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20070303

Florbcast

Entry 308

A couple of years ago I discovered the slightly fantastic audio freeware Audacity and immediately started to play around with it. These were also the days that I was deeply into The Orb so I started to make an audio mash-up mixing tunes from that band with the geriatric dinosaur of rock called Pink Floyd.

Probably I started with the job in 2003 although this may have been a year earlier. One of my earliest attempts was to mix the chants by the otherwise unknown Magupa tribe on Absolutely Curtains with the Tuvan throat singers found on Madrugada Eterna from the KLF. I'm still not happy with that too obvious attempt so it will stay hidden in the cupboard.

A second attempt in creating a Florb was done by taking that absolutely fabulous, but rather unknown, ambient anthem by the Orbsters called I Am The Red Worm (originally from the Daleth Of Elphame EP (2002), but later re-issued on the Badorb.Com Bless You compilation) and gluing one of the worst Floydian tunes on top of it: A New Machine comes from the cocaine-driven and rather average A Momentary Lapse Of Reason (1987). Me thinks the result is quite funny, but you may of course have an other idea.

Pink Floyd was originally a rather experimental band and when Syd Barrett left in the late Sixties the remaining members just, euh, meddled on for a few years before finding the narrow way that led to their success. One of their experimental tunes was called Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict (Ummagumma, 1969) and when The Orb issued their rather chaotic Pomme Fritz album in 1994 both albums were sometimes compared. We're Pastie To Be Grill You shaked with Small Furry Animals leads to, hold your breath, Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Grilled Together In A Pastie And Arguing Over Beat Poetry and is the second track on my Florbcast.

Last, but not least, the beautiful Oxbow Lakes (Orbus Terrarum, 1995) stirred with some of the messier parts of Atom Heart Mother (1970) provides for the final part of the show.

I quit working on the Florb-mixes somewhere in 2004 although they are, in my opinion, not entirely finished. But as I'm not planning on reopening these files again I can as well publish them. I hope you'll enjoy listening to them as much as I enjoyed creating them.

Florbcast #1 (17 minutes)

A New Machine (Red Worm Meta Structure - 5'10")

Entrance: The Grand Vizier's Garden Party (MC Hans Keller - 57")
Main Dish: Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Grilled Together In A Pastie And Arguing Over Beat Poetry (3'25")
Dessert: The Grand Vizier's Garden Party (MC Groovy Pict - 35")

Oxbow Lakes (Alan's Nuclear Breakfast Mix - 6'30")

(Comment 2008: the Florbcast has been deleted from my MySpace page.)

If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Perplexed Orbbery 

20071021

U.F.Orb 2007

Entry 350

Unfinished Business The pile you see at the left side of this screen is my to-do-list. A bunch of cd's, cd-roms, DVD's and books I'm busy with or I pretend to be busy with. Actually the rockpile is a bit higher now as the pic was already taken a few weeks ago. Then I've still got a few hundreds of vinyl records I've never listened to.

In a previous life I was a radio show assembler, meaning that I made up a playlist, wrote the comments in between songs, did the actual mixing behind the studio console, but that someone else got all the credits because that person happened to present the show. I've been nearly waiting 30 years to write this down, so finally vengeance is mine.

The above isn't entirely true in fact. The radio show host was a very good friend of mine, after each show we went to the local pub to get pissed and whenever he got free tickets to go to a concert he would invite me to come along. I was rather happy with that deal.

The bit about the hundreds of vinyl records I've never listened to is true however. As the radio station sound library only contained the latest greatest hits I went record hunting on a weekly basis. Never paying more than 100 Belgian francs (2 and a half Euros or dollars) for a used LP I would come home with 6 - 8 - 10 - a dozen records a week. At home I started digging into the intros of those tracks. I didn't bother to listen to the complete song, a minute, a minute and half would do. Once I found a suitable song to add on next week's playlist I had a go at its outro. Trying to glue two records together in what we called a perfect mix was the aim of the day. I noted how long the intro would take and how long the fade out was. Tracks with an ending (so not a fade out) got a # sign behind their name. It was a game of give and take. Sometimes I played a pretty horrendous record only because I found a perfect mix-match. This was highbrow leftist student radio and showing off was never punished, on the contrary.

But I'm not here to talk about my pimpled reminiscences; on the contrary, I'm here to talk about the re-release of U.F.Orb, a 1992 landmark album by ambient house band The Orb. Here is something I wrote a decade ago for an embryonic unfinihed project of mine (it slowly died in the womb)...

BLUE MOON RISING

In 1992 Kris Weston and Alex Paterson are in the studio with Jah Wobble, Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy to produce what will become the longest single in British history. Vinyl version: 37 minutes and 46 seconds. Add an additional two minutes and 12 seconds for the cd.

Blue Room is LX's sweet revenge on Gallup who forced him to release a shortened version of A Huge Ever-Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld because it was 2 minutes too long. (1)

The track rises to number 8 in the British charts and that means that The Orb can have a playback session at the popular BBC TV show Top Of The Pops. Rather than acting like fools behind some fake synthesizers Alex and Trash decide to play some chess on television. Unfortunately (?) the Blue Room single is shortened to about 3 minutes on television.

Blue Room shows the new direction The Orb is developing into, although it still carries the odd sample (Marilyn Monroe's Happy Birthday). Alex explains that they are: " taking weird noises and making them sound vaguely musical." The high chart position may have had more to do with the novelty effect, not to mention the hype it created in the press as being the longest single ever, than with its hit potential. So it was even more of a surprise that the subsequent album U.F.Orb made it to number 1 shortly after its release on July 7 of 1992. (2)

U.F.Orb is the first album were DR Alex Paterson and Trash fully co-operate as a composing team, all seven tracks carrying their names. (On the previous album that was only the case on Gaia.) Also gone is the weird kaleidoscope of recognisable samples that has left place for a more musical approach of sampling and the prominent use of traditional rock instruments: flute (Tom Green, O.O.B.E.), bas (Guy Pratt, U.F.Orb), guitar (Steve Hillage, Blue Room), harmonica (Marney Pax, Towers Of Dub). (3)

O.O.B.E. (Out Of Body Experience) is the perfect introductory track, starting with a haunting drone and taking us well over the four minutes mark before a faint rhythm starts sliding in. Best described as a new age meditation tape pastiche de luxe it sets the perfect mood for the record. The ending one sixth of the track is left over to experimentation: machine rumbling, pool sounds and some Arabian whining.

