
"The Orb Interview" by Howard Shih from ???
LX interview from Future Music 75, October 1998
Q&A w/ LX from NME, 10 October 1998
The Rolling Stone 200: The Essential Rock Collection on Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld.
The Orb launched their "Space Age" double album in 1991, bringing the formerly stuffy, highbrow genre of electronic ambient music to a more visceral level. Drawing as much from Pink Floyd and Doctor Who as from Brian Eno, the album slows down the manic pace of techno and fills in the cavernous voids of earlier ambient fare. With gems like "Little Fluffy Clouds" (a lawsuit-provoking song that samples an interview with Rickie Lee Jones), the Orb injected goofy antics and insane-asylum effects into the stiff technophile genre, influencing the course of '90s dance music along the way.
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I thought people might be interested if they missed it, this issue of Spin had a decent amount of stuff on electronic music & this whole article was covering Organic & the artists (Orbital, chem bros, & underworld, etc). It might be a little off since my keyboard is messed up but this is pretty much it, Orb's mentioned a few other times in the article but this is the main paragraph.
from Spin volume 12, #7, oct 96, "Drums & Wires" by Charles Aaron, p. 69 (only the relevant bit).
"Heady shit, particularly at 2:30 A.M., but the Orb's Alex Paterson had no intention of easing up. A '90s skeptic with a fat spliff in his and, Paterson, 36, has earned a reputation as rave's benign anti-guru, prankiishly stretching techno's boundaries - linking '60s psychedelia with '70s art rock and jamaican dub to create ambience with biite and wit. The Orb live (Paterson and partner Andy Hughes) was another, not-so-fluffy world entirely. Bass ghosts lumbered across the mountainside, as a lonely steel gutar kidnapped from Eno's Apollo album wafted woozily. Two monstrous screens on either side of the stage matched deathly illustrations (Charles Burns-like cartoons of bodies skinned alive, a skeleton leaning over a desk, head in hands) with footagge of trained elephants, marionettes, and circus clowns. Ren & Stimpy tapped us on the shoulder and exhorted loudly "You're not happy enough!" Suddenly, the Orb's chill-out room became a cozy morgue with a laugh track.
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(from Wire 153, nov 96 where there's a whole nice article on him & the new Proverb / City Life)
"Well the only stuff that I'm really aware of was about three, four, five years ago when I was here in London," he admits. "Somebody gave me a CD of "Pink Fluffy Clouds" [sic] by the Orb which had Electric Counterpoint sampled in it, and I think he gave me Orbital too, which I listened to. I played it for my record company and they said, 'Do they have alot of money'" He continues with a wry smile, "I went, 'Naah, don't sue 'em.' And I was flattered, I was genuinely flattered, because then I was in my mid-fifties and these guys, I guess, were somewhere in their twenties, and the fact that they found what I was doing relevant to what they were doing makes me feel, well, this is great. If I have helped contribute to a return to normalcy in that sense I feel real good. If I can have helped in tearing down the wall between concert music and popular music, then that's the normal state of affairs, that's the healthy state of affairs."
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orb.article.jam.950526
article from JAM (Florida's Music Magazine, South Edition) May 26, 1995.
Cover has an oval picture of Alex, with the text "...VIR CLARISSIMUS
ALEXANDER PATISSERIE FUNDATOR ET PARTICEPS AB ORBE CONDITA C-MCMLXXXVI..."
which is latin & the end is roman numerals (which are partly covered by the
magazine title). Then in the middle it says "THE ORB - Weird scenes inside
the chill room: Alex Paterson loses his cool." My best translation (been a
few years since I had latin) is "the very famous man, Alexander Paterson
(cook?), founder & part of the Orb condition circa (around) 1986" (or 89,
you just can't read it).
Page 3 (contents) has a full page pic of Alex with sunglasses & hat
looking upward & says:
"Welcome to The Orb's orbit, where leader Alex Paterson is given to
little tantrums. His testy demeanor stands in contrast to the group's
dreamily ambient music."
Page 12 & 13, "THE ORB - Weird scenes inside the chill room: Alex
Paterson loses his cool" by Richard Proplesch. There's 3 pictures which
I've seen before.
"Alex will speak with you now." The press liason's voice is
friendly, yet the introduction is strangely ominous. It's like being
ushered into a darkened room for an audience with a mysterious figure,
even though it's just a mid-morning transatlantic phone call. There
seems to be a pervasive tension building even as the long distance
phone lines link together in their chain of static noise.
It's an unsettling mood that Dr. Alex Paterson, a.k.a. The Orb,
might find amusing. His albums of electronic music have been the source
for plenty of whimsy and imagination while he cultivates the personal
image of an elusive and difficult character.
After our exchange of greetings and a few preliminary topics, it's
apparent that Paterson is fidgety - he admits to feeling uncomfortable
in his motel room's easy chair. Most of the inquiries are met with a
clipped "yeah, right" or "I suppose so." Clearly, Paterson would rather
being doing something else. Press reports of the Englishman's
reluctance to talk about himself to Americans and journalists (in
ascending order of avoidance) are becoming apparent.
Opting for a quick diversion, we begin to discuss The Orb's latest
album, Orbvs Terrarvm. Like all of Paterson's projects, the current
disc sounds different, but represents a natural evolution from the
previous release. Orbvs Terrarvm is The Orb's organic album, a
descension to earth from all of the terrestrial soundscapes that
Paterson and associates have been creating over the last six years. The
new album's free-flowing, slowly unwinding tracks stand in direct
contrast to last year's noisy, experimental Pomme Fritz EP.
What prompted the change?
"Oh, come on now. How do I come up with my ideas? That's like one
of the most obvious questions anybody could ever throw at me," he
snarls, obviously annoyed. "I'm sorry. I'm just letting you know.
That's the difference between me and a novice.
"I can't tell you how I do those things - I just do those things! I
should say that we (Paterson and his collaborators) do those things
collectively in the studio and usually I'm happy with the end result. I
don't want to be doing the same things all of the time.
"Ah again, the bad wicked world of the press! They say that we
should have just 'stayed the same as we were' or 'what a
disappointment.' Or they can tell us how badly wrong we went. Or they
could say that this is a very interesting and influential album.
"They change their tune too much. I know I should expect these
things. We're brilliant until we're told we're crap by the press!"
Paterson's tantrum slowly subsides, with an admission of weariness.
"I'm not here to offend you. I'm not trying to bite your head off for
asking a silly question. You must realize that I'm doing interviews
day in and day out, seven days a week on tour..."
(previous quote from interview, written big in the middle of the
page) "I CAN'T TELL YOU HOW I DO THOSE THINGS - I JUST DO THOSE
THINGS!"
With his outburst over, and explanations issued, it should be noted
that Paterson is not mired in the gooey muck of the
"woe-is-me-rock-star." In fact, he has spent most his musical career
trying to avoid those very trappings.
As a drum roadie for metallic punkers Killing Joke, Paterson
observed the band's fracture over personal conflicts despite the
formidable music that they produced. His next stint, as an A&R
representative for EG Records (home to Brian Eno and King Crimson's
family tree), gave him a working education into the business dynamics
of the music industry.
Armed with a practical knowledge of the pitfalls he might face,
Paterson convinced KLF member Jimmy Cauty to release a collaborative
4-song EP in 1989. Christened The Orb, their 12-incher of treated FM
radio samples was a diffiicult collage of found sounds. The release was
largely ignored until their breakthrough disc the following year.
"A Huge Pulsating Brain That Grows From The Center Of The
Universe," an Orb 12-inch released in 1990, is widely considered the
transitional step from techno's throbbing beats into the relaxed
atmosphere of "ambient house." The track's understated beat and spacey
electronics (as well as generous sampling of Minnie Ripperton's 1975
hit, "Loving You"), provided a "calming down" effect for techno's
hyperkinetic raves. The Orb's music was like a relaxing stretch after
an intense aerobics workout.
The mixture of subdued Jamaican dub, bizarre-sounding borrowed
vocal samples and cosmic electronics spawned a rash of anonymous
imitators (who Paterson now refers to as "twats with keyboards").
After-hours hostels, known as "chill rooms," began to organize as quiet
accommodations to compliment the music's blissed-out effects.
By 1991, Paterson and company has moved into a more purely
electronic, less rhythmic, direction. Adventures Beyond The Underground
was an extended space-rock jam (featuring the psychedelic guitarwork of
former Gong member Steve Hillage) that had sonic ties to the
intergalactic noodlings of Hawkwind, Tangerine Dream, and Pink Floyd.
The Orb's initial European tours confirmed the critics' Pink Floyd
analogies: The aggregation presented a two-and-a-half hour flow of
continuous interstellar music with a massive light show that
overwhelmed audiences. While Paterson tried to shake the obvious
comparison, he eventually poked a little fun at Floyd - mocking their
Animals album cover for The Orb's own concert disc, Live.
Paterson still retreats from the mention of Floyd or any of the
early '70s space-rock bands. His personal tastes lean toward the rawer
sounds of punk and new wave's first dabbling into electro-pop. It's a
point that finds him temporarily off his guard and more talkative.
"I think the closest musical parallel to The Orb is Brian Eno,"
Paterson says, "He had this involvement with the early punk bands and
David Bowie as well as his own work, long before all of his world
famous productions for U2.
"My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts is a classic album!" he says
enthusiastically about Eno's groundbreaking disc recorded with the
Talking Heads' David Byrne. "That really set off all this new
electronic music, using those radio samples as vocals. I suppose the
closest thing to what we're doing is Eno's Music For Airports.
"I like to think that I'm one step ahead of these musical things. I
used to play these crazy electro-funk tapes that I had recorded from
KISS-FM before Killing Joke's shows," he says, referring to his roadie
days. "I thought I might try to educate their punk fans a little bit,
but they all hated it! Now I hear it all coming back to me today as
some weird form of guitar mutation - like Ministry, so there you go."
Unlike Ministry and other musical industrialists, The Orb's slow,
pulsating music has an entrancing quality, allowing the mind's eye to
rove into the deep recesses of invention, with Dr. Paterson behind the
controls as some fantastic mad scientist of sound.
"Mmmm...I suppose I could live with the (mad scientist) reference.
I've heard it a few times. Perhaps it's the fact that I'm delicately
losingg my hair a little bit," he muses.
The Orb's latest album is another sophisticated departure from an
ambient scene that seems to have become complacent, that has overgrown
with anonymously-named synthesizer technicians performing loops and
effects as faceless as their electronic New Age step-cousins. Paterson
avoids most of the easy, pre-set compositional routes provided by the
latest musical technology. By merely suggesting patterns of repetitious
sound - and then juxtaposing them with found voices and sound effects -
The Orb creates adventurous tracks that are full of aural sensations.
For instance, there's a truly startlying effect on "White River
Jvnction" on Orbvs Terrarvm where a background percussion part is
brought to the front of the mix and refiltered to reveal a woman's
voice subliminally whispering, "Listen to the radio" in a continuous
loop. Imagine a dozen of those sound reconstructions moving all at
once, and you may begin to appreciate Paterson's artistry. And who else
could honestly sample Alvin & The Chipmunks, as Paterson does on the
new album, without inducing a headache?
In concert, The Orb has become one of Europe's premiere touring
events. Paterson and band re-create their recorded work with an
aggressive psychedelic edge beneath lighting designer Chris Craig's
behemoth visual set-ups. The band's contrasting pair of shows at
Woodstock '94 revealed its ability to "chill" and "rave" while using
the same song set.
"It's really quite an undertaking sometimes - it's almost like
taking a studio on the road," Paterson remarks about his touring band.
"The mindset can be a little different since you have people around you
all the time and you've got to have your shit together by showtime. In
the studio, there's no one there.
"Live, because of the light show, we can be hidden or we can be as
animated as we want. Our live sound is really raw sometimes. We could
almost become a thrash band. But we're not a thrash band - we just
thrash around onstage a bit. The drummer and I can dance around a
little bit, but we're usually not encouraged."
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a quick album review by John Weiderhorn from Rolling Stone 706 in 95 on orbus terrarum.
