"The real reason why we did 'Orblivion' is because we're living in misconceived time," says founder Alex Paterson. "In a sense in 1997, if they reckon it's three to four years that the actual calender is out of whack with the time of Christ, then we're living in misconceived times. So the year 2000 should be next year, but not many people know that.... It's just one of those strange mathematical equations that after 1,500 years of living on a calender they decided to change it but they forgot to realign the date of Christ which put it three years out of time."
Since their inception The Orb have developed into a collaborative unit based around Alex Paterson with other members coming and going. The band according to the misconceived time calender anyway, began in late '88-early '89, when Alex started making music during 48-hour weekends of hedonism and sampling with Jimmy Cauty. The latter was published by EG, Brian Eno's label for whom Alex was an A&R man.
The initial result was 'The Kiss EP' (1989) which consisted completely of samples from New York's KISS FM station mixed with anarchic gile. Around the same time, at Patersons suggestion, he and Cauty also pioneered a peculiar blend of beatless/collage music. This had a public unveiling when they were invited to DJ in the chill out room at Paul Oakenfold's Land of Oz do at Heaven and ambient house was born.
The importance of The Orb in the development of ambient music shouldn't be underestimated. They lifted it out of new age realms and made it a vital post-club sound track for the Thereafterhours Generation by giving it a new, fluid architecture, certainly the '70's experiments in ambient of Brian Eno weren't lost on Alex and Cauty since both were involved in one way or another with Eno, but they went a giant step further.
The Orb's beauty is they took Eno's cerebral approach and turned it into a sonic graffiti spray can painting with it pictures that mirrored and stimulated the chemically stuttered lost-and -found and lost it again time-distorted synapses of the acid house kids. You didn't need drugs to appreciate The Orb since their music was virtual drugs. If Eno wrote the book on ambient, The Orb made the film and through it they popularised a whole genre of music. They were to become the first truly modern band to come out of England since New Order 10 years earlier.
The Orb's open-ended recording template finally emerged in the autumn of '89 when they released 'A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld'. With its samples of Minnie Ripperton's 'Loving You', choral parts, waves, jet noises, conversations, church bells etc. all drifting in and out of a cyclical keyboard sequence, The Orb proved that it was musically possible to be space-age electric, avantgarde, classical, romantic and funny and anything else you wanted all at the same time. A truly barriers-breaking effort, the tune marked Jimmy Cauty's departure.
With Jimmy heading off to work with Bill Drummond on The KLF, Alex called in Youth for the third single, 'Little Fluffy Clouds'. Youth was a natural choice. They shared a flat and he was an old school mate of Alex's. Alex had also been a drum roadie for Killing Joke in which Youth had played bass and the band had been instrumental in getting him the A&R job at their label, EG.
'Little Fluffy Clouds' became a club masterpiece and as the tracks for the band's debut album, 'The Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld' (1991), took shape so to did the crew who would help Alex in the coming years. Crucially Thomas Fehlmann and Kris 'Thrash' Weston were recruited, as were ex-Gongsters Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy.
Alex had met Swiss-born, Berlin-resident Thomas when the pair worked on 'Teutonic Beats' compilations and Sun Electric/Fischermann's Friend projects for EG. Thrash had come in from the strangelands of south London, and Hillage and Giraudy, aka System 7, had been fans since they heard Alex mixing up parts of Steve's 'Rainbow Dome Musick' in the chill out room at Land of Oz.
'The Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld' did the business and spawned a startling remix baby, 'Aubrey Mixes: The Ultraworld Excursions'. John Peel and Annie Nightingale were fervent high frequency champions of the band on radio. An album of a live Peel session was released. The momentum was building.
It was with their third album, 'UFOrb' (1992), though that the band indelibly stamped their commercial as well as cultural importance. 'UFOrb' entered the British Charts at top position. If this wasn't enough, the preceding single, the alien-abduction epic, 'The Blue Room', through its length (39 minutes 58 seconds) had The Orb laughing up their sleeves by calling into question exactly what length of music constituted a single or an album. They celebrated this by appearing on Top Of The Pops playing chess, Alex being a bit of a dab hand at the game.
By now The Orb were beginning to find their feet as a live act fleshed out in the rhythm department by Nick Burton and Simon Phillips. Gigs were events to a large extent because their sets were inventive beyond the recorded equipment and featured, to mug a phrase, blinding lights. A show on the NME stage at Gladstonbury and one at the Trekroner Water Festival Party in Copenhagen were among the more high profile.
These gigs, which featured radical re-interpretations of old tunes plus new material, were released as 'Live 93', a double album which marked the beginning of The Orb's association with Island Records. The band had for some time prior been having label and management problems, it would take a long while for them to be resolved, hence the move to Island.
Already much feted for their mixes of, among others, Primal Screams's 'Higher Than The Sun' and KLF's '3am Eternal', to keep busy and earn money while the business machinery burst its cogs, The Orb stepped up their remix work. Yello, YMO, Dave Stewart, U2, Erasure, Depeche Mode, Material and many others had their EQ's re-aligned and doctored. Sometimes quite brutally. Alex also kept his Technics hand in DJ-ing around the world.
After a long and some what frustrating hiatus the band resurfaced with the darkling 'Pomme Fritz - The Orb's Little Album' (1994). It proved to be an hours d'oeuvres for the subsequent main course, Orbvus Terrarvm' (1995). Arguably their most eloquent and realised work, 'Orbvus Terrarvm' was epic in scope and duration and cathartic in execution. It caught the band exploding with ideas. They were creating something akin to a neo-classical music, mind-bendingly serious but funny as hell. Critics in America caught its buzz full-on and the band began to break big in the States.
At this juncture Kris Weston, tired of touring and other things, decided to leave The Orb. The crew once again rolled with a major change and Andy Hughes, who had been involved for a while on the engineering side, came more to the fore in a collaborative capacity. It was during this transitionary period that Alex, Andy and Thomas Fehlmann slowly started putting the pieces of 'Orblivion' into place.
Alex, meanwhile, still DJ'd world-wide when he had the chance. He once played in Auckland, New Zealand and San Francisco on the same day thanks to fast jets and strange time zones. Andy became a dad and sometimes popped over to Denmark to work with a techno outfit called Anaesthesia. Thomas continued to evolving his flow project in Berlin. All three of them took time out to do remixes for various people, from the famous - Cranberries - to the infamous - Mindless Drug Hoover.
'Orblivion' was eventually hatched in London's Trident Studios in the summer of '96. With its more compact tunes and drum and bass flavour in places, 'Orblivion' is a contemporary take on culture. It also marks another set of mood swings for the band.
'Orblivion' - the countdown begins here.