The meditation session is abruptly interrupted by the intro from U.F.Orb, referencing to a Radio Moscow bulletin about Yuri A. Gagarin. Driven by Guy Pratt's pounding bass and a frantic dub beat, it is the perfect track to accompany a Lavazza espresso at 11 in the morning (so far for my fantasy!). The Orb's Blue Room, with its waves at the seashore, a faint air-raid siren, Steve Hillage's guitar collage and a wailing background girl, is light-years separated from the Blue Room at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio where US marines define Shania Twain as a - to be avoided - punk suicidegirl.

Towers Of Dub gives exactly what the title predicts and is largely saved by Marney Pax's harmonica solo throughout the somewhat monotonous beat. At the end the pace is slowly put to zero so that the waiting Close Encounters train can be set to full blast.

Close Encounters will not be remembered as the album's standout track but is nevertheless a perfect in-between for Majestic's wake up call. With its kaleidoscopically rhythmic patterns it ends this wonderful album in a, hmmm, rather majestic mode.

FLOYD ON FISH

The Orb's first album was titled Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld and that was exactly what it was, an expedition into a roomful of tunes, some green some blue, some orange. U.F.Orb is a fine, well thought-over, studio concept, although lacking in the wacky department. This also shows in the track listing, ambient and dance pieces follow each other up quite nicely, and are not separated as on Ultraworld. This makes the album more accessible to the general public. U.F.Orb made Alex and trash instantaneous superstars, playing gigs in the four corners of the world. Alex: "I was given the money for a helicopter ride to JFK airport once, so I pocketed the money and got the bus instead." (4)

Some journalists (and a few narrow-minded Floyd fans, although a narrow-minded Pink Floyd fan must be something of a contradiction in terms) used Blue Room as a scapegoat to fully illustrate The Orb's floyd-a-rama. The track meddles a lot with the psychedelic brain centre, the piece is filled with wind and water samples, even more effective are the industrial noises: air-raid sirens in the beginning and a tantalising g-o-o-d-b-y-e train whistle. "Taking natural sounds and setting them to a rhythmic idea", LX Paterson calls it.

And then starts Steve Hillage's guitar solo: genuine Syd Barrett (Pink Floyd creator) or early David Gilmour (Pink Floyd curator) so are we made to believe, but those who think only Pink Floyd play like Pink Floyd should maybe first have a go at Daevid Allen's Fohat Digs Hole In Space from Gong's Camembert Electrique album (1971).

In 1989 Steve Hillage, a forgotten musician from times past by, paid a visit to the chill out room of the Land Of Oz club where he discovered to his amazement that one of his own records Rainbow Dome Musick was being played. Wanting to meet the DJ, a certain Alex Paterson, their meeting resulted into a musical collaboration that would surface on several Orb records and on a new Steve Hillage project called System 7. (5)

CONCLUSION

U.F.Orb is a concept: U.F.Orb, Close Encounters and Blue Room point to the presence of extraterrestrials on our planet. In the top secret blue room, situated at hangar 18 of the American Wright(!)-Patterson(!!) Air Force base, some bodies (of dead) alien astronauts are kept in hiding, so the story goes...

U.F.Orb is fun: Towers Of Dub starts with a telephone prank by Victor Lewis-Smith asking the reception of London Weekend Television if Haile Selassie has arrived at the lobby. Sticky End is entirely made of noises from a defecating resident of the Gaya Park in Nepal.

U.F.Orb is ambient: O.O.B.E., Blue Room, Close Encounters.

U.F.Orb is dub: Towers Of Dub.

U.F.Orb is: Majestic.

U.F.Orb is The Orb's Dark Side Of The Moon.

(This (previously unpublished) review was written about a decade ago. No illegal chemical products were taken while writing it, as far as I can recall.)

2007. For its fifteenth anniversary U.F.Orb has been remastered and re-released in a deluxe edition. An extra disk has been added with some remixes and unreleased material. But it still hurts my brain trying to find a valid reason why the full 40 minutes version of Blue Room has not been added to the extras.

Footnotes
(1) The dance scene made Gallup redefine their rules. The maximum length for a single was doubled from 20 to 40 minutes. Blue Room is 2 seconds shorter than that. Back to text.
(2) U.F.Orb was first released as a limited triple vinyl set, the normal issue was a double vinyl album. The cd version only has one disk, although in America a limited double cd version could be found containing the full 39'58" version of Blue Room and a new track called Assassin. A video release Beyond The Ultraworld Patterns And Textures was made containing a live performance of the music on the limited third vinyl record. An even more limited version of this tape exists, it has the music of the live performance on a separate cd. Back to text.
(3) Samples that have been musically altered are, for instance, the barking of a dog (Towers of Dub), telephone ringing (Majestic) and, last but not least, the Sticky End noised of an effervescing elephant. Back to text.
(4) Lester, Paul, Brothers From Another Planet, Melody Maker, 01.08.1992. Back to text.
(5) Due to copyright problems System 7 had to be called System 777 in some countries. Back to text.

If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Florbcast

20080224

Dreams come through

Entry 414

The typescript Why isn’t double U double U double U atagong dot com up and running yet? Good question. It took me 3 weeks to realise that my domain didn’t need the www (the only abbreviation, according to Douglas Adams, that is longer than the phrase itself). So I thought it was better to start all over again, searching, checking and replacing all internal links on the odd 200 archived posts. I should’ve read the fucking manual first, I know…

About a dozen of years ago I was planning to create the best Orb site of the world, called Orb Weavers. For those out in the wild, The Orb - and I quote my own previously unpublished ramblings here - …mainly orbits around a guy called Duncan Robert (DR) LX (Alex) Paterson, who, on his different projects, has chosen a wide variety of the musical human species to assist him. I started writing like a nutter and somewhere between 1998 and 1999 a rough draft was finished.

For various reasons – mainly because some people who had promised to collaborate pulled the plug - the website never got published, although it tickled and hurt in a far region of the left upper corner of my brain. In a streak of momentary madness, now five years ago, I shredded the complete folder and made it impossible – even for the CIA – to recover it from my hard disk.

Gone was my typescript, but more important: gone were also plenty of downloaded articles, interviews, reviews and even personal messages (and insults) that I had received from Orb aficionados and (one time) collaborators. These are - I fear - gone forever because the sites and places were I had found most of these no longer exist. Archiving isn’t part of the World Wide Web priorities. One example is www.theorb.com, nowadays the official Orb website, belonging to LX Paterson, but in those days it was the Ultraworld fan site that contained a treasure chest full of Orb related stuff. Does anybody remember In Orbit Dreams?

The only piece of junk I still hold in my hands, and I guard it with my life now, is a printed version of the typescript - 50 pages long - 31 chapters (every chapter was going to be a separate webpage). It ends with a review of Bless You, a compilation of the short-lived Badorb label that appeared in 2002.