Ambient-Rave music was pioneered by Orb helmsman Alex Paterson, who in the late '80s DJ'd a "chill-out" room at a London dance dub where overheated techno ravers could unwind to the sounds of placid galactic blips and shimmering electronic oceans. The tones and textures he devised were more of an evolution than a revolution - merging the atmospheric minimalism of Terry Riley, Harold Budd and Brian Eno with the heady psychedelia of Pink Floyd and the buoyant pulse of Jamaican dub - yet they effectively heralded a new generation of electronic sound. After the Orb released two groundbreaking albums - The Orb's Adventures Beyound the Ultraworld and U.F. Orb innovation surrendered to trend. Dozens of ambient groups surfaced, including Aphex Twin, the Future Sound of London and Orbital but none could capture the Orb's mind-altering vision and sophistication. Like the best space rock (Pink Floyd, Hawkwind, Tangerine Dream), the Orb's music provided sheer escapism, taking listeners on a trip deep inside the imagination. Today many of the band's contemporaries are still dabbling in flotation-tank music, but the Orb have moved beyond hallucinogenic sedation into more provocative realms of mood enhancement.
Orbus Terrarum, the Orb's new record, is a sonic bridge between the drifting dubscapes of U.F. Orb and the chaotic but somewhat directionless noise experiments of last year's EP Pomme Fritz. As such, it's the band's first disc to demonstrate real continuity. While much of the Orb's past output wafted like gaseous vapors that never strayed far from their places of origin, the new album meanders through a cryptic obstacle course toward a distant psychic finish line.
Along with the traditional cache of lunar waves and pulsar beats comes an endless supply of sound effects, from chirping birds and crickets to bubbling geysers and whizzing spaceships. Dub rhythms are few and far between, often vanishing to accommodate flurries of synthetic noise. At times the seemingly random splash of effects makes it sound as if the band's equipment were malfunctioning. At other moments computerized water droplets and delicately gliding synths are all that separate the music from true ambience. Even at almost 80 minutes in length (between seven and 17 minutes a song), Orbus Terrarum never sounds long-winded.
Much of the album is orchestral in design, with songs that ebb and flow like symphonic movements. And like works by Igor Stravinsky or John Cage, the tracks contain melodic motifs that provide cohesion even when little else does What makes this music arresting, however, is the way the Orb provide tension by juxtaposing a wide variety of beats, noises and melodies. On "Oxbow Lakes" a spare, eloquent piano line reminiscent of Eno's Music for Airports is bombarded by what sounds like a tumultuous meteor shower, and on "Montagne d'Or (Der Gute Berg)" an echoing pedal steel guitar struggles to be heard over a crashing industrial beat.
Orbus Terrarum is a dense, convoluted record, for sure, but it's not difficult or pretentious. Credit this to the Orb's oddball sense of humor - a quality that further separates the band from the horde of computer geeks that holds every keyboard bleep sacred. The Orb have demonstrated their sharp and uniquely British wit on the music variety show Top of the Pops by sitting in front of the cameras playing chess while they were supposed to be performing, as well as by gracing the cover of their 1993 live album with a wide-eyed stuffed toy sheep flying over the Battersea power station (an obvlous reference to Pink Floyd's Animals cover). Levity is unquestionably a key ingredient of the Orb's artistry, and Orbus Terrarum is their most amusing offering to date.
During the unsettling clatter of "White River Junction," a soothing voice from a self-help tape ironically comments, "You are a happy person full of imaginative thoughts.... Accept the friendship people offer you, for you truly deserve it, a wry allusion to the therapeutic New Age reputation of ambient techno. Other samples are more bizarre. The relatively upbeat "Occidental" features a computerized voice that repeatedly intones, "Right here, right now," over the beat, a tongue-in-cheek poke at the Jesus Jones hit.
But the most whimsical banter comes during the epic psychedelia of "Slug Dub," a contorted Peter and the Wolf for the Tarantino generation peppered with snippets from one of Paterson's favorite children's stories In it, a distraught family's lettuce crop is destroyed by slugs until the youngest son befriends a bird that eats the garden pests.
With Orbus Terrarum, Paterson has created an auditory experience that stretches the limits of ambient techno. Instead of aiming to chill, the Orb are now determined to thrill.
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log of IRC session Andy Hughes at the Virgin Oxford St. Superstore [22 jan 97]
Keyboard (june 1995) Alex Paterson/The Orb - Inside the Ambient Techno Ultraworld by Robert L. Doerschuk If music is a response to the temper of our times, then the Orb is exactly what America needs. Things are getting a little too cut-and-dried here: Complex problems beget weirdly simple solutions -- kicking people out of the country, putting them in institutions, shutting down institutions, or just saying no. As the guiding force of the group known as the Orb, Alex Paterson sees things differently. His music is all blur and fuzz. Scraps of sound fade in and out, drifting over fields unbound by the barbed wire of verse and chorus. There's rhythm, and it's as regular as anything on the prosaic dance charts. But so are heartbeats regular, though life swirls through and around them with beguiling imprecision. Shapes are hard to identify in Paterson's world. Voices fly about, sometimes as sharp and intrusive as a mosquito's whine, more often muffled and unintelligible; someone is talking, but we can't quite make it out. Occasionally the aural clouds lift and we hear something more clearly -- something ugly or scary, a snake-handler's snarl, or fragile, a child's tale. We hold our breaths and listen, afraid of losing this picture of innocence as it sinks into a sea of reverb, the sound of a dream dissolved by the light of awakening. There's a lot more going on here than ambience. Many of the artists tagged with the ambient label update the ideas pioneered by Brian Eno and, especially, Harold Budd. Through space and suggestion, they define a style that celebrates inertia, or even creates almost a sense of paralysis before a moment of beautiful oblivion. But there's an optimistic tinge to the Orb. It surfaces in the organ motif from "His Immortal Logness" on *Pomme Fritz*, a simple, roller-rinkish tune that seems drawn from some half-remembered childhood scene. It blossoms in synth parts that fan out over teeming noise pastiches. Even the prickly staccato synth and rhythm interludes in the *Live 93* version of "Blue Room" is more tickle than sting. Then there's *Orbus Terrarum*, the latest Orb exercise. As noted in last month's review, Paterson combines a vivid timbral ear and improvisational sense to create an album of great organic power. One could imagine its pulses, spacey reveries, and fragmented monologs as a kind of interior soundtrack, a score for a ballet of brain and biology -- an almost uniquely human document. Not much of Paterson's style draws from pre-punk rock or the familiar electronic icons. Its energy is a streamlined variation on the ambient dance discs he spun as a DJ at Paul Oekenfold's club, Land of Oz. Its sense of movement stems from his experience as roadie and occasional performer with Killing Joke in late '79; the slow, unfolding pace owes much to Paterson's experience as an A&R staffer for Eno's E.G. label, beginning in the spring of '88. In those days Paterson was working closely with Jimi Cauty, whose music was being published by E.G. Together they launched the Orb catalog in the summer of '88 with "Tripping on Sunshine," an experimental piece intended for use on ex- Killing Joke bassist Youth's *Eternity Project One* album. Other releases followed: They pressed and quickly sold 1,000 copies of a four-song EP built around samples recorded in 1981 from broadcasts of KISS radio in New York. In the spring of '89 they unleashed "A Huge Evergrowing Pulsating Brain that Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld," a haunting meditation on a sample taken from the late Minnie Ripperton's "Loving You." Several months later, Paterson and Youth collaborated on "Little Fluffy Clouds." With its thumping beat and spaghetti- western harmonica hook, it hit the charts hard. After Cauty left to work full-time with KLF, Thrash became Paterson's partner and helped lay the groundwork for the group's live debut in April '91. Since then, the Orb has performed throughout the world, on occasion as post-punk quartet covering the Stooges' "No Fun" but often in more ambitious settings. From Glastonbury Plain to pre-dawn sets at Woodstock II, Paterson and assorted colleagues excel at live remixes that embrace and absorb the natural world into which they are released. After an Orb marathon, it doesn't really matter whether the crickets you're hearing are real, sampled, or in some strange place between. We met with Paterson in L.A. Thrash had recently departed the Orb, leaving Paterson in charge. He was putting a new lineup together, with plans to tour the U.K. from March 15 into April, with European dates following in May, American club gigs in June, Japan in July, and more concerts in Europe after that. As we spoke, the group consisted of Nick Burton, Simon Phillips, co-writer and producer Thomas Felhmann, and Andy Hughes, engineer and, according to Paterson, designated sex symbol. We began by zeroing in on what American audiences can expect from this year's incarnation of the Orb. ***How does the Orb's approach to performing differ from the approach taken by more traditional bands?*** Everything is already on DAT, basically. We have a multitrack onstage, because we try and take the feel of the band in the studio onto the stage, rather than go onstage with instruments to copy what you've already heard. Technology has given us the freedom to buy three DAT machines for the cost of a thousand pounds, so in essence we've got a three- or four-track studio up there. ***Will there be any instruments onstage?*** I might have my ARP 2600, because that's what we used for the bass part on "White River Junction" [from *Orbus Terrarum*]. It's been MIDIed. ***You'll have a rack of modules as well?*** A rack of effects, mainly. Andy's got his rack of effects, and I put my effects through whatever I want to do with two turntables, three cassette machines, two CD players, and a couple of DAT machines. That creates quite a racket. ***Effects seem to play a key role in how you improvise in concert.*** Well, yeah. If you listen to an Orb record, there's never really an ending; it just leads to another record. You've got to change the DATs live, so if you just leave an effect running you can do that. ***You can do the same thing by using looped samples as transitional elements.*** Right. "God wants to love and use you": That's an example we've been using recently in our shows. That's a pretty phenomenal vocal, and we just leave it running in a loop. I've got my own Akai S1100 in my mixing desk; DJs are a little more technical than they used to be when they were just playing two records. I've got two ten-second samples I can use through a digital delay any time I need to stop the record. When we first started doing shows, we used to use just a DAT machine. But when I'd play it onstage, people would say, "That sounds so different tonight. What track did you play that in?" And we'd be playing the same DAT every night! We'd just be changing effects. ***The DAT, then, would include the basic rhythms and chords.*** In the old days, it would contain the whole track. In the new days, you can strip it all down to just the metronome. It depends on what you're trying to do. We're bringing real musicians into technology now, whereas we used to do it the other way 'round. The hardest thing we're doing right now is to get a bass player and a drummer who are open to what we're doing and can play in time with everything on the DAT. Simon and Nick seem to be having problems trying to understand what the hell is going on. It's easy enough with technology to move something in 7/8 over something else in 4/4. But to get humans to do that is difficult. ***Depending on the people you hire.*** But, look, I'm not *hiring* these people. They're my friends. We're going to tour, which means we're going to be living together for a year. You can't *hire* people for that. That ain't gonna work. They'd end up in their own tour coach, wanting loads of money and not getting on with other people. It's very difficult to stay friends with people when you're on tour. ***Traditional bands improvise through solos. When you've got your DAT running onstage, how do you improvise?*** I'll take some effects out. The engineer on the other side of the stage brings other effects in. Chris [Weston, a.k.a. Thrash] used to do that as our engineer, but then he decided he didn't want to engineer anymore; he wanted to concentrate on doing the music with me. Chris got to the point where it was very much like, "Well, if you're doing that with the music, I don't like it. I want to be doing this, and *then* I'll like it." It was pretty sad. He's left the band now. Nick, Simon, and Andy, as a live band, are very strong. Nick and Simon have been touring with us since 1992, and Andy has been in the studio as an engineer with us since just after *U.F.Orb*. He was the engineer on *FFWD* [available on the English label Inter]. He got himself more and more involved. Then Chris wanted to become the engineer again, *and* be the songwriter, *and* not have anybody else involved. I told him, in no uncertain terms, "Get your own band together. Sort your own life out." So he left in early August. At the end of the day, Chris might feel a bit grieved about leaving the band, but it was his decision. ***What kind of a role did he play in Orb concerts?*** Well, he stopped doing them two years ago. He didn't want to go on the road. Andy just got gradually involved, and a bit of antagonism was going on. So when Chris finally left, Andy just stepped into his shoes. ***What qualities does your current co-producer and co-writer, Thomas Fehlmann, have that let him play a major role in your creative process?