Since then not a lot of creative things happened to The Orb, and just like Pink Floyd, they were mostly active in the recycling business. Alex Paterson released compilations of unreleased material (Orbsessions 1 and 2), deluxe re-releases of their first groundbreaking albums (Ultraworld and U.F.Orb) and partner-in-crime Thomas Fehlmann found it necessary to reheat some leftovers from his solo career and label those as genuine Orb tracks. I didn’t found that Okie Dokie at all. The pile of Orb releases that I possess (I still maniacally buy every Orb related stuff I can find) but that I didn’t care listening to is big, last on my list is The Art of Chill 4, a mixed ambient compilation by Alex Paterson that has never made it into my cd-player.

When the Orb mailing list (and their MySpace page) promised a new album end of last year I was not that excited. But then good news started sipping through. This week’s Orb was Alex Paterson, Tim Bran (Dreadzone) and long-time-no-see Youth (Killing Joke), once a very prominent Orb collaborator.

There is an Orb album, can’t remember which one actually, that states that ambient is dead. According to the German electronic music magazine Raveline ‘das neue Album der Elektronikpioniere ist ein groβartiger Space-Trip zurück zu den Wurzeln von Ambient House’ and who am I to contradict this. Last time the world tried to contradict the Germans they invaded Poland.

But anyway: I haven’t heard a single note yet, but I already like the album.

If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: U.F.Orb 2007

20080314

Perplexed Orbbery

Entry 515

One of the best Orb disks ever is called Moonlight Orbbery but it can only partially be credited to LX P and partners. It is, in fact, a remix-rehash-mash-up project from Bill Bbroo Brooks that was distributed amongst Orb fans in the year 2002.

If you are into spacey soundscapes you will not be disappointed provided you could still find the little gem of course somewhere in a forgotten time curve of the wwweb (long time since I’ve seen that word floating by).

After Moonlight Orbbery had received much acclaim, some people even thought it was a genuine Paterson-Brooks-co-operation, Bbroo wrote:

If someone as untalented as I can do this, so can you. I suggest that everyone that plays an instrument, dj's, mixes, etc: GO FOR IT! Don't put it off, create that new sound and I promise you will not be disappointed. You may not become a star, but you will probably have more fun anyway...

So I took the opportunity and created some Orb rip-offs myself and even put these on my MySpace page for a while. Should you bother to care then you can read something about it in an old post called Florbcast.

There are a lot of good home composers in the wild so I won't try to give a listing. Too many of them not enough time to listen to them all. I've got some good memories about Gel Sol (who turned professional after a while) and wet nature project just to name two of them that happen to cross my mind.

When Syd Barrett passed away in 2006 several fans put their feelings into music. Alessandro Cospite put A Man In Cambridge on YouTube and Maynard and the Molemen made the very cute Song For Syd (it could do with a better recording though).

One of the more active (active as in wacky) members of the Syd Barrett Late Night forum is ~SVG75~ or as we better know him: Stanislav. In the middle of last year he made a twelve track album called Perplexed Infinity, that he first advertised on the forum, and that he made now - it’s about time, isn’t it - public on his blog.

One of the tracks, called Missed Episode can be found as background drone and in a slightly remixed way on my MySpace page, were it will reside ad perpetuum or until I have found something to replace it with.

Oh, by the way, when you are still at it, you can also have a look (or a listen?) at Stanislav’s side project called Syd Save Me. I still have to give that a spin, but I promise I will do that after I have finally listened to The Orb's The Dream.

If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Dreams come through.

20080718

Apples and Oranges

Entry 884

I want to be a little fishy... Pomme Fritz (aka The Orb's Little Album) (1994) was the second Orb cd I bought and it nearly made me loose my appetite for LX Paterson and his goofy friends. Although it was rather short I could never bear to listen to it in its entirety. The jewel box lay next to the player and for weeks I tried to digest it with the only result that I ejected the disk, mostly somewhere during the quite abominable We're Pastie To Be Grill You track.

In the end a cat with good taste peed on it so I finally found it was time to place the goddamn thing in between those other plastic do not open boxes that just gather dust in my cd collection. (If you really want to know it was in between Meatloaf’s Bad Out Of Hell and T’Pau’s China In Your Hand.)

But on the twelfth night of the twelfth month of the year 1999 I finally took a breath of fresh air, put the 'Little Album' in my cd player and listened to it in one go. Here is the (previously unpublished) report I wrote about that.

KARTOFFELN MIT SCHWEINEBRAT

It all starts in March 1994 when the Orb announces a new single: Pomme Fritz, to be part (with Valley and Plateau) of a new album that will be called Orbus Terranus. A few months later it is promoted as title track of The Orb's Little Album, little indeed, as this full cd has about the same length as their infamous single Blue Room.

Paterson explains in the press that they decided to reshape the single into an album to make it available for the fans. They don't want the same thing to happen as with Blue Room, labeled as a single and since long withdrawn from The Orb's back catalogue. Seems logical, but some paranoiacs believe that their new record label, Island, may have a hand in this. The adventurous days of the Island label are long gone and the record bozos are probably not happy with a group that continuously undermines long term record company management plans by issuing 40 minutes singles, albums for a day and a saucerful of very limited mixes for the small, but happy, few.

This doesn't mean it is a bad record. Is Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music bad? Not if you love the sound of dozen buzzing amplifiers, it is not. Is John and Yoko's Two Virgins crap? Not if you like the lurking game, with an ear against the wall, while your neighbours are having a go at the Kama Sutra inside the lid of a grand piano. Is Amon Düül's Minnelied a joke? Probably. (I bought mine for its cover alone).

Pomme Fritz has a nice picture as well, reminding me of the cover of the remastered Pink Floyd Relics cd, so once in a while I took it out to have a look at the strange machine.

Pink Floyd trivia. The LP version of Pink Floyd's Relics (1971) had a drawing by their drummer and once architectural student Nick Mason, representing a Pepperlandish machine. The most common cd version has a 3D model of this original drawing.

I DON'T LIKE FISH

I once mailed the superfluous statement to the quite lethargic alt.music.orb newsgroup that I never realised what a fine track Pomme Fritz (Meat'n Veg) really was until I heard it on the compilation album U.F.Off. Some Orb lover replied that Little Album wasn't that bad when listening to it on acid. I am not an acid man myself (and no other illegal drugs either, gentlemen of the FBI & CIA, whose Internet tracking machine that goes <ping> just went <ping> by detecting the word acid, <ping>, acid, <ping>, acid, <ping>, LOL) so tonight I planted myself as a Bombay potato in my couch with a glass of lethal, but legal, Italian Sambuca on the side and let the horror loose.

As I already stated, Pomme Fritz (Meat'n Veg) really is a nice track in the fine traditional Orbian mix between Kraftwerk and the Magic Roundabout. Somewhere near the end a voice promises us an electroshock therapy and that's what the rest of the record really is about, I guess. The only question is: how many electroshocks will it take to like the rest?

More Gills Less Fishcakes isn't that bad either if you take the Vickie Leandros Après Toi and sect leader annex mass killer Jim Jones samples for granted. Then it is time for the already cited We're Pastie To Be Grill You, seven minutes and fifteen seconds of the same sentence being repeated over and over again, in altered states, sometimes slowed down, sometimes accelerated, shaken, not stirred, run through a dozen of noise inducing filters. This is experiment for the sake of experiment and most of the time it sounds as if a Gregorian monk choir is singing inside a helium infested studio.

Emptying your mind and letting this track take possession of your brain is a trippy experience indeed, although not always a pleasant one.

As a matter of fact the sampled sentence does not really say We 're Pastie To Be Grill You but "We're happy to be with you" and Pink Floyd fans will probably compare it with the Roger Waters experiment on 1969's Ummagumma: Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict.

Pink Floyd trivia: Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict is basically a Roger Waters fun track using human voices and nature sounds playing at different speeds. The track may have been inspired by Ron Geesin who experimented with tape loops before and who asked Roger Waters to co-compose a soundtrack for the documentary movie The Body (1970). One track of their partnership, Our Song, used body noises to create music.

Bang'er'n Chips further elaborates on the electroshock sample, but can’t keep its promise "that you will be more relaxed than you've been in weeks". Alles Ist Schoen, German for "everything is beautiful", shows the composing skills of someone who will soon become a full time member of The Orb: Thomas Fehlmann. His musical roots are buried among the German minimalists whose repetitive electronically drones were very successful in the Seventies: Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Gerhard Froese and Kraftwerk.

To end the record there is a two minutes joke track called His Immortal Logness vaguely build around the tradition or German march music.

WHAT EXACTLY IS A JOKE?

That's about it.

For the first time in years I finally managed to get through the complete menu. And while I realized that Pomme Fritz (The Orb's Little Album) isn't really that catastrophic at all I put on Robert Wyatt's masterpiece Rock Bottom to console myself. With its backwards taped vocals, its shrieking trumpets, its repetitive and monotonous drones, this record must have sound as alienating in 1975 as Pomme Fritz did to me in 1994.

You maybe have found out by now that a culinary theme runs through the album, but most titles also hide a few puns. Pomme Fritz is, of course, linked to the French Pommes Frites (French fries) but Fritz, as we all know from televised black and white Saturday afternoon movies, is also a nickname for the Germans. The Orb's Little Album was, for a great deal, recorded and mixed in Berlin and most of the numbers have had input from Thomas Fehlmann and his band Sun Electric.

More Gills Less Fishcakes could be a possible Pink Floyd pun when reversing the reading order of the title (Gilmour?) and while I'm at it Fish Rising was one of Steve Hillage's solo albums (a long shot, I admit).

I already explained that We're Pastie To Be Grill You is a bastardization of the "We're happy to be with you" sample. I can't make anything decent from Bang'er'n Chips although the term chips is used as a synonym for French fries (I won't get into details about the bang'er'n bit that probably means the same as ummagumma).

Alles Ist Schoen (or schön in neat German) is the literary translation for 'everything is beautiful'.

His Immortal Logness could be, with some imagination, interpreted as a little dance performed by the last living species of a crusty old dinosaur, which lives, as we all know, in the lake of Loch Ness.

EN FRANÇAIS S'IL VOUS PLAIT

In 1994 I found an advertisement for Le Petit Album in a French magazine with French song titles. Those are:

English Title French Title
Pomme Fritz (Meat'n Veg) Viandes Et Legumes
More Gills Less Fishcakes Oeufs Farcies Aux Cèpes
We're Pastie To Be Grill You Crèpe Suzette
Bang'er'n Chips Beatrice Dalle Et Brigitte Bardot
Alles Ist Schoen Tout Est Beau
His Immortal Logness Bon Appetit

Some happen to be literary translations of the English titles, some are not. I never figured out if the album was indeed issued with these French titles in France, or not.

CONCLUSION

Is Pomme Fritz "little more than a meeting of disparate electronic doodles from an endless array of natural and synthesised sources without the benefit of any obvious musical landmark" as Peter Kane wrote in Q? It certainly isn't the album I would point starting Orb fans to buy first. Do Pink Floyd fans really listen to the studio disk of Ummagumma? Who has ever made it through Nick Mason's Grand Vizier's Garden Party?

FLOYDABILITY

In mind but not in music.

Pomme Fritz has recently been reissued in a remastered version, containing a second disk with the following rare or unreleased mixes: Sausage Tats Mit Gravy, Star Twister, Potato Fields of Electric Gliding Blue (extended version of Alles Ist Schoen), Eastern Hot Dogs in Gardens of Dub and Wrapped with Salt & Vinegar.

I don't think I will ever listen to it.

If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: U.F.Orb 2007

20080725

Obscured by Fluffy Clouds

Entry 889

Recently The Orb has been re-issuing some of their classic albums, richly enlarged with extra tracks and remixes. Past week I reviewed Pomme Fritz, not exactly their best album (one of their worst, I might add). Today I have a go at Orbus Terrarum. The following text comes from an attempt to write an Orb biography somewhere around the turn of the millennium and has not been published before. 8-)))

FAST FORWARD, HE CRIED

1994. The world is not even partially recovered from Pomme Fritz or another Orb-like project sees the day: FFWD. This stands for Fripp, Fehlmann, Weston and Duncan Robert Alex Paterson. Robert Fripp, in the early Seventies among the troglodytes of symphonic rock with his band King Crimson, and famous for his guitar and tape technique called frippertronics or frippotronics (this was before the sampling age), puts endless layers of guitar over monotonous krautrock based ambient-trance style rhythms from The Orb. The album manages to experiment a lot further than Pomme Fritz and is often described as annoying, irritating or both.

Originally the band was to be named ORBert (and the album: Hidden In Heaven), but later on the makers decided to drop The Orb flag and to use FFWD instead. It has been out of print for ages and one can only hope for Robert Fripp to re-issue it on his Discipline label. In the Nineties there have been rumours about a follow-up for FFWD (but without Kris Weston). Two tracks may have surfaced later. One on Cydonia (Terminus) and one on the Thomas Fehlmann's solo album 'one to three. Overflow; ninene/nd' (Friedrichstraβe). The 2003 Back To Mine compilation, an album with LX's favourite ambient tunes, includes the FFWD track Hempire.