*** He's a very dear friend. And he's got the same idea that I have, that music isn't just something to dispose of. We don't want to make disposable records. We're fed up with them. You pick up a Led Zeppelin record, you know exactly what you're gonna get. It's gonna be the same kind of integrity we'd like to have in putting the message across on an Orb record. We may have achieved that on the new album. At least we gave it our best shot. But I think that, like a Led Zeppelin album, it sits on its own. The difference is that you kind of know what's going to happen on a Led Zeppelin record; on an Orb record, you don't. You hear something in one speaker, then you walk to another speaker in another corner of the room and it sounds completely different. But you don't know that until you get over to that speaker and listen to it three times. So it's really nothing like a Led Zeppelin record, except in that I've got to have some kind of focus to make it not just, "Oh, I'll listen to that album and forget about it." ***Some of the strong beats on earlier Orb albums seem to reflect your punk roots. How did you evolve from that background to the position you assign to rhythm in your music today?*** I'll mention one band: Can. That's the easiest way to answer. He [i.e., Holger Czukay] changed my way of thinking in the sense of what he was up to. I admit I was a very late learner of Can ways. They were always hidden under the perception that Kraftwerk started up. Kraftwerk was an amazing band too, which leads me to the whole German feel of music in the early '70s. I mean, Stockhausen brings out the non-rhythm side of the music, but that same quality is still there. I sat down one night with Richard James, played some Stockhausen, and talked about it for half an hour. ***Which Stockhausen piece was it?*** The one that was made in 1959. I'm quite attracted to it because of the fact that it was made the year I was born. ***Your rhythm tracks create an almost ethnic feel, often through intricate patterns that avoid emphasizing the backbeat.*** That's true of the new album, but we've done music where it's much more obvious where that bass drum is gonna come down. ***How do you get that organic quality in your rhythm parts?*** That's from putting the noises through any outboard effect we might have handy. That makes them sound completely different. A bird noise can be turned into a cuckoo clock, as an example. We don't always do that kind of thing deliberately, but on *FFWD* we did -- so deliberately that we called the track "What Time Is Clock"? We'll take raindrops and use them too. There was a hole in the roof of our studio, and every day it would rain. Every day we'd have to take all the gear out, then put it back in when the rain stopped and carry on recording. One night we decided to record all the raindrops. That turned into a rhythm pattern. ***When did you begin exploring beyond the ambient idea?*** I was working with Jimi. We'd spent the weekend before programming these really shit drum sounds. I was rapidly going off the idea of using drums because I wanted to create a music you could play *after* the clubs, music that was modern but that you didn't have to dance to. The only way you could stop people from dancing was to take the bloody drums away. That night I went out to an amazing club or party, call it what you want, in a big tent near the sea. I ended up on the beach the next afternoon. Then Jimi and I went back and did "Loving You" [the Minnie Ripperton vocal sample used in "A Huge Evergrowing Pulsating Brain . . .," from *Aubrey Mixes* and *Adventures beyond the Ultraworld*]. I was so chilled out by the fact that we'd spent the afternoon by the sea after doing this club all night that it was like, "We can take these drums out!" The ambient noises in there created the environment where we'd been that morning. ***Before launching the Orb, your involvement with music technology was minimal. You were a drum tech, for example, with Killing Joke.*** It's easy enough to say I was just a drum tech, but actually I was the only roadie they had. I ended up with the drums because that's what I enjoyed most: tuning drums, playing around with drums, annoying people with drums. Still do. Besides, we were the first band ever to use [Clavia] ddrums. I was the first roadie who ever tried to put ddrums into a live kit, because the drummer looked like an idiot playing the stupid electronic stuff. He wanted them to look like the sound was coming out of a regular drum kit, which really pissed me off. I wasn't a bloody carpenter. Still, [Killing Joke drummer] Paul was very open to hearing me. If I wasn't getting the bass drum in time, he'd still hear what I was trying to do. When you listen to Can, you can hear what he was trying to do: loops that you can do in a computer now. ***Do you see what the Orb is doing as a bridge between, say, Stockhausen and more accessible styles?*** I know exactly what you mean, but if somebody reading this says, "Oh, I've got to buy that Stockhausen record because it must be really good," they're gonna get a cruel awakening. ***But you have no problem combining radically disparate influences in your music?*** That's right. It's like being a painter. You see something that you want to put in a picture. It becomes a collage rather than just a painting. Americans are very good at doing these things through society, picking up bits from Europe, from South America, from here and there. That's what we're doing at the musical level. I mean, I had the first Led Zeppelin album coming into my head when I was eight years old. So I've always thought, "I like John Bonham, I like Sly Dunbar, and I like Brian Eno. I wonder what that all sounds like together?" That's what the Orb is, even today. ***Did you ever go through a period of playing real-time music in bands?*** No, but I've always been surrounded by music. I had what I regard as a musical home. My brother was a really good musician. [Producer/Killing Joke bassist] Youth and I grew up together. We went to school together, shared flats until about four years ago. He was trying to teach me to , these two fingers still have their own minds. Forget it: If I'm playing keyboards, it's with my thumbs and index fingers. That's peculiar, but it's just one of those things. ***So sequencers and related developments in technology must have been the catalysts that let you begin making music as the Orb.*** Well, to be honest about it, the Orb at first was basically about taking lots of drugs and going clubbing. I had been trying to run my own label with Youth, but people were telling me that since I was also working in the A&R department at E.G. I should be more involved with the label that was paying me. Then Jimi and I decided that we should get a band together. I saw that as my lifeline because Jimi had a 16-track studio and his publishing company was E.G. So the people at E.G. said, "We'll turn a blind eye to you working with Jimi because if you come up with anything successful we'll publish it." They also turned a blind eye to me running a company with Youth, because Youth was signed to E.G. Publishing as well. So those were the breaks that took me into the realm of making music. The technology had been there, but I was a late developer. ***How did sampling affect your work?*** It really gave me my main purpose with the Orb: What can we do with this sample? What effect can we put into it? How can we hide the saxophone from *Blade Runner* and put that into a track that went into the Top 20 in Britain without anybody recognizing it? There's a kind of beauty, a kind of cleverness, in that: People will go, "What did I just hear? That ain't in there!" But it is! It's like taking the drums in "Little Fluffy Clouds" from a drum break that went on for about three minutes on an album by a very important singer who died recently. No one would even think of going into that type of music to find it in the first place. ***You rely a lot on spoken word samples to set moods and provide segues, though they're often mixed down to the point of inaudibility.*** That's true, although we didn't do that on the first album [*Adventures beyond the Ultraworld*], which was three weeks of hard work: Get the album out and keep it under budget. The new album is two years of blood, sweat, tears, and loads of money -- more money than I ever would have imagined I could possibly get my hands on when I was younger. And getting the words in the right places. ***Where did that money go on this album that made it different from less lavishly funded Orb projects?*** Into our manager's pocket. Let's put it that way. ***Have you got a better manager now?*** I've got a caretaker manager, a close friend. ***How did you begin thinking of spoken word samples as devices that could enhance your music?*** Intuition. That's the only way I can put it. You've got to have some humor on these records, and words can put a smile on people's faces. In essence, I'm doing what a lot of journalists -- dare I say? -- want to do, and that's to take the piss out of somebody. For example, "Spanish Castles in Space" [from *Aubrey Mixes*] has a sample I took from an album in Russian. This bloke was talking about what kinds of fishes he had in his fish tank. You can imagine the reaction this will get when you play it in Russia. ***Where do you find your speech samples?*** Mainly from the lovely TV and radio networks you've got here in this lovely country. I record two hours of DAT while sitting up in a hotel room, bored. Then I'll go home, put it in a sampler, and find the nice ones. It could be two hours of crap, but sometimes I'll find something great. Remember that sample on "Little Fluffy Clouds" -- something about a morphine drip in someone's stomach? That comes from a religious program. That's just an example of this society you live in; we wouldn't have some evangelist punching somebody in the stomach and yelling, "See? No pain! No pain!" Pow! ***Fundamenalist religious diatribes are familiar material for samples these days.*** Yeah, but we got in trouble once for using something from the Koran. We were using samples of passages from the Koran on one tour, and we were told, "If you don't stop, we're gonna declare a fatwah and destroy every gig you play." In fact, when we were playing this record onstage in Brighton, these guys started trying to strangle our tour manager. I was putting the Koran over the top of, I think, "Outlands" when this message came up on my mixer: "Take the Arab record off. Now!" I thought someone was joking. Then I saw these three Arabs holding my tour manager up in the air and screaming at him. ***What about bird chirps and other real-world samples? Do you get many of them from third-party sources?*** I used to. Not now. It's an excuse to get away. ***So if we hear a train on an Orb record, it's not taken from a sound effects CD?*** Certainly not trains. There's a very big train line just 300 yards from my house. At about three in the morning this huge train comes running through, so there's this really low rumble going on. One night I left a DAT on outside my bedroom and got it on tape. It's also got the sound of some kids talking about whatever they could possibly think up. I have all of it on this two- or three-hour DAT, and I play it live at gigs. ***What purpose does Orb music serve? Is it entertainment? Is it a kind of commentary on our world?*** It's just something to chill out with at the end of the day. It's nice to know that people can cuddle up, kiss each other, and make themselves at home listening to the Orb. It's not like, "Right, I'm gonna get into the Orb and go for it tonight!" It's a much more personal experience than that. ***In that sense, do you see the Orb as playing a major role in defining ambient music?*** Look, we're not making ourselves to be the "guardians of ambience." We're not throwing down this gauntlet and saying we're the best band in the world. We're just doing our own thing and creating what we want to create. I like to think there's someone out there making music in the '90s that I can enjoy, just like I enjoyed sitting at home and having a listen to Can records. But if there isn't, I'll do that music myself.back on up to start
orblivion review from rolling stone #758 (96?) by ???
You may be more familiar with the faces of Tricky, Prodigy and Orbital, but it was Alex Patterson of the Orb who helped lay the ground rules for the new electronic-music revolution. If it weren't for the hallucinogenic sound washes of the Orb's first two albums, "Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld" and "u.f.orb," the current crop of computer wizards might not be using their arsenals of keyboard effects in quite the same way. Of course, after creating the mold, the enigmatic Patterson shattered it, venturing further afield by creating two experimental records full of frazzled noises and arrhythmic beats (Pomme Fritz and Orbvs Terrarvm) that alienated many of the group's fans. Now the Orb have returned with "Orblivion," which harks back to the linear constructs of the group's early material while retaining the anarchic sound effects and humor of their later stuff. Most of the songs feature sparse melodies that swim through galactic pulses, sonar blips and assorted computer sounds. Beats drift in and out, picking up intensity then dissipating like steam, and echoing voices pop up from time to time to impart surreal bits of wisdom. The overall effect is a scintillating contrast of chaos and euphony somewhat akin to playing Nintendo while listening to the Cocteau Twins.
Orblivion's catchiest song, "Toxygene," bobs merrily on a cartoonish keyboard hook and dub bass line in a manner reminiscent of the group's hit "Little Fluffy Clouds." The short, arresting "Pi" begins with the sounds of sea gulls and a car whizzing by, then mutates into a grinding track riddled with distorted beats and the sound of a whirring dentist's drill. The Orb are at their best when they imbue their mind-bending music with Monty Python-esque levity. "S.A.L.T." is strung together with samples of a lunatic giving bizarre signs of the apocalypse, and the six-second-long "72" is a mock TV jingle with the lyrics, "The youth of America on LSD," from Hair.
The Orb may still be off on their own world somewhere, but they're closer to Earth than they've been in years - close enough, perhaps, to begin setting suns and starting fires alongside their electronic offspring.