Bad reviews and lousy selling figures for Pomme Fritz on one hand and differences of what to do with the next record causes Trash (Kris Weston) to leave the band. But the split may also have to do something with the bankruptcy of their management company Wau! Mr Modo, leaving the duo in debt. The subsidiary record company, Inter-Modo, and a recording studio near Battersea are bankrupt as well.

The Orb survived a barrage of legal wrangles, financial upsets and personnel changes to deliver their latest collection of Ambient musical adventures. Mark J. Prendergast gets the word from the group's founder, Alex Paterson. Prendergast, Mark J., Journey To The Centre Of The Orb, July 1995, hosted at: sound on sound.

LX Paterson is back on his own, but not for long. In 1995 the long awaited Orbus Terrarum is released (note the title change from Orbus Terranus to Orbus Terrarum).

This is a giant leap forwards for some, a journey further into ambient regression for others. The absent Kris Trash Weston is mentioned as author on all tracks but has lost his credits as producer. Alex Paterson, Andy Hughes and Thomas Fehlmann sign for that, and this trio will now be officially known as The Orb, aided by a new drummer Nick Burton and bassist Simon Phillips on a six months tour.

Orbus Terrarum: a further exploration of minimalist and repetitive rhythms

Valley starts the cd promising enough and this version surely is better than the live one. Plateau, on the other hand, has somewhat suffered from the (very long) studio treatment when compared with the Orb Live 93 rendition that was richly spiced with randomly thrown-away samples. The first two tracks have the same feel and structure as the cosmic sound paintings made by Klaus Schulze in the Seventies. When in the right, sleepy, thoughtless or transcendent mood these are very interesting to digest, otherwise, they may just sound long and monotonous.

Oxbow Lakes with its clash between Paterson's romantic piano and the nervous beat of the dance generation reminds the listener of the inventive pre-Island Orb. This is a great piece of Orb-music indeed and the first half hour has passed away rather agreeable...

Montagne D'Or (French for golden mountain) is not the exact translation of its German subtitle Der Gute Berg (the good mountain). It starts rather moody in an ambient kind of way before getting slightly more upbeat at the five minutes mark. Neither Steve Hillage, nor Robert Fripp are on the track but the presence of psychedelic distorted noises, played by B.J. Cole on a pedal steel guitar, surely reminds me of them. At 8'12" the track suddenly regresses into an Ozric Tentacles horror-show and one can only feel lucky because the track is nearly at its end.

Sweet White River Junction starts Orb-like enough, complete with excerpts from a self awareness tape, ever-present bubbling water sounds, some machine noises and an offside Kraftwerk beat. At nine minutes and counting it passes back at the start, contradicting the sample that promised that this tune would carry us deeper and deeper...

The past 5 tracks would have made a very ambient Orb album, not one of their best and a bit too monotonous for the heart beat pig meat generation, but a nice gentle effort indeed. But the album isn't over yet and some of the freakier stuff still has to come...

A rather intriguing repetitive tune shapes Occidental's main motive until The Orb gets enough of it. It is the starting point for unleashing a bunch of directionless sound effects that can easily compete with the weaker parts of Pomme Fritz. First Slug Dub seems to be a fun track like Sticky End (on U.F.Orb) or His Immortal Logness (on Pomme Fritz), built around a Billy Bobtail story, but soon after the start the joke starts to wear thin. These monotonous doodles can't keep the listener's full attention for long. Only the attentive Pink Floyd fan in me woke up when some seagull noises a la Echoes passed at 10'25". I had a drink, a very long piss, and hoped that the record would be over when I returned 5 minutes later... but unfortunately, it was still on the run...

CONCLUSION

Heavy Orb-fans find this album (together with Pomme Fritz and FFWD) the best thing LX has ever made. Personally I find the Pomme Fritz and Orbus Terranum years their weakest period, although each album has some fine moments (Oxbow Lakes is probably the best Orb track ever). One feels that no compromises were made to compose Terranum. I can surely appreciate their efforts but in minimal quantities only.

The 2008 version of Orbus Terranum contains an extra disk with the following rare or previously unreleased mixes:

Plateau (all hands on deck mix - 2am) – 15 minutes long remix, similar to the live version.
Slug Dub (dumpy dub)
Valley (mix 3 dubby)
White River Junction (zoom vinegar mix)
Oxbow Lakes (andy's space mix) – released before on the very limited Orbscure Trax promo album (1000 copies).
Peace Pudding (Occidental). Probably not an Occidental remix but an extended version of a (rather rare) Orb track from 1997 called 'Cocksville USA'.

If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Apples and Oranges 

20080809

The Orb Lives On

Entry 915

Asylum cover Recently The Orb has been re-issuing some of their classic albums, richly enlarged with extra tracks and remixes. The first two records had lifted The Orb from an obscure DJ-set in the backroom of a techno temple to ambient house superstars, but their superstar status soon melted away with their following darker albums, dark because the modal fan couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel anymore. Weird, experimental and monotonous, it seemed that the members of The Orb had lost all musical direction. Enough, said record company Island, who had invested a lot in The Orb, it is about time to make a second U.F.Orb! All right, said LX, time to get out of oblivion, here is Orblivion! (Underneath text taken from a previously unreleased discography of the band, written by moi).

In 1997 Toxygene is released. It is a single in the Perpetual Dawn tradition where humorous patterns and ska rhythms interact. Island throws the story round that this track was originally a Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygene-remix.

Just like Mike Oldfield (Tubular Bells 2, 3, ad infinitum) and Meatloaf (Bad Out Of He1l 2) Jean Michel Jarre couldn't resist releasing an Oxygene sequel. Jarre is an electronic composer floating between the ambient and elevator muzak whose Oxygene and Equinoxe are well worth the try. I still feel that Souvenir De Chine from the album Les Concerts En Chine (1982) is a small (and short) ambient masterpiece.

Toxygene grants The Orb a second visit to the BBC's TOTP, although some fans find the poppy single slightly over the top. The track is co-credited to Fil Le Gonidec, a colleague who replaces Thomas Fehlmann on live gigs and a fellow member of the Killing Joke gang from eaons ago (LX Paterson used to be a roadie for that band.)