Melody Maker (Feb 15th 1997)
THE ORB ('Bloody Essential' star) ORBLIVION Island (12trks/80 mins) "BUT I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked. "Oh, you can't help that," said The Cat. "We are all mad here. I'm mad, you're mad." "How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice. "You must be," said The Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here." - "Alice's Adventures In Wonderland", Lewis Carroll. How do you measure madness? In inches? Kilowatts? Ounces? I mean, how do you gauge the difference between giddy eccentricity and full-on, pant-raving craziness? The answer is: you don't. It's all a matter of perspective. One person's sanity is another persons insanity. For every person who has described Coleridge, Blake, Rimbaud or Van Gogh as mad, there's another who'd be willing to stand on the nearest rooftop and proclaim their genius to the world through a megaphone. Which, in a way, brings me to The Orb. There are people who see Alex Paterson as a genuine pioneer, pushing forward the boundaries, boldly going, and so forth. Then there are those who see him as a fried old hippy, sitting in a darkened room with tubs of hallucinogenic fungii for company, endlessly reading and re-reading the run-off grooves of Gong albums in case they contain messages from aliens, or God, or both. Me? I belong to the former category. I remember hearing "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld" for the first time, stoned as a bat on hot knives and five-litre bucket bongs, trying to grapple with this awesome record while my brain assumed the consistency of week-old soup. "Genius," I muttered, when it finished. Then I passed out. Eight years and seven albums down the line, Paterson is still out there; a kind of millennial Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear, peddling ambient house for the E generation, concocting adventures in topsy-turvy, looking glass worlds. "Orblivion" is, like all Orb albums, just one long piece of music; a fantastical voyage through Paterson's psyche as he dabbles with everything from covert US military operations ("Delta Mark II") to the end of the world ("S.A.L.T", complete with David Thewlis' rant from "Naked"). Considering how rapidly dance music evolves, it's impressive that The Orb still sound as vital as they did eight years ago, here flirting with drum'n'bass ("Delta" again) and Far Eastern rhythms ("Beduin") alongside their trademarked dub-influenced beats. A very, very fine album indeed. Have you ever sat beside yourself and felt really sometimes? Of course you have, or you wouldn't have come here. MICHAEL BONNERback on up to start
NME
by Stephen Dalton
22 Feb 97
RIGHT SPHERE, RIGHT NOW THE ORB
Orblivion
(Island/All formats)
"... 'Orblivion' emerges from a deep-space mist of booming dub, clanking Krautrock, hypnotic ambient undulations, half-heard radio broadcasts, reefer-fuelled conspiracy theories, sci-fi sound effects and a very English sense of music-hall humour, a planet not too distant from previous Orbular emissions. What's different here is the self-assured spark and meaty substance at the heart of 'Orblivion'. Working with new sidekick Andy Hughes and long-time silent Orbster Thomas Fehlmann, Paterson hasn't sounded this confident since 'Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld' first defined The Orb's trajectory six years ago, nor as assured of commercial success since 1992's chart-topping 'UFOrb'. In fact, this latest garbled message from Orb Central convincingly proves Professor Stephen Hawking's theory that time is actually circular - give or take the odd black hole.
'Orblivion', then, is not the sound of label wrangles, personnel fall-outs, impenetrable self-indulgence and all the attendant sickness of recent Orb activity. It's funny and funky, deep but playful, deadly serious yet suffused with wry self-mockery - and it doesn't give a tattered old Hawkwind album what you think of it either.
You already know Top Five smash 'Toxygene', an anodyne techno-dub chugger with a slyly subversive Trojan Horse intent: get the kids and grannies to buy the album, then the serious freak-outs can begin. And so they do. There's the amorphous 'Ubiquity', deceptively soothing on its softly throbbing surface yet harsh and abrasive in its dank nether regions. Or the exquisite 'Bedouin', a beguiling lopsided clank which suddenly spills ghostly ethnic chants from its wheezing robotic innards. 'Passing Of Time', meanwhile, is vintage Orb, its fragmented sci-fi narration and trickling, twinkling textures reminiscent of those Soviet astronaut tapes on '...Ultraworld'. Played neither for laughs nor B-movie kitsch, such dreamy word-paintings add up to much more than the sum of their parts. Spooky, spine-chilling stuff.
The album's centrepiece is 'SALT', which weaves the apocalyptic pre-millennial rants of David Thewlis' manic outsider Johnny in Mike Leigh's Naked to a spiralling symphony of dirty, doomy electro noodling. Whether Paterson and co truly sympathise with the character's feverish, acid-tongued, Mark E Smith-esque paranoia or are simply riffing on his persona for pure atmosphere, this is a tremendously powerful collision of style and content. And yet, however embittered and pessimistic The Orb's current outlook might be, 'Orblivion' is ultimately an upbeat and romantic album. It may lapse into spiky noise at times, as in the bubbling industrial swamp of 'Pi', but such sour asides are rarely sustained. Far more representative is 'Molten Love', whose lush orchestral strings sweep it upwards into the ionosphere, buoyed along by whooshing thermals and stray radio transmissions. And these lofty heights are where we find The Orb in 1997. It's not enough to say that 'Orblivion' finds them regaining their sense of humour, because that never truly faded; rather it finds them rediscovering the correct balance of smart-arse smirking and wide-eyed musical exploring.
After umpteen crash-landings, The Orb have rebuilt their space podule and are back where they belong, surfing the stratosphere, redrawing the sonic atlas, flicking distinctly non-hippy V-signs at their doubters. And they've set the controls for the heart of the charts." (7/10)
Stephen Dalton
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SEEKING A NEW ORBIT ROCK: The pioneering techno-heads behind the Orb struggle to keep from being outpaced by their contemporaries. By BEN WENER The Orange County Register It's easy being the aged godfather of a musical movement. You can rest on your laurels, make an album Whenever you want and expect that reverence from fans and critics will keep you selling well beyond your retirement. It's quite a different matter when you're merely one more pioneer of a potentially soon-to-pass trend struggling to keep current before the new rebels eat you alive. That's when you've got to do something to set yourself apart. It's a thought not lost on the Orb, the groundbreaking British techno outfit masterminded by former Killing Joke roadie Alex Paterson and his cronies Andy Hughes and Thomas Fehlman. The Orb Where: The Mayan Theatre, 1038 S. Hill Road, Los Angeles When: 8 p.m. Thursday Tickets: $20 Call (714) 740-2000 In 1989, Paterson started creating ambient worlds built around Eno-esque soundscapes and acid house beats, laying the foundation for what's now called electronica with early works such as the single "Little Puffy Clouds" and the album "U.F.Orb." But now the Orb's creation is verging on surpassing the band itself, with more recent groups such as the Chemical Brothers, the Prodigy and the similarly named Orbital finding greater sales and even MTV exposure, leaving the Orb to devise new sonic schemes. "Having pioneered something is really a dubious distinction when you get right down to it," Hughes said by telephone recently. "The notice is great, but it doesn't always translate into connecting people to what you're doing. "We've been lumped into the same genre as these other groups right now, and I'm not so sure that's such a bad thing. We're not all that different from the Chemical Brothers, after all. But I think we've become much more conscious of trying to appeal to a wider audience, though never by compromising what we're all about." They try to do that by bringing a rock ethic to the genre that abhors much of what rock stands for. The group's sixth album, "Orblivion," finds the trio plumbing more accessible sounds in shorter songs, something closer to an album of singles (well, bizarre singles) rather than a seamless whole that must be listened to from start to finish. "We tried to get rid of so much of the waffling we tend to do on our records," Hughes commented. "We built it up very much around a jam-style ideal, where we would just work out new grooves and quickly start paring them down, rather than letting tracks get away from us too soon." "Toxygene," the album's first single - and a sly jab at Maurice Jarre's new-age snoozer "Oxygene" - definitely returns the Orb to dancier roots. But it's still the more daring tracks - such as "S.A.L.T.," a lurking beat built around David Thewlis' millennium rant from Mike Leigh's 1993 film "Naked" - that keep the Orb ahead of its contemporaries. "We're not out there to create the perfect pop tune," said Hughes, 31. "'Toxygene' was a fluke, really. We were just (messing) around. Things like 'S.A.L.T.,' that's more of what we're about. It's about presenting more random thoughts and ideas - some I agree with, others I don't - but just putting -them out there to let people think for themselves." That approach, coupled with maintaining a restless spirit that manifests itself in limitless imagination, is the bottom line for the Orb. Next on the agenda, Hughes says, beyond more "music to make your eyes bleed," is a possible film score. "Our interests really begin and end with not limiting our scope," he said, "that there are no boundaries, that we can create stuff you couldn't hear any other way. Some things may not ultimately fit into our focus, but we don't ever want to give up that flexibility."back on up to start
Sonicnet Orb chat log
3 march 1997
online w/ Andy Hughes
pepe Where is Thomas?
THE ORB Thomas is in Berlin making lists. He is good at that.
Gargantua What about Chemical and Underworld?
THE ORB We are going to do Organic with Chemicals and Underworld, and then 6 other gigs with Chemicals.
base I'm wondering what sort of relationship you had with Kris Weston. In interviews, and in general, he always struck me as the boy wonder or something.
THE ORB He always had to work with someone else.
base Meaning he couldn't handle it himself, or he wasn't creative enough to produce solo tracks?
THE ORB He was just too young.
Irie-One What American techno bands do you like?
THE ORB I don't know about techno. I like a lot of Andrea Parker.
Gargantua Subway submarines?
THE ORB Not us, but Phil our roadie loves them. It's all he eats.
KevArnold Are you going to conquer America or leave that for Prodigy?
THE ORB The Prodigy are doing a very good job of it at the moment.
Gargantua Would you like to be part of a big 2000 party?
THE ORB No.
Irie-One What's your favorite piece of gear in the studio these days?
THE ORB My fingers.
FFreddy Any particular areas you plan to explore in the future?
THE ORB London.
rachel If you could have any one thing in the whole world right now, what would it be?
THE ORB A toilet.
boobert Do you like to tour?
THE ORB Not really.
MARIA What about Orb merchandise?
THE ORB We have one piece of merchandise and Alex has it.
boobert Could you give a budding musician some advice?
THE ORB Don't do it. Get a lawyer.
dave2 What steps can a good regional band take to get noticed?
THE ORB Take a famous song. Sample it, and then tell everyone. If that doesn't get you noticed...
Synergist ...call MTV!
boobert Do you guys have any pets? Do you bring them on tour?
THE ORB I would but there are those strange laws.
dave2 Do you think that DJ mix music has a long-lived future?
THE ORB As long as people are making dance music there will always be a future for DJs.
I am leaving to go to dinner.
Rolling Stone review of the Hammerstein Ballroom, NY, live show in May 97
The Orb
Hammerstein Ballroom, New York, May 9, 1997
[ May 16, 1997 issue? ]When the Orb appeared in New York in 1995, they attracted a fairly uniform audience of young ravers with a few New Age types mixed in. Just two years later, with electronic music snaking into the mainstream, the group attracted a diverse crowd of fashion designers, Web-page producers, newlyweds from Queens and even a drag queen or two.
But if the Orb has gotten bigger, they certainly haven't become stars. Though founder Alex Paterson and partner in crime Andy Hughes are revered by many ambient musicians and are probably among the most recognizable electronica artists because of it, they preferred to act as behind-the-scenes mixmasters, bopping their heads as they orchestrated effects and sounds from behind banks of machines.
With a level of sensory overload that evoked Pink Floyd, a constant stream of psychedelic images was projected onto the screens about the stage, including morphing faces, ubiquitous alien references, Bela Lugosi, panda bears and a red chair flying through a futuristic cityscape. Musically, the beat-driven soundscapes were interlaced with a frenetic procession of quirky musical details and punctuated by ambient pauses, as though to pace the level of absorption. At one point, mellow dub hooks transformed into watery splishes; seconds later, the room was filled with chattering electronic birds.
Paterson and Hughes also dropped in various snippets of speech, from bits of conversation, to weather reports, to a hilarious poem by a man with an English accent about his regret at not being Italian. Also mixed in throughout were what sounded like McCarthy-era speeches declaiming the sanctity of God and country. Layered amid music without a fixed narrative and offered up to an audience to whom that time is ancient history, it amounted to an odd nostalgia for a fixed world order, as well as a cool acknowledgment that such order is now impossible.
While the sensory onslaught of an Orb performance practically forces a fairly passive relationship to onstage events, the opening DJ duo, We, gave concert-goers the sonic space to interpret sounds for themselves. With a sweet but gritty sound that seemed to get into people's bones, We's music was at once primal and futuristic, embryonic and worldly. Although the group, which consists of DJ Olive and DJ Loop, usually performs in smaller venues, they managed to retain the intimate quality that makes their occasionally jackhammer-like sounds somehow transmit a grinding warmth.
from the Lollapalooza program:
The Orb - by Larry Harmon
With the release of "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Center of Ultraworld" in 1989, The Orb created a groundbreaking new genre in electronic music: ambient house. The tracks bridged the gap between the two styles, defining it with slower-paced, softer sounds, combining an evolved disco beat and soulful divca vocals. This single would go on to influence a younger crop of musicians with its female vocal samples, sounds of flowing water, swirling bells, chirping insects and dance rhythms with minimal beats.
But the band members haven't allowed themselves to be pigeonholed into one sound. With an evolving group of musicians and engineers (which have included members of KLF, System 7 and Killing Joke) revolving around core member DR Alex Paterson, the group deliberately crafted other styles and sounds, most notably on 1994's dark "Pomme Fritz" and 1995's psychedlic "Orbus Terrarum". The band has also shown staying power, averaging a new release every year in a scene where collaborating musicians often disband and reform under a new name with a new sound with each new release.
Anyone experiencing The Orb for the first time may be underwhelmed at first. There's no front man or leader to train your eyes on. Instead, you'll see twon men behind a bank or sequencers, keyboards, mixers and turntables, all being used with the same mastery and skill traditional musicians would have over their instruments.
But The Orb is able to achieve things that a conventional band cannot. They can transform the one-way flow of energy from the band to the crowd into a circular pattern that feeds upon itself. Responding to a crowd's reaction with their sounds and mixes, they combine the use of lights and film to work up the crowd or to chill them out with slow transitions between dance and ambient. Although The Orb is accustomed to playing in front of large US audiences, both the group and the audience with reach new dimensions together.
INK nineteen August 1997 east
review by Carole Jaszewski
The Orb
Orblivion
Island
From its McCarthy hearings opening the Orb sounds like a Cliff notes of some of their prior projects all set to tease the chill out room. Synthetic serenity with bursts of revvved up BPMs zig zagging from ear to ear are brought together by a collection of futuristic, historic and commonplace sounds bytes. Alex Patterson and current cohorts Andy Hughes and Thomas Fehlmann have Oblivion zinging off ito anything but that. Watch out for the five minutes of silence that prelude "72". I assume that's nap time.
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Vibe/Metaverse? interview w/ Andy & LX while touring w/ Chemical Bros
The Vibe: Interview with Orb
Calling Doctor: Metaverse Interviews the Orb
by Gump
If Kraftwerk's Rolfie and Florian are the grandaddies of the electronica movement, the Orb must be the papas of it. Yet, they have been out of the North American music press since hitting the scene/record shelves in 1991 with their pioneering Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld.
Just before their final gig co-headlining with the Chemical Brothers, the Orb sat down with the Metaverse to discuss how they view electronic music and the media attention it's currently getting as well as how they approach their remix projects and how they approached their latest cd, Orblivion.
This was a very tricky interview because it happened during a very audible (read: LOUD) Chemical Brothers soundcheck. Many times, questions and answers had to be repeated and yelled.
Metaverse: When you first started, did you ever think electronic music would get this big?
Dr. LX Paterson: I didn't think about it really. I was just thinking about the experience as it was happening.
Metaverse: Does it feel odd to pegged "electronica"?
LX: We've been going around America for 6 years now touring, and when we started in 91 we were playing in like pool rooms where we were a side show, so now if we're "electronica" so be it.
Metaverse: I just mean out of the blue you've become part of the "mainstream" with press and record company push.
LX: We're a "made our own stream" - act. We've broken all the rules set up by the record company. We've done it our own way. We're not a big selling act, but we've kept up our sales to keep the record company interested in having us around, cause there's a different liking for what we do.
We make music for special people with special ears really. We're rebuilding at the moment. We're a very experimental band.
Andy Hughes: (laughs) Experimenting with record companies.
"Cars" is a brilliant track.
Metaverse: How did these dates with the Chemical Brothers come around?
Andy: We don't know is the answer. It was like an agent and management decision. It was only 6 gigs which isn't a lot until you do it, but the crowds have been good. It's weird cause this crowd is different than when we play on our own.
A lot of people who have come to see the Chemical Brothers have never heard of the Orb. It takes them a while to get into it, and we end up getting a great response.
Metaverse: How does it feel to warm-up for somebody? Do you approach the set differently?
LX: We get to shower quicker.
Andy: and stay cold longer. It's a dual headliner, but it's bit hard to come on after us anyways.
LX: We did play after Rage Against the Machine twice. It was fucking hilarious. All these surfy punks standing around not knowing what to make of us.
Metaverse: I noticed your gig from Las Vegas was a cybercast. Is that a direction you would like to take the live shows?
Andy: I don't like that idea at all. When we do stuff it's for that night and we change it night after night, so when we play it's for the live audience.
LX: That's fucked.
Andy: Yeah, we might as well be Future Sound of London.
Metaverse: How much of your live material is on tape?
Andy: I'm not telling, but there's a lot going on. You've got to see it. There is a studio on stage.
LX: We could try to re-create the album on stage each night but that would be really boring.
Metaverse: How about software? Do you use any to assist the writing process?
Andy: Algorithmic composition? Is this Big Blue? I use that stuff, but it's soulless. I'd rather us do it ourselves. At the end of the day, someone's just going to go after the things that they like.
We make music for special people with special ears really.
Metaverse: So, could the Orb take on Big Blue?
Andy: (laughs) To play a tune?
LX: I've seen 4 DJs challenge each other from different sides of the room. That's the closest I want to get.
Metaverse: What approach do you take to choosing your equipment?
Andy: We get rid of so much equipment. All we have is the stuff on stage and a little more. We look for stuff people have made themselves. I just get fed up with the same thing coming out with the same sounds on it but in a different package. But look at the kickback, everyone is going back to analog.
Metaverse: When you recorded Orblivion, did you set out to build upon what you established on Orbus Terrarum?
Andy: It was done a year ago, last May, so it wasn't like we had a vision of what was going to happen. We don't know what we're doing until we do it.
Metaverse: I noticed the songs on Orblivion are short and the beats are more up front.
Andy: Just something else different. Just another change. Everyone expected long tracks, we just did what we wanted.
LX: That's right, one of the ideas we had for Oblivion was industrial pop, but as you see we never got around to it. We just, we just, whatever!
Andy: Most of the beats came in during the remix because we recorded the album at Thomas Fehlmann's flat in Berlin, and his neighbors didn't like the noise, so we had to wait till London to put some drums in.
Metaverse: How do balance your own, original work with your remix work?
LX: We only do remixes when we need the money!
Androids do dream.
Metaverse: I see you just did a song for the Can remix album, Sacrilege?
Andy: It was really tough cause they didn't have the multi-track, everything they did was straight to two-track.
LX: Rumor has it this remix LP will out-sell their entire back catalog, cause after years they finally have a reputation. Quite sad isn't it?
Metaverse: I heard you did a song for the forthcoming Gary Numan tribute album, Random 1/Random 2?
LX: I used to go see Tubeway Army, and a lot of my mates took the piss out of me for liking electronic music when there was all this punk stuff about. Now after years, they're getting the point. "Cars" is a brilliant track.
Metaverse: Didn't you do a remix for U2? Whatever happened to it?
Andy: I think we'll have to buy it back off them for it to be released.
Metaverse: Is the copyright issue dead or is it still a problem for artists who sample?
LX: It's great. It's alright, right? Since the beginning, not just because of us, but like the KLS, publishing companies starting hiring whole legal teams of musicologists and that's what they do is...
Andy: try to spot other people's music.
LX: Yeah, so that shows you how seriously they take it.
We could try to re-create the album on stage each night but that would be really boring.
Metaverse: Are films an influence at all?
Andy: We saw the 5th Element the other day. A good bit of mindless trash. I thought it was excellent cause you didn't have think through it.
LX: Bladerunner's Director's cut.
Andy: Yeah, it made sense. Androids do dream.
Metaverse: This is the last date of this leg of the tour before coming back to do some Lollapalooza dates in August. What are you doing between?
Andy: We'll be in the studio at the end of June.
Metaverse: What else is in the future then?
Andy: I'm quite excited about going to film school in the fall.
LX: I'm quite excited about Chelsea scoring this weekend. I got tickets for the F.A. Cup this weekend.
Metaverse: I didn't know you were that much of a fan?
LX: It's great. We've (Chelsea) got the only team with a black manager, Ruud Gullit, and he has dreads. He's Dutch, and he has his own reggae band. When he won the Golden boot in 1988, which means he was the best player in the world, he dedicated it to Nelson Mendela. So, it's brilliant.
Metaverse: Do you plan on doing any interviews again, real soon?
Andy: Not if we have to shout like this.
LX: I think we should only do them when the Chemicals are doing a soundcheck.
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HERE FOR REALAUDIO OF INTERVIEW (2:31)
This is a transcript of the appearance that Dr Alex made on the BBC/WGBH Boston documentary series "Dancing in the Street", episode 10 "Planet Rock". [4 minutes] [voiceover] Even with all this diverse wealth of sounds, some were still looking for that perfect beat. Approaching the 90's came bands that would push the boundaries even further with 15 minutes soundscapes, montaging samples and sequences which seemed to sum up the musical adventures of the 80's. ["Blue Room" plays over imagery from the video, and Dr Alex swings into view on a dentist's chair which has "ORB" down the back and is spewing smoke in reverse :)] [Dr Alex] In the earlier part of the 80's, there was still this undeniable urge to release records with choruses and verses even in dance music. Fortunately, bands like Run DMC came along, and using a huge 808 bass sound, which no-one had ever really heard as a bass drum before recreated this whole new sound which became the bass and drums, which to a lot of people who listen to reggae, would be laughing, because to them, that's what it was all about in the first place - the bass and drums. ..used to get these tapes sent religiously from NY - Friday night KISS-FM tapes - Chuck Chillout and Chef Pettibone (?) who later on became producers - producing people like, even Madonna, shall we say. He was doing things to New Order that I'd never heard before, you see a connection when you think "I really like what Derrick May is doing, why's it sound so different?" Then you find out he like Kraftwerk, that's an answer. House was another ball game entirely, it became ... [unintelligible] to me it became, I got eaten up by it... [section of the "Summer of Love"] I've never seen 20,000 people in a field with no... no real supervision, so many different types of people in that club, all really loving each other. Well, DJ's took over the part of being "the band", without actually being seen as a band... you could, again, go to a club and become the band by dancing to the DJ's music, that's where the Orb started off. [Little Fluffy Clouds starts to play, @ 2:27minutes] The mixing desk itself, live, has become another instrument with us, but it's used to do a different, totally different purposes. One is to make a completely different arrangement out of something that's been made in the studio in the first place. We then moved it forward and put a live drummer on stage with us, which is played through the mixing desk, and a live bass player and a live percussionist. Now we've started experimenting from doing 12 minutes takes to doing like 40 minute versions live using technology and old instruments together. [voiceover] Although a total break from all the established pop rules, this new ambient sound was to earn the Orb 3 platinum albums. [Dr Alex] The feel I've had for music has been to travel and finding different types of music, anyways, that's a lot of influence for me, music from around the world, be it from South America, be it from India, be it from Asia, be it from Africa [end]back on up to start
From The Oregonian, 8/15/97, Living section, pg. B4
review by Melanie McFarlandHow exactly to you assess the merits of a good dance party? that's the puzzle you have to unravel when you see the Orb, a London based band that turned La Luna into the hottest chill room in town Wednesday night.
Whatever sentiments audience members left with that evening, however, most couldn't deny that The Orb's ambient music affects a temporary transformation in listeners. You might want to go home and watch some surreal animation. reality just isn't good enough for you.
Any trepidation that skeptics might have about the encroaching electonic revolution would have been quashed had they been in attendance. If the Orb's concert was an example of live electronica at its best -- and many would say that is was -- then we should be thankful the future is pulling into the gate.
For one thing, bloody noses at an ambient music concert are pretty much out of the question. most Orb fans were too blissed out at the musical and vusual treats to be concernted about petty things like spilled beers. [my note: La Luna doesn't allow alcohol on the dance floor, but oh well.]
Also, electronica, by nature, is pretty much a science. Granted, computer systems crash, things get erased, etc. The Orb's concert, however, was smooth as silicon, yet far from predictable.
Finally, in the aftermath, electronica concerts tend to be much less stinkly than grunch concerts. Go figure.