Orblivion, the album that follows, has a smashing cover representing some great buildings and statues from all over the world:

  • Athens (Parthenon)
  • Barcelona (Gaudi's Sagrada Familia Cathedral)
  • Berlin ('Unter den Linden' angel statue near the Brandenburger Tor)
  • Brussels (Atomium)
  • Gizeh (Pyramid)
  • Kuala Lumpur (Petronas Twin Towers)
  • London (Big Ben)
  • Madras (Taj Mahal)
  • New York (Empire State Building)
  • Paris (Eiffel Tower, I'Obelisque and the Notre Dame)
  • Pisa (Leaning Tower)
  • Seattle (Space Needle)
  • Washington (White House) and perhaps the
  • Transamerica building in Los Angeles.

This may have been a visual leftover from an idea LX had in '93 when he wanted to issue an album based upon a musical trip around various cities of the world.

Orblivion tries hard to be a commercial comeback for the (lost) public who cherished U.F.Orb. Steve Hillage (on Delta Mk II, Ubiquity), Miquette Giraudy (on Delta Mk II, Ubiquity, Log Of Deadwood) and Tom Green (on Bedouin, Secrets, Passing Of Time) are welcomed back as part-time band members. But alas, times have changed, as even I found out when I tried to plug the album to a twelve years younger cousin. His verdict was that The Orb weren’t half as funny as Daft Punk, now there was a band that really knew how to be witty. Suddenly The Orb had become a dinosaur of ambient house.

And the loyal fans who had blindly followed LX in his weirder experiments (Pomme Fritz, FFWD, Orbus Terrarum) found this rhythmic album a sell-out, only made to please the record company anyway.

A SHORT REVIEW

With 13 tracks on 1 single album, going from 6 seconds for the shortest to 9 and half minutes for the longest, The Orb has certainly moved into a new direction. Some years ago 13 tracks would have meant at least a triple album (the Ultraworld double album only has 10 tracks), but The Orb has learned not to repeat the same gimmick over and over again and stays well away from the 10 minutes mark per song.

Nearly every track has a happy beat. The typical ambient Orb doodling, a trademark on their first album that would often go on for at least a quarter of an hour, has been limited to a strict minimum. These restrictions also show in the spoken parts department: long conversational pieces, taken from obscure Russian or American sources, are mostly avoided although the odd one-liner still appears here and there: a sample from the McCarthy trials (Have you ever been a member of the communist party?) on Delta Mk II and, but I’m guessing here, a Married With Children joke on Secrets. The only exception is S.A. L. T (Scorpio Aquarius Leo Taurus), based upon a monologue from the movie Naked by Mike Leigh.

CONCLUSION

Orblivion is a concept: a journey throughout the musical world combining happy beats, computer blips, oriental rhythms and eastern sounds: Ubiquity, Bedouin.
Orblivion is fun: Toxygene, 72 (sample taken from the musical Hair) and even LX's mum (on Asylum).
Orblivion is ambient: Passing Of Time.
Orblivion is rhythm: Delta Mk II, Asylum, and Secrets.
Orblivion is: Molten Love.

Not their best but I kinda like it.

The 2008 version of Orblivion contains an extra disk with the following rare or previously unreleased mixes:

Delta Mk II (love bites mix) – very ambient
Bedouin (the sheik’s film mix) – although this track shares the same title with a remix on Orbscure Trax it is quite different
Log of Deadwood (implanting machines mix)
Secrets (i love a woman in uniform mix)
Passing of Time (ambient mix)
Molten Love (orbits of venus mix) - extended version of the ‘berlin session film mix'
S.A.L.T. (snow mix) – (superfluous) version without the monologue
Toxygene (kris needs up for a fortnight mix) – previously released as a single
Asylum (soul catcher's mix) – previously released as a single

The Orblivion singles (Toxygene and Asylum) have all been issued in different formats, versions and mixes. Not all remixes can be found on this enhanced version. I personally find it a pity that the You Are Evil But I Like You Mix from Asylum has not been included.

If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Obscured by Fluffy Clouds 

20080907

The Orb On Mars

Entry 966

Recently The Orb has been remastering, re-editing and most of all re-cashing on their studio albums. Today we have a go at Cydonia. The following review was written for an Orb project of mine that never saw the light of day. and because it is so long I'll keep this intro short.

Cydonia v1 (1998)

After a few false starts in 1998 a new Orb album is announced for March 1999: Cydonia. A track listing is available as well as the names of two possible singles: Once More (in a Jim Cauty 'scourge of the earth' remix) and Ghostdancing. A while later the album is postponed till September, and when that date expires, it is believed to be delayed indefinitely...

That the finished album is lying somewhere in the vaults of the Island record company is a fact. Promotional cd's have been known to circulate among fans and internet record shops advertise a Japanese limited pressing, probably a record of illegitimate origin.

Alex Paterson later explains that the decision not to release Cydonia has been taken over their heads, by Island Records owner Universal. New masters mean new rules and even the once so progressive Island Records can't escape the hit the money and run tactic that seems to be the only marketing plan big third millennium record companies understand nowadays. "One day there'll be just the one label with the one super band, if it goes on like this.", sneers Paterson.

Crying won't help you, baby, and those urging to undergo some Orblike ambient moods have access to two excellent Thomas Fehlmann releases: good fridge. Flowing: ninezer onineight and one to three. Overflow; ninene/nd. The first record has 2 co-operations with Alex Paterson, but these are not among his best. The same can be said of Robert Fripp’s collaboration on the second.

Other millennium rumours go The Orb have been narrowed to a duo. Apparently the ongoing Cydonia story made Andy Hughes leave the building, following the footsteps of early Orbfellas Jim Cauty and Kristian Weston. Some fans speculate that it may have been LX who kicked Andy out because the latter, angry about Island's refusal to release Cydonia, leaked the early mixes to some collectors who weeded the tapes to the public. Alex Paterson: There was a spy in the camp, but we fixed that."

Note: An Orb intimate called Smiley claimed this rumour was not correct. The Orb has never been over protective anyway for its demos, and white labels, (unreleased) remixes and copies have always been circulating between friends, DJ's and collectors. But on the other hand:
"As we were about to release Cydonia, ( ... ) everyone was saying that they'd already heard all the new tracks on MP3 websites. So, we were about to release an album that had already been heard. Needless to say, that all stopped when Andy left. ( ... ) Well, it's obvious isn't it? There was a spy in the camp," growls Paterson, "but we fixed that." (Dreyer, Andrew: Big Noise, 16 November 2001).

A more vicious explanation for the split is Andy's growing interest in booger sugar, but this may have been just another villainous gossip as well. On the other hand, Trash has repeatedly testified about 'coke snorting power hungry money crazed prawn sandwich with black pepper eating scum' circling in and around the band.