The Orb's concert was live Memorex, but creatively used live Memorex. Alex Paterson and Andy Hughes melted sound clips together beautifully, bathing listeners in sticky-sweet music they could move to.
There was a definite Chicago house music groove going on, particularly earlier in the evening when DJs Mestizo and Jesse James spun the wax. The Orb crashed this into a variety of styles, from ambient dub to jungle-flavored techno.
Some riffs gave you and indication of what was being playe,d but the Orb experimented so mcuh with the framwork of songs that many sounded drastically different from the recorded version.
When the sampled shriek of Minnie Ripertons's "Loving You" on "A Huge Evergrowing Pulsating Bran That Grows From the Center of the Universe" rang out, for instance, it elicited cheers as dancers got ready to catch a groove.
The Orb spun that classic and the early morning favorite, "Little Fluffy Clouds" along with penty of older material. Its new album, "Orblivon" ruled most of the evening as The Orb highlighted the concert with extended versions of the single "Toxygene," "S.A.L.T.," "Secrets," (with its trippy weather girl blabberins) and the subliminal-message-laced "Passing of Time."
Projections of skies spattered with cotton-candy clouds melted and reformed on the background screen. So did numerous colorized wildlife and anthropological figures, smiling old men's faces morphing into those of a beautiful and disaffected-looking young model, and a computer animiated diapered infant, gyrating with the smoothness of a rave queen.
Clips of pepper, carnival style "commericals" broke the two hour concert into digestible bits so the audience didn't collapse from nonstop dancing. Often the breaks provided laughts as well, with one "commercial" sounding like a barbershop quartet singing a song that consisted only of the word "beer."
More to the point, it was the best party going in town that night. No matter how unusual and preened the beautiful young things in attendance looked when they came in, most were wilted with sweat when they left.
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NME
by Simon Williams
26 april 97ONLY HERE FOR THE SPHERE!
THE ORB
Amsterdam Paradiso
"... One perk of staggering around the Paradiso's balcony is the opportunity to gaze down upon such minute occurrences in The Orb's world in action, looking right into the heart of their curious tepee construction which is one part Concorde cockpit, one part Reliant Robin and several parts acid-crazed advertising concept for PG Bastard T(r)ips. The Orb '97 is a sleek, seemingly satisfied machine, as evidenced by the sunburnt Paterson's victorious trip back to Blighty earlier today to see his beloved Chelsea reach the FA Cup Final. Better still, after various recent touring shenanigans have taken the duo from Brixton Academy to Milan via scruffy Belgian DJ slots, where on earth could there be a better place to witness The Orb than in the skunk-skewered environs of Amsterdam?
So we peer through the haze and find Alex playing the calm card, gliding from decks to computer screen and back again, flinging out soundbites of disco dribblings, rock riffage and marginally deranged romper-room noise. Next to him we find Andy playing the perkily possessed rocker card, hunched over his enormo mixing desk and spending virtually each and every live nanosecond twiddling, tweaking and generally giving off a seriously hairy Toto-drummer-high-on-temazepam-vibe.
And overall? Well, just as the duo spend the duration of the set half-obscured by a canvas bastardised tea bag, so their music oozes a similarly shoulder-shrugging fuck-you attitude. Like, yeah, there is a 'version' of 'Little Fluffy Clouds', but it's frazzled beyond virtual recognition. And yeah, there is a healthy heap of fun to be had with the crappily-titled 'Orblivion' album, especially when its cosmic curves and boogaloo grooves and spacewarped wibblings conspire to both comfort and confuse at the same. And with marvellous predictability, not to mention zonkered Tonka truckloads of tolerance, the local stoneheads care not: Amsterdam shimmies in the sold-out Paradiso shadows, grinning for a skinning and pleased to be welcoming back an old, weirdly comfortable musical friend. Not balls, then."
Simon Williams
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Phoenix New Times April 24 - 30, 1997
Eye of the Orb
Picking the “ever growing pulsating brain” of Alex Paterson, don of ambient
By David Holthouse
Several London dance clubs can lay claim to the title “England [and therefore the world]’s First Underground House Music Club.” But only one--a South London spot called Heaven--has clear bragging rights to “England [and therefore the world]’s First Chill-Out Room.” It also can lay claim to helping bring about the ambient house of Alex Paterson, founding member of Orb, which is scheduled to hit the Valley this week.
It was 1989, and Heaven’s owner, Paul Oakenfold, flashed on the idea of providing overheated dancers a separate space to relax and come down off MDMA trips during the club’s weekly acid-house club night. He hired then London DJ Alex Paterson to provide atmosphere. Paterson, an A&R man for Brian Eno’s label EG and part-time roadie for the gothic industrial band Killing Joke, was then pioneering a new form of beatless, aural-collage music, similar on the surface to New Age relaxation tapes but with far more intricate and intelligent structures. Thus, Heaven’s chill-out zone was the delivery room for ambient house, and Paterson was the wizard behind the curtain.
Eight years later, with electronica breaking open the pop landscape like an earthquake fissure, Paterson is on tour in support of his ambient group Orb’s seventh album, Orblivion.
Orb has incrementally defined and then expanded the boundaries of ambient house since its landmark 1989 album A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Center of the Ultraworld. Despite that pretentious mouthful of a title, Brain is a gorgeous piece of graffiti where jet noises, church bells, choral parts and myriad other samples play like seals in and over waves of synthesizer. One memorable review labeled the album “virtual drugs.”
Orb launched its first U.S. tour in Phoenix with a show at Silver Dollar Club. Now Paterson and his Orb accomplice Andy Hughes, who replaced Kris “Thrash” Weston in 1995 after a nasty split, are scheduled to return to the Valley Wednesday, April 30. New Times spoke with Paterson recently about his Phoenix debut, the rummy rave scene in Puerto Rico, and why Americans are not very good with their feet.
New Times: What do you remember about your first U.S. show, at Silver Dollar?
Orb has incrementally defined and then expanded the boundaries of ambient house since its landmark 1989 album. Alex Paterson: Just that it was quite weird. It was in November of 1991. No, it must have been October of 1991--that’s when Halloween is, right?--because everyone was dressed up in all manner of elaborate costumes. And we had this Blues Brothers sort of thing where there was wire mesh all across the front of the stage, except instead of protecting us from country-music fans throwing beer bottles--which might have been interesting, really, as long as we were protected--it was the end of a barricade to separate the 21s from the under-21s. It sort of ran the length of the club and wound up in this big wall in front of us. And so, from the stage, you couldn’t really make head nor tail of what the fuck was going on out there, except there were all these people dressed up. Oh--I do remember there were all these lovely cheerleader girls running about. That’s what sticks out in my mind, anyway. Wire mesh and cheerleaders. Not a bad combination, really, when you think of t he possibilities.
NT: On U.F.Orb, you sort of tacitly expressed a fascination with the idea of UFOs and alien visitation. The Southwest is ground zero for sightings and abductions. Do you really believe the aliens are coming?
AP: Well, I certainly hope they are. And I think they may well be. All this talk has been around a while, hasn’t it, and it doesn’t seem to be going away. It’s just getting stranger and more frequent. People may laugh at that, but I’m sure the idea that the Earth was round seemed just as ridiculous to people at the time. “Oh, the Earth isn’t flat, hey? And I suppose little gray men are coming to visit as well.” At the very least, I like the idea, because I think there’s a little alien in all of us, trying to get out.
Andy Hughes, in the background: I think yours is just stuck in your head, Alex.
AP: No, Andy, it’s in my stomach. Didn’t you see the cinema?
NT: You recently played in Puerto Rico. What’s the scene like there?
AP: Well, I didn’t perform as the Orb. I just played records. I played this little club by the sea, and the scene there is really grinding, you know. It’s heat-oriented, it’s about a tropical, sexy groove, and sexy men and sexy women, and just sex, sex, sex. Grinding. So I wound up playing a lot of hip-hop and slowed-down jungle. That’s what they’re into in Puerto Rico. That and rum. There’s a huge Bacardi distillery there. I didn’t know Puerto Rico was part of America until I got there and a couple of locals who took me around told me it’s an American commonwealth. They didn’t seem to care for that at all. I’d say the natives are getting resentful. Didn’t seem to care much for America or Americans.
NT: What do you think of Americans?
AP: Well, you’re all right for the most part, except you’re not very good with your feet. If you throw a ball to your average Americans, they’ll at least try to catch it, and usually they’ll manage to look pretty cool doing it. But kick a ball at one of them and they just go all funny.
NT: Well, we do have a few soccer players in this country.
AP: That was just generally speaking, mate. No offense, you know.
NT: Okay, what about the underground dance scene in America? What’s your opinion?
AP: Well--say you had an A-bomb, and you dropped it on New York City, L.A. and Chicago--
NT: One bomb?
AP: No, three bombs. One each for New York City, L.A. and Chicago. How much of the U.S. population would you take out? Just answer quick. I’m trying to prove a point.
NT: Probably about 15 percent.
AP: No, 6 percent. Point being, there’s a lot more of America beyond New York City, L.A. and Chicago, and there’s a lot more to the American scene than those cities. Which is brilliant. We play all over America, and people are into us everywhere. We only had one bad show on the last tour, and that was in a small town in the outs in the south of France. There was just no one there. And that doesn’t happen in America anymore, no matter where we play. It’s really starting to all come together and happen. We’re doing a lot of our dates on this tour with the Chemical Brothers, and, well, this is going to sound like some sort of snob story, but it’s true. I was down at my neighborhood grocery store in London just before we came over to start the tour, and I ran into Tom from the Chemical Brothers, and he said, “This is it, Alex. We’re going to conquer America.” They’re really into it, those two.
NT: What do you think of their new album?
AP: It’s all right. It’s a lot of fun, and probably a good introduction for people wanting to check out this stuff. But if you’ve been into it for a while, it’s just more of the same. I mean, they loop it up a lot, don’t they? The Chemical Brothers definitely love a loop.
NT: So what’s the secret to keeping techno and ambient fresh?
AP: It’s easy. Just don’t copy everyone else. Be a black sheep, not a white sheep. I mean, God, I am tired of hearing all the sounds a [Roland] DX7 makes. Say, here’s one for you--how is a DX7 like a clitoris?
NT: I have no idea.
AP: Every cunt’s got one.
Orb is scheduled to perform on Wednesday, April 30, at Club Rio in Tempe, with Markus Schulz, and Kevin Brown. Showtime is 8 p.m. (all ages).
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westword.com
April 24-30, 1997
Future Shock Is electronica the next big thing, or another passing fancy?
By Michael RobertsAnyone who's ever paid the slightest attention to popular music in these United States has long realized that the record industry's response to an economic slump is to manufacture a trend. There's no shortage of examples: The birth of rock and roll, the British Invasion, the singer-songwriter era, the disco movement and the grunge assault all were fueled to a large degree by business types primarily interested in expanding markets, moving units and reinvigorating consumers. If the result was good music, fine, but that was hardly the main goal.
When viewed from this perspective, it makes perfect sense that music-biz heavies would cook up something new to excite masses left cold by recent releases from R.E.M., Hootie & the Blowfish, Pearl Jam and other alleged superstars. But the one that they're propagating--electronica--has left many observers scratching their heads. For years now, the underground rave scene has been a fertile breeding ground for technologically oriented dance music--so many years that the sudden embracing of it strikes Alex Patterson, the 35-year-old leader of England's Orb, one of electronic music's most long-lived acts, as comical. "The most absurd side of it is that this music has been under your noses since 1985," he says. "All it does is show you the power of the media and the music industry. And it is no reflection whatsoever about what's really going on musically in America."
True enough--but that's no surprise. After all, fealty to the essence of a musical form has never had much to do with breaking a new genre in this country. Take the failed attempt to push punk rock into the American heartland in the middle and late Seventies. The real stuff, like the Sex Pistols and the Ramones, proved either too corrosive or too outrageous to survive in the mainstream, so the musical menu planners at the labels smoothed it out until it became something else entirely: new wave. A lot of this music was enjoyable--even ditties like "My Sharona" were not without their charms--but its connection to punk was tenuous indeed. The same could be said of the neo-punk that finally hit big in the Nineties; the stuff that sold best, like Green Day, was about as anarchic as Al Gore.
Whether the same thing will happen to electronica remains to be seen, but the early signs are not good. Take, for instance, the artistic and financial failures suffered by those veteran artists who've lately been slapping modern dance music's sonic signatures onto their songs. David Bowie's Earthling was a shallow excursion into jungle grooves that tanked almost immediately, while U2's much-hyped Pop, which layers electronic textures atop yet another recycling of its trademark sound, is a sales disappointment of epic proportions. But these efforts are works of genius compared with Retail Therapy, a CD credited to T.D.F., an aggregation built around well-known technophile Eric Clapton. The onetime god of guitar is not the first performer from his era to anonymously dip his toe into electronic waters; Paul McCartney did so--to surprisingly good effect--with Strawberries, Oceans, Ships, Forest, a 1994 release credited to the Fireman. But Clapton's offering, which is dominated by somnolent, quasi-new-age picking decorated with undeniably slack dance beats, is so jarringly tepid that even Grammy voters might accuse him of being a dilettante. Keeping his name off the liner was the smartest move he could have made.
As for more organic electronic groups, they remain an acquired taste that America in general has yet to acquire. Despite frequent appearances on MTV, whose championing of electronica via increased airplay and persistent promotions is proof that the labels are taking the style seriously, worthy acts such as Underworld, the Future Sound of London, Goldie, Orbital and Aphex Twin are selling fewer recordings than "Weird" Al Yankovic. The sole exception to the rule thus far are the Chemical Brothers, whose new Astralwerks opus, Dig Your Own Hole, entered Billboard's Top-200 album roster this week at number fourteen--an all-time electronica high. In some ways, this achievement is predictable: The album includes "Setting Sun," a single whose appeal has a great deal to do with its conventional pop-song structure and the vocals of Oasis's Noel Gallagher. But this is no sellout, despite what naysayers claim. While "brothers" Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons have put together a concoction that's hookier and more immediately attractive to electronica novices than the average techno-platter, they can't be accused of abandoning the music's precepts. Tracks like "Block Rockin' Beats," "Piku" and "Don't Stop the Rock" combine prominent, relentless rhythm patterns with astutely chosen samples and electronic "instrumentation" ranging from sirens to power chords to effectively break up the repetitive figures that are electronica's greatest strength and most profound liability. In short, it works like a basic rock album without actually being one.
Orblivion, a subtly entertaining disc from the Orb that hit stores earlier this year, has practically nothing in common with Dig. "Delta MKII," "Molten Love" and "Log of Deadwood" work best as chill-out music--gently undulating waves of sound that reward close attention but function just as well as all-purpose stress relievers. "Ambient" is the term most often used to describe this format, and in the case of the Orb, it's especially appropriate. Patterson began his career in the professional music universe as an A&R man for EG, an imprint founded by Brian Eno, whose Another Green World long-player is widely regarded as the first ambient album. He founded the Orb in 1988 and made an impact stateside with "Little Fluffy Clouds," from the 1991 opus The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld. Since then, Patterson and a shifting crew of associates have put out five more Orb extravaganzas. While some of these followups (notably Pomme Fritz--The Orb's Little Album, from 1994) were spotty, the majority (including 1992's UFOrb and 1995's Orbus Terrarum) sound as fascinating now as they did then. Still, none of them sold well to fans lacking membership in the electronic-music cognoscenti. You might expect this to bother Patterson, who, like most "influences," seems destined to see others make money off music that he developed and nurtured. But you'd be wrong.
"I've seen the Chemical Brothers come along," he says, "and never in a hundred million years would I tell you that they've taken what we could have had, because we're coming from completely different directions. But the direction that they're coming from was brought about by us, and that gives me pleasure."
It also gives Patterson the hope that some fans of the Chemical Brothers and hot properties like Prodigy can be induced to check out the Orb, whose work he describes as "a niche where people can go and relax to something that's modern and their own, and not fall back onto somebody else's culture." And in the electronica feeding frenzy that's risen to the fore, he may get his wish. Suddenly, he says, he and his Orb partner, Andy Hughes, are receiving more attention than they have in ages. "It's quite bizarre," he admits. "I guess we were too far in the future in 1988. We were ahead of the game. I didn't know nine years ago that we were pioneers, but I suppose we were. Some people may have overtaken us on the record charts, but nobody compares to what we've done. I'm immensely proud of all of our albums, and to me, they still sound very current. I'm honestly thinking, why not stick out an old greatest-hits album and be done with it?"
Of course, Patterson acknowledges that the electronica uprising is not without its negatives. Some misinformed commentators have even suggested that Orblivion's relative accessibility is a result of the Orb trying to cash in on the genre's higher profile. The truth, Patterson points out, is that Orblivion was completed, with the exception of one track, at the beginning of May 1996, long before the domestic record companies decided that electronica was in every American's future. "People who haven't understood what we were doing have patronized us and criticized as since the beginning," he allows. "And that's fine, because it's a reaction, and it's always better to get a reaction than to get no reaction at all. So when we see reviewers saying, 'Oh, they're trying to be a drum-and-bass band now,' it doesn't bother us. We just say, 'Where's the drums and bass?' Because there aren't any."
Indeed, the Orb, which has been among the rare electronic bands to tour with a live rhythm section and supporting musicians (documented on its Live '93 package), is going out on the road in 1997 without such props; Patterson and Hughes will be on their own. By doing so, Patterson is leaving himself open to the charge that his group, like the majority of electronica combos, does not make enough of an attempt to connect with an audience in concert, settling instead for light displays hardly different from the ones that can be seen in neighborhood dance clubs. Patterson shrugs off such grousing. "We're an experimental band," he says. "We're constantly changing and striving to put on a different kind of performance each time. We've managed to find a lighting director who is in tune with us all the way down the line, and he's been feeding us his ideas and bleeding us for our ideas, and it's come together very well. When we played a gig in London recently, even our old drummer and bass player were blown away." What's the key visual image? "Well, we've been performing under a pyramid," reveals Patterson, a numerology buff who believes that, because of various calendrical errors, the millennium is actually occurring this year. "I don't know what kind of energy we get out of it, but we've had fun so far."
Listeners raised on windmilling guitarists, bare-chested frontmen and general rock-and-roll bombast likely won't view two guys standing under a pyramid as a fair tradeoff--and whether electronica practitioners like it or not, these are the sorts of standards against which they will be judged. Nonetheless, Patterson doubts that the anticipated electronic-music revolution will turn out to be nothing more than a blip on the musical radar screen. In his view, the groundwork for electronica has been laid too well for that to happen.
"There was a nice little scene in Denver and Boulder five years ago," he says. "There were young kids doing exactly what we were doing in the UK at the time, and maybe there were only 150 of them, but at least it was a start. And now there are people like my girlfriend, who just turned seventeen--but she was going to Orb shows when she was only thirteen."
Suddenly, he pauses. "She was eight years old when the Orb started," he mutters. "And this is supposed to be new music?"
The Chemical Brothers. 8 p.m. Tuesday, April 29, Ogden Theatre, 935 East Colfax, $18.50, 1-800-444-SEAT.
The Orb. 8 p.m. Tuesday, May 6, Ogden Theatre, 935 East Colfax, $16, 1-800-444-SEAT.
"The most absurd side of it is that this music has been under your noses since 1985."
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I.D. Magazine (International Design Magazine) - "Expo" section: "At the end of a century of clashing ideologies, where better for the art of the Russian Revolution to end up than on MTV? An upcoming video by the ambient electronica band The Orb called "DJ Asylum" is an animated tribute to Constructivist posters, directed by Benjamin Stokes of H-Gun Labs in Chicago. The video bounces along through an industrial cityscape past smokestacks, cheering proletariat and uplifting sequences of the band members being fired from black cannons. On the brick walls are dynamic posters of spinning geometric shapes in the mode of Rodchenko, El Lissitzky and friends. 'There was so much interesting artwork coming out of Russia at that time,' says Stokes, who recruited artists and SGI/Alias experts to work on the piece, "and to my knowledge, there haven't been many attempts to animate it." Could the final legacy of the glorious revolution be the Bolshevik pop video?"back on up to start
Option, No. 77, Nov/Dec 1997 "Minimal Impact" by Kenny Berkowitz. Photos by Martyn Gallina-Jones. (about influence of Philip Glass & Steve Reich on younger music makers excerpt about The Orb...) But for Reich, who hasn't had the same degree of commercial success as Glass, there's always something left to prove. "It's boring for somebody to do the same thing over and over again," he says. "My hope as a composer is to make music that is just going to sweep you away into some kind of very positive, ecstatic state." That could also stand as a perfect description of the goals of the early rave scene. After growing up on a diet of Eno ("I was in awe of him") and Kraftwerk, the Orb's Alex Paterson came up with a strain of beat-driven ambient music, creating "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Center of the Ultraworld" out of ocean waves, church bells, and jet planes - all held together with the throbbing keyboard arpeggios of Philip Glass and gradually shifting rhythms of Steve Reich. "I remember seeing Koyaanisqatsi six times in one evening," says Paterson, who was 23 when the 1983 movie was released. The film, neither fiction nor documentary, contrasts the rapid pace of modern life (via time-lapse photography) with the static grandeur of nature. Lacking dialog entirely, its imagery is driven solely by Glass's monumental score. "I couldn't put it down, had to watch it again and again and again," says Paterson. "All my mates went out to play. They thought I was quite mad. And I just stayed inside and watched it. And watched it, and watched it, and watched it, and watched it, and watched it." Paterson is in New York for a quick gig at the dance club Carbon. It's unfortunately the kind of night where everything goes wrong, with lighting troubles, a crowd complaining about ticket prices and the promoter ranting, "I produced Madonna! I produced Madonna!" Recovering in his hotel room the next day, Paterson sounds tired. After seven albums, he's seen a whole generation of musicians come along after him. And just the day before, the Village Voice described the Orb as "an up and coming band that's already on its way down." "I've seriously thought about packing it in this year. If you want to say we're on our way down - I mean, we've been going for nine years now," says Paterson. "To me, just to be around nine years, to be making a good, honest set of albums, I couldn't ask for a better life. We may have committed a little plagiarism here and there - but we haven't copied anyone too drastically." His influences are as clear as 1991's breakthrough "Little Fluffy Clouds" - a piece that Reich recognizes as his own "Electric Counterpoint" - as they are in 1997's "Ubiquity," which Paterson calls "a rip-off, in a sense." There's the bubbling, pulsating, keyboard (Glass); the polyrhythms of drum and metronome (Reich); the steadily shifting synth textures (Eno). At 37, Paterson has been playing long enough to hear himself imitated by younger musicians, with prettier melodies and funkier beats creeping into electronica as the music shifts from underground democracy to big business. "Way back in the '80s, we didn't expect anybody to know about us," says Paterson. "Basically, we were creating an atmosphere where people who could dance would come to our gigs. Now we're getting more people who aren't dancing - that's called success. I never set out to make loads of money out of this business. I set out to have a really good time, and I'm having a really good time. Really, we were just out for a bit of fun. And now it's become corporate fun.back on up to start
Redhat Linux Unleashed 2nd Ed., page 142
Just a little FYI for you UNIX folks out there -- in the latest Redhat Linux Unleashed 2nd Ed. book, check out the FTP Server Setup chapter on page 142. Here is the excerpt: [...] The alias command allows you to define directory aliases for your FTP clients. They are acticated when the clients use the cd command and specify the alias. This capability is useful to provide shortcuts to often requested files. The format of the command is alias .string. .dir. whereis the actual directory the users should be transferred to. The following is an example of this command: alias orb_discography /pub/music/ambient/orb_discography Hence, if the clients connect and use the command cd orb_discography, they are automatically moved to the /pub/music/ambient/orb_discography directory, regardless of their current location. back on up to start
The Orb interview
Interview by Howard Shih
Sitting in a hotel lounge less than a block from Times Square, The Orb and I are having a laugh about the sudden discovery of electronic music by American press. Andy Hughes, longtime engineer for The Orb and now full-fledged member, replacing the departed Kris "Thrash" Weston, can only smile: "The other week when we came in they're talking about the 'new wave of electronic dance music.' I thought it's quite funny actually." But what's the situation like in England? Is there a divide between rock and..."Rock?" Dr. Alex Paterson, founder of The Orb, smirks. "No, we killed it. I mean, look at U2. They have to make discotheque records now." Paterson is exaggerating a bit since bands like Oasis and Blur are still huge in England but more importantly, going to a club to hear a DJ spin records is as normal as going out to see a band play. This acceptance of DJ culture by the masses in the UK has its origins intertwined with those of The Orb.