Note: a short compilation of Trash's writings about the use of drugs in the band:

"We could get a new manager with a coke habit
And ask him to take all our money
and spunk it right up his nose", (Trash, LX in Bklyn two nights ago, e-mail, 1 Nov 2002)

"People like him (Andy Hughes) and others connected with the orb
Wanted to squeeze it dry for the money the coke and the birds
NOT the music!", (Trash, Nibiru - How to make great handfulls of lovely dosh!!, e-mail, 6 Nov 2002)

"that bitterness could be something to do with the tracks they (The Orb) stole off me... and the 250,000..and (apparently/allegedly) the gear Andy sold to fuel his coke habit...", (Trash, ???, email, 3 Feb 2003).

To end the Andy on drugs rumours, here is a final statement by Rachel, whose Shrine To The Orb has got the approval of the official Orb website: "I dunno what sort of sordid past there might be, but there's absolutely *No Way* Andy has a coke problem - he's a very dedicated father and AFAIK doesn't even touch weed anymore. He's a very together and down to earth guy." Rachel, Andy Hughes, e-mail, 24 May 2002.

Cydonia v2 (2000)

While a lone wolf howls at alt.music.orb, that gets lesser and lesser messages, Alex spends most of his year 2000 in the good old US of A playing DJ sets at several places. And for a change Cydonia v2 is announced for October 2000, then delayed again...

Cydonia v3 (2001)

Finally, in March 2001, nearly three years after the album has been conceited, a partially revised Cydonia enters an already overcrowded market, its impact that of a dry sponge hitting a gong. The times don’t favour The Orb anymore and almost all reviews give the album a less than average rating.

The new Cydonia is more vocal orientated than was the original plan. With more than two years time to play with the original demos some loop-based instrumentals have nearly become pop songs.

That surely is the case with opener Once More, but I can't testify, before god nor the holy bible, that not experiencing it would have left an inexplicable emptiness in my life. Starting with a typical water sample the music soon clashes with the vocals and maybe that is why Aki Omori sings about a 'sound of confusion'. Don't get me wrong: Once More isn't a bad track, but I would never give it an inch of attention without LX's signature on it.

Note: Once More didn't surprise me as some of The Orb's earlier pop singles. The 7" edit of Perpetual Dawn, for instance, with its added vocal track was, in my opinion, far more effective. So were Toxygene and Little Fluffy Clouds. And even Mickey Mars. Anyway, those who know testify that previous Once More versions were less poppy and with less dominating vocals.

A second, and far superior vocal track, Ghostdancing, sung by Nina Walsh, was obviously destined to become single number two. (Don't search for it the track was never released as a single and that's a pity.) Both of them are linked together by a quasi-seamless interlude Promis. The trilogy forms an ambient suite, taking 18 minutes of time, not too short, but sweet nevertheless.

The title of track 4, Turn It Down, undoubtedly is an easy target for a would-be reviewer. Sounding like an 8 and a half minutes crossover between Orblivion's Passing Of Time and U.F.Orb's Blue Room this ambient experiment with a beat fails to fully contradict its title. One gets the feeling that The Orb already has done this track in the past and with better results.

Egnable is announced in the cd-booklet as a track from the lost FFWD sessions. If you have read the previous Orb reviews you may remember that FFWD was a highly experimental album described by some critics as annoying or irritating. Build around a (fake) Linguaphone commercial read by Fil Le Gonidec, Egnable manages to combine both, quite an achievement if one realises that the tune is less than 2 minutes long. It makes one wonder why on earth this lost session tape was ever found back.

Firestar starts with the familiar sound of a radio cycling between stations. A similar effect was used on the Pink Floyd album Wish You Were Here where Have A Cigar fades out until it sounds like a cheap transistor radio. The track suddenly ends, with new stations being searched (and found) on the wave band. After a snippet of Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony, the intro of Wish You Were Here starts. On several live performances during the Seventies, Pink Floyd used a real radio on stage to recreate the 'musique concrete' bit between both tracks.

Note (2008): I haven't got a clue why I couldn't write anything more inspirational about the above track. Probably because there isn't anything more to say about it?

Another Side Of Paradise

A Mile Long Lump Of Lard is a beat bolero, nothing less, nothing more, a truly amazing rhythmical piece, probably the best track on the album, maybe even the best track The Orb has done in ages. Its bombast and pathos reminds this crusty old dinosaur of the Emerson, Lake and Palmer rendition of Prokofiev's Romeo And Juliet and I'm pretty sure nobody would have expected mentioning these boring old farts on an Orb review.

But just when one thinks the action is finally getting somewhere, The Orb & Co decides to have another sing-a-long contest. At their best Centuries and Plum Island sound like a mediocre tune from Grateful Dead goddess Donna Godchaux, at their worst it just sounds like Madonna with a postnatal dip.

There is no Steve Hillage on this album, but a link to times past by is offered by a guest appearance of Guy Pratt who co-signs Hamlet Of Kings. This is one of the very few tracks on this album that intelligently play with samples: flowing water, a harp sound, some tubular bells, a quasi wish-you-were-here guitar lick and the return of the famous Orb train whistle! This track time warps the listener into an atmospheric adventure from the lost Ultraworld.

Note: The thank you section in the cd booklet mentions the couple Guy and Gala. This refers to Guy Pratt who married Gala Wright in October 1996. Gala, born in 1969, is the daughter of Juliette Gale, who was background singer of the London based R&B band Sigma 6. That band would really become famous when a certain Syd Barrett joined and renamed them The Pink Floyd Sound. By then Juliette Gale had already left the troupe but only after she had married the keyboard player Rick Wright.

A remix of Hamlet of Kings will appear a few weeks later on the album Dr Alex Paterson's Voyage Into Paradise. Although the title makes one think that this is a solo record it really is a mixed compilation of 'post club chill out' tracks from the Liquid Sound Design label with Paterson's name glued to it to sell a few copies more.

Note: Orb lovers will find familiar names on Voyage Into Paradise: Youth (M. Glover), Greg Hunter and Trash (K. Weston) are represented on tracks from Kiosk, Dub Trees and a Killing Joke's Requiem remix, the band that more or less started The Orb. For copyright reasons the The Orb is presented as The Rob and The Hamlet Of Kings alternative mix has been retitled to 4 Horseman.

Boundary Stone

Back to Cydonia. Track eleven is called 1.1.1, with its 35 seconds nothing more than a quick, but quite efficient, intro for Thursday's Keeper. Best described as a sample driven oddity it hits the listener as a crossover between LX's Kiss radio tapes and System 7's 7: 7 Expansion (Conspiracy Mix).

The album ends with Terminus, a typical 'German' minimalist track in the Valley tradition. I don't know if this soundscape was originally destined for the second FFWD album but Robert Fripp surely had his mojo working on this. Although the longest track and highly repetitive, it feels less time-consuming than others on the same album. I personally like the discreet wind chimes that sound exactly like those hanging on my porch (the first time I heard the track I thought it was the wind outside playing tricks with the music).

Note (2008): some early pressings of Cydonia had a hidden track called EDM, the 2008 remastered version includes this as well.

Conclusion 1

Reading the above can make you wonder if this album is any good.

In a relaxing kind of way, it rather is... and if you take the effort to let the music grow on you it may well become nested in your favourite Orb Top 5. On a total of 68 minutes and 48 seconds...

It has several gems. A Mile Long Lump Of Lard. Hamlet Of Kings. Terminus. Representing twenty-five and a half of excellent Orbian minutes (37%). Orblivion was a more coherent album on the whole, but the gem tracks are all individually better than those on the previous album.

It has its vocal tracks, and two of these are able to haunt the mind for days long: Ghostdancing and Plum Island. The others, Once More and Centuries, are fillers. The 'Orb In Love' invests twenty-one and a half minutes of our time (31%).

It has its transitional parts, typical album tracks that pass with the stream. Promis. Turn It Down. Thursday's Keeper. Some of them are only used as (short) intros to the next track. Firestar. 1.1.1. (29%).

Egnable is ignorable (3%).

Conclusion 2

Cydonia is probably better than we assume.
Cydonia sings: Once More, Ghostdancing, Centuries, and Plum Island.
Cydonia is ambient: Promis, Hamlet Of Kings, Terminus.
Cydonia is beat: Turn It Down. Thursday's Keeper.
Cydonia is chant: A Mile Lump Of Lard.
Cydonia is a concept: A Martian northern summer in the afternoon. A cold northern winter in Battersea. Et In Arcadia Ego. (These lines can be found on the cd booklet.)

Martian trivia

Arcadia Planitia and Cydonia Planitia can be found on the planet Mars. Cydonia (41 north latitude, 10° west longitude) is known for its collossal 'human face' photographed by the Viking spacecraft in the mid-to-late 1970s. The Cydonia area contains other strange objects as well. One of them is a five-sided 'pyramid' and there is an artificial looking rock structure that has been called the 'fortress'. Close to it the 'city' that also contains some pyramidal rock structures. Believers say these artefacts proof that there was once life on Mars, while the non-believers argue that is it all some weird cosmological trickery.

Masonic trivia

Et In Arcadio Ego is a painting of Giovanni Francesco Guercino (1618). Apparently this was a secret phrase in the esoteric and Masonic societies of those days (Arcadian myths had already been noted down by the Neapolitan poet Jacopo Sannazaro in 1501). A few years later the French painter Nicolas Poussin further elaborated on the theme, titling some of his work Et In Arcadio Ego and Les Bergers d'Arcadie (The Arcadian Shepherds (1629)).

The phrase was the official device of the French Plantard family who claim to descent from the Merovingian king Sigisbert IV (676-758), whose bloodline may go back to the Old Testamentary king David. It is believed that the Plantards have been active in the Templars, the Rosicrusians, in freemasonry and in any other (French) secret organisation you can stick your finger in. Pierre Plantard de Saint Clair became an immediate occult superstar when the authors of an esoteric bestseller wrote he was the Grand Master of the Priory of Sion, the alleged guardians of the Holy Grail. (Baigent, Michael; Leigh, Richard and Lincoln, Henry: The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail, Corgi Books, London, 1982).

69 69 69 69 69 79 79 40

The 2008 version of Cydonia contains the following rare or previously unreleased mixes:

Disk One

EDM: a hidden track that was previously only available on the (first?) UK release and that is now included on the remastered version.

Disk Two

Centuries (eurofen mix). Previously released on Orbsessions vol.1.
Ghostdancing (version). Instrumental version.
Hamlet of Kings (version).
Firestar (front bits).
Centuries (wine, woman & king mix). Slow and dubby.
Once More (scourge of the earth mix). Previously released on a 12” promo single.
Plum Island (flat mix).
Promis (version).
Once More (bedrock edit 2). Previously released as a single.
Turn It Down (long version).
Terminus (andy's mix). Faster version with additional beat and sounds.

If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: The Orb Lives On

20080927

zORBa, the G|r|eek

Entry 1006

The (origina) Peel Sessions The Orb hasn’t been sitting still the past year. In February they released a new album, called The Dream and five disks of their back catalogue have been re-released, with extra tracks to draw the money out of the collector’s pocket.

Not that long ago they already had unleashed two rarities albums called Orbsessions One and Two and an ambient volume in the The Art Of Chill collection (a previous volume of that same collection, mixed by Steve Hillage from System7, also contained a Paterson collaboration). March also saw a promo-mix-cd called The Orb vs Freeze, containing 3 unreleased tracks, only available as an extra with a Greek music magazine.

But the best was yet to come and this week saw the release of The BBC Sessions 1989-2001. Of course completists have been complaining that not all Orb sessions (especially those with John Peel) have been put on the double cd set, so the original ‘working’ title of the compilation (The Complete BBC Sessions) had to be shortened a bit (Amazon USA however is still advertising it as the complete sessions).

It obviously starts with A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Underworld (Loving You). Did I just wrote underworld? Seems that there is a typo on the cover. The track in question is of course titled: A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld (Loving You). I once compared this ambient pièce de résistance to Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful Of Secrets. This BBC version uses samples from Minnie Riperton’s Loving You, Grace Jones’ Slave To The Rhythm and Pink Floyd’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond. For obvious, copyright, reasons the tracks isn’t credited to Jimmy Cauty and Alex Paterson alone, like it used to be when it was first released, but to a Pleiades of composers and authors, in alphabetical order:
Jimmy Cauty
Simon Darlow
Trevor Horn
Stephen Lipson
Alex Paterson
Minnie Riperton
Richard Rudolph
Bruce Wolley.

From the 17 tracks on the album 5 come from The Orb’s debut, 2 (3 if one counts Assassin as well) from U.F.Orb , 3 from Orbus Terrarum, one from Orblivion and 3 from Cydonia.

The collector will find it amusing that the Stooges cover of No Fun is added as well (a reminder of the days that Alex Paterson was a roadie for Killing Joke and used to sing that song to test the PA) and a live rendition of an excellent, and mostly forgotten ambient tune by The Orb I Am The Red Worm that was originally issued (in very limited form) on the Badorb label.

All in all this double cd is a nice greatest hits compilation, if one can use the term hits for The Orb, classic tunes would perhaps be more appropriate. Now if only I could find the time to give The Dream a spin.

If you liked this post - you might be interested in this as well: Apples and Oranges 
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