Rewind to London 1989. On Monday nights, for about six months, Paterson DJed with The KLF's Jimi Cauty upstairs at the chill-out room of London's Heaven nightclub during the seminal Land of Oz parties. "When we first started doing ambient stuff we used three [record] decks, a little 12 track Akai [mixer], loads of cassettes and cds... and nobody would know what the fuck was going on," he explains. Their experimental ambient DJ sets were a swirling ocean of sound that was perfect for people to lose themselves in after an night of Ecstasy fueled dancing. "In those days it was a beginning of a new era, a new society. It was a new drug [Ecstasy] everyone enjoyed as opposed to everyone suddenly dying from it," explains Paterson.
When the good Doctor began recording The Orb's double-length debut album, Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld in 1990, he and Cauty had already parted ways but the album expanded upon the music developed at their Land of Oz sessions. A song like "Little Fluffy Clouds" took totally unrelated samples (a snippet of Rickie Lee Jones reminiscing about the skies where she grew up, a harmonica from an Ennio Morricone soundtrack, and Pat Metheny's guitar playing on Steve Reich's "Electric Counterpoint") and married them to a catchy beat surrounded by blissfully bubbling synths to create something that you could chill-out or dance to- it was ambient house.
In the UK, Ultraworld reached the Top 30, a feat virtually unheard of for a double album by an unknown, let alone ambient, group . Despite its success, Ultraworld was neutered into a single disc for America, much to Paterson's chagrin. "They said, 'We'd like you to trim all the tracks down to three minutes.' Sorry? You want "Spanish Castles" in 3 minutes? No, you can't..." (The average Ultraworld track is about 10 minutes long.) "Only if you change the name to "Spa Ca"," jokes Hughes. "You don't do bits of The Orb... you have to get the whole thing or it doesn't make any sense."
Actually, the success of The Orb's 1992 single "Blue Room" probably doesn't make sense to those who dismiss ambient or electronic music as 'faceless' and inaccessible. "Blue Room" was a 39 minute and 58 second single that miraculously reached #8 on the singles chart. Soon afterwards their second album, U.F.Orb, entered the UK charts at #1. (Not bad for 'faceless' music, eh?) However, at this point The Orb's relationship with their record label, Big Life, quickly deteriorated. They were unable to release any records for about a year until the legalities were worked out and a new deal was struck up with Island Records.
Interestingly enough The Orb's next two albums of new material, Pomme Fritz and Obrus Terranum, alienated fans won by the blissed out ambiance of their earlier material. The music was less beat oriented and incorporated dub's mindfuck studio techniques into The Orb's vocabulary of oddball samples and sounds. Their latest album, Orblivion, harkens back to The Orb of old by adding jungle-ish breaks and beats to the mix and sounds like a natural progression due to jungle's origins in dub and rave. While Orblivion is more immediately accessible than its recent predecessors, the album probably isn't Island's idea of a breakthrough record.
"They just don't get it," sighs Hughes. "The album launch organized by Island in LA was pure Spinal Tap- the party was on the rooftop of the Hyatt where they actually filmed it. It was like, 'What the fuck is going on?' No one could smoke; security people were chasing you around trying to get you to put your cigarette out; the sandwiches were [so small] you that couldn't fit the bread over the bits of meat; they had nothing there but a PA and a CD player... There wasn't a whole load of people either; it was like 30 people."
"They said we spent a thousand dollars on drinks. Wow, great", Paterson says very dryly. "It's not as if individually we don't get on with people in the record company. It's just that we feel as if we're just product." Indeed, Orblivion was recorded almost a year ago in May 1996 but it's release was delayed because Island wanted the album to follow the release of U2's much hyped 'techno' album, Pop. It's not the first time that an Orb project was held up by their mega-selling label mates. The Orb had completed a remix of U2's "Numb" but U2 never released the results.
"It's sitting at home somewhere," says Hughes. "[It's] a much sought after piece of music." Which is a statement that can be applied to just about every one of the countless remixes The Orb have done. Primal Scream, Erasure, Depeche Mode, and, more recently, label mates The Cranberries are among those who've had their music reconstructed by the band. While Paterson and Hughes acknowledge that remixes are mostly done to pay the bills artistic expression is also an important factor. "It's a bit of challenge... A lot of people are like, 'We need an Orb remix', but then none of them have really heard a remix that we've done. They expect their song with not much changed but you really get an Orb track with bits of your song on it."
While record company execs may think of Orb remixes as another way to sell the band, Dr. Paterson has a better idea: "Maybe when one of us has died they can turn us into an icon... they can turn us into a Bob Marley or something."
"I thought I was gonna last night when I was flying in through that storm," says a deadpan Hughes.
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Future Music N 75 autumn special issue october 1998
* There is a short LX interview about UFoff; the next album (the Other one !).
Q : There probably aren't that many people who see the Orb as a greatest hits band. Doesn't it make you feel like Dean Martin ?
A : Dean Martin... yeah , kind of. The funny thing is that is's also 10 years of the Orb so it rounds things off very nicely. I will admit it was a bit funny looking back at all those songs.Q : Did it make you feel like old-timers ?
A : I think we've got a long way to go yet. There are still a lot of people I used to listen to 10 years ago who are still going now and still producing good music. Look at Derrick May. I was on a BBC documentary with Derrick May last year... that was a very proud moment for me.Q : As Orb guv'n'or, do you have a particular personal 'greatest hit' ?
A : Yes, but it's nothing to do with the album...ha, ha. No, let's be serious here, I wasn't looking for individual tracks, I just wanted to gather together a real mish-mash of songs. Once again, that meant the Orb fell foul of the stupid BPI rules. If you do a two-Cd album of 'greatest hits' the second CD has to be remixes. Don't ask me why. Most people would probably say that The Orb haven't got two CDs worth of hits anyway !Q : Did that mean re-recording tracks ?
A : Not re-recording exactly. We did a bit of, ahem, sonic tweaking here and there but that was about it. Obviously there were some tracks we had to mess with. I mean, it would have been ridiculous to include the 40-minute mix of Blue Room on there. That would have been a real con. For Assassin we had two 20-minute versions and we edited them down to one and a half minutes, crossfading between the two. One track on the album is only going to be 45 seconds long.Q : Searching throught 10 years's worth of tapes and discs must have revealed plenty of previously unreleased Orb epics.
A : We've never really worked like that. When we go into a studio it's usually because we're ready to put together a track and we spend our time working on that track. We don't suddenly shoot off in another direction for a couple of weeks. Having said that, we've just got our own writing room which has caused a slight shift in our working methods. It's funny..when you don't have to pay for studio time, it's a lot easier to mess around with ideas. Wonder why that is ?Q : What sort of set-up have you got in this new writing room then ?
A : I keep it very simple. I have two turntables... and a microphone...sorry, I have two turntables and two Vestax DJ mixers. One of the mixers is quite comprehensive. It has a built-in drum machine and built-in sampler. Basically that allows me to do live sampling. I recently found this album "Teach your parrots to Talk" and I had a lot of fun with that, I can tell you.Q : Are you a gear-head ?
A : No, not at all. I leave that to Andy. He's does all the programming, he's knows which sampler to buy, he's knows which wire goes in which hole. I'm more of a sample-head...I collect sounds.My only other piece of kit is a keyboard - I can't remember what model - with all my favorite sounds on and all the main samples for all the songs we're working on. That's all I need.Q : There was a time, about 3 or 4 years ago, when it looked as if the Orb would never make its 10th anniversary. Thrash buggered off, the press hated you, the albums didn't sell...
A : Thrash was under a lot of pressure and had to get out. The only thing keeping me going was that I wanted to prove everybody wrong. I had to search for that inner strength. The deal with Island Records helped. Suddenly we had all our eggs in one basket instead of bits of egg all over the place.Q : Did the music suffer ?
A : I think some of the bad feeling came out on Orbus Terrarum which the British press gave a good kicking. What was funny was that the Americans really picked up on the album. Rolling Stone made it their album of the month. They thought we'd reinvented music. That sort of paved the way for the Chemicals and the Prodigy. To be honest, we didn't want to do the whole big American experience. We were asked to play Madison Square Garden but we refused on principle.Q : What principle ?
A : That we'd have to support Depechemode.Q : So how's the new Orb album going ?
A : We're hard at work. I've got a feeling in my water about this new album. There's something definitely different happening. It's loads of different styles from drum n bass to African. And Classic. It's a bit difficult to describe but it's definitely not going to be typical Orb tunes.Q: Any regrets over the last 10 years ?
A: Regrets ? Naah ! I'm having a wonderful time. Just think, I could have stayed as Killing Joke's roadie for 10 years instead. Imagine having that chiselled on your headstone : "Testing, testing...one, two...testing, testing..."back on up to start
NME, 10 October 1998. interview w/ LX Paterson. Questions by Piers Martin. Q : What song describes you best ? A : 'Towers of dub' by us, because it has all the elements : ambient, dub, manicness and samples. And humour. Q : What is heaven ? A : A path through hell. Q : What is hell ? A : It's a place on earth. Where ? In one's soul. Heaven is in your soul as well; it depends on which path you want to make. Q : What is your earliest memory ? A : Having a piece of silver paper being taken out of my nose with a pair of tweezers by my dad when I was about one. Q : What is your greatest fear ? A : Fear. Q : What is your all-time hero ? A : Colin Wilson. He writes books on fiction, fact, crime, sort of pre-X Files mysteries from the 60's. He's written my favorite book, The Philosopher's stone, which is about trepanning and using the brain to lever itself into different dimensions, as opposed to using drugs. Q : What's the worst trouble you've been in ? A : A recent time was last week-end when I got arrested by the Spanish police in Vigo for being an Ecstasy dealer with a mobile phone on the beach the previous night. They picked me up in the middle of the gig. I was taken away for about 5 hours and then brought back after they got a lawyer in to sort it out. Otherwise I would've had to stay there all weekend. Thing is, I wasn't even on the beach, and yet thay said they'd seen me there. Q : Who was the first love of your life ? A : Annette. We went out for nearly 6 years. Q : What's your greatest talent ? A : At the minute, DJing. I like the instant gratification- if you're shit, the crowd'll let you know. But when they're happy, you're happy. Q : Upon whom you most like to exact revenge ? Why ? How ? A : Unprintable. I'd get sued. But you know who you are. Q : What's your most treasured possession ? A : My two terrapins. Fascinating creatures. Q : What have you most regretted doing while drunk ? A : Swinging from balcony to balcony, 20 floors up somewhere in Spain. Or in Germany, when I set fire to a hotel door. I thought that would be the easiest way in. Q : What can you cook ? A : Pastas, sauces - vegetarian food, really. Q : What's the best piece of advice you've received ? A : It's all in the mind. Q : Can you read music ? A : No. Q : If you were invisible for a day, what would you do ? A : I'm reading a comic at the moment called The Invisibles, and in it there's a secret force of invisible people who go around protecting the good from evil on Earth. Maybe I'd become one of them. Q : What are your final 3 wishes ? A : I'd have a big brandy, a spliff, and somewhere nice like Scotland to scatter my ashes. My fourth wish before that would be to be a DJ in a hotel foyer in outer space. It's just got to be done. In this issue, you also have a great ad for UF OFF (Launch this week), and a review about LFC promos. "Limited edition worth storming Island HQ for it if your local specialist store can't assist. Pal Joey, Adam Freeland and One True Parker just about scrape by with their house, breakbeat and electronica versions, but New Yorker Danny Tenaglia embraces the unenviable task of revamping perhaps ambient's finest moment with monumental gusto, blasting it to the core of the stormy, narco-disco style which Manhattan clubbers have taken to calling K (aka the drug Ketamine) house on his 'Detour mix'."
thanks to r. platte, n. king, s. levering, a. krieg, j.e. mello, c. 'saundo' saunderson, j. rickert, h. finney, j. goelzer, s. shah, JCfromParis, & anyone else who typed articles...
