The Orb
The Orb are an English electronic music group founded in 1988 by Alex Paterson and Jimmy Cauty. Known for their psychedelic sound, the Orb developed a cult following among clubbers "coming down" from drug-induced highs.[1] Their influential 1991 debut album The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld pioneered the UK's nascent ambient house movement,[2] while its UK chart-topping follow-up U.F.Orb represented the group's commercial peak.[3]
This article is about the European band. For other uses, see Orb (disambiguation).
The Orb
London, England
1988–present
Alex Paterson
Michael Rendall
Jimmy Cauty
Kris Weston
Andy Falconer
Andy Hughes
Simon Phillips
Nick Burton
Dom Beken
Thomas Fehlmann
Beginning as ambient and dub DJs in London, the Orb's early performances were inspired by electronic artists of the 1970s, most notably Brian Eno, Cluster, and Kraftwerk. The Orb have maintained their signature science fiction aesthetic despite numerous personnel changes, including the departure of Cauty and members Kris Weston, Andy Falconer, Simon Phillips, Nick Burton, and Andy Hughes. Paterson has been the only permanent member, continuing to work as the Orb with Swiss-German producer Thomas Fehlmann, and later, with Martin "Youth" Glover, bassist of Killing Joke. Paterson's unauthorised use of other artists' works has led to multiple disputes, most notably with Rickie Lee Jones.[4]
During their live shows in the 1990s, the Orb performed using digital audio tape machines optimised for live mixing and sampling before switching to laptops and other digital media. Featuring colourful light shows and psychedelic imagery, their performances often incited comparisons to Pink Floyd, whose guitarist, David Gilmour, later collaborated with them on the album Metallic Spheres in 2010.
Their seventeenth studio album, Prism, was released on 28 April 2023 by Cooking Vinyl.
History[edit]
1988–1990: Paterson & Cauty[edit]
Alex Paterson began his music career in the early 1980s as a roadie for the post-punk rock band Killing Joke, for whom his childhood friend[5][6] Martin "Youth" Glover played bass.[7] Having left Killing Joke's employ, in 1986 Paterson became an A&R man.[2][8] Paterson and Youth shared a flat in Battersea[8] and Jimmy Cauty, Youth's former bandmate from Brilliant, was a regular visitor.[6] Paterson and Cauty began DJing and producing music together under the name the Orb. Their first release was a 1988 acid house anthem track, "Tripping on Sunshine", released on Youth's compilation album Eternity Project One.[9][10] The following year, the Orb released the Kiss EP, a four-track EP based on samples from New York City's KISS FM.[9] It was released on Paterson and Glover's new record label WAU! Mr. Modo Records, which they created out of a desire to maintain financial independence from larger record labels.[2] After spending a weekend of making what Paterson described as "really shit drum sounds", the duo decided to abandon beat-heavy music and instead work on music for after-hours listening by removing the percussion tracks.[11] Paterson and Cauty began DJing in London and landed a deal for the Orb to play the chill out room at London nightclub Heaven. Resident DJ Paul Oakenfold brought in the duo as ambient DJs for his "The Land of Oz" event at Heaven.[12] Though the Orb's Monday night performances had only several hardcore followers initially, their chill-out room act grew popular over the course of their six-month stay to the point that the room was often packed with around 100 people.[13] The Orb's performances became most popular among weary DJs and clubbers seeking solace from the loud, rhythmic music of the dancefloor.[14] The Orb built up melodies using multitrack recordings linked to multiple record decks and a mixer. The group incorporated many CDs, cassettes, and BBC sound effects into the act, often accompanied with pieces of popular dance tracks such as "Sueño Latino".[13] Though the group used a variety of samples, they avoided heavy rhythm and drums[15] so that the intended ambient atmosphere was not disrupted. Most often, the group played dub and other chill-out music, which it described as ambient house for the E generation.[9][16]
Throughout 1989 the Orb, along with Youth, developed a music production style that incorporated ambient music with a diverse array of samples and recordings. The British music press later labelled the music ambient house. The culmination of the group's musical work came toward the end of the same year when they recorded a session for John Peel on BBC Radio 1. The track, then known as "Loving You", was largely improvisational and featured a wealth of sound effects and samples from science fiction radio plays, nature sounds, and Minnie Riperton's "Lovin' You".[17] For its release as a single on the record label Big Life, the Orb changed the title to "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld". Upon the single's release, Riperton's management forced Big Life to remove the unlicensed Riperton sample, ensuring that only the initial first-week release of the single contained the original vocals of Minnie Riperton; subsequent pressings used vocals from a sound-alike.[12] Despite its running time of 22 minutes, the sample-laden single reached #78 on the British singles charts. Soon thereafter, the Orb were commissioned by Dave Stewart to remix his top-20 single "Lily Was Here". The group obliged and were soon offered several more remix jobs from artists including Erasure and System 7.
In 1990, Paterson and Cauty held several recording sessions at Cauty's studio, Trancentral. When offered an album deal by Big Life, the Orb found themselves at a crossroads: Cauty preferred that the Orb release their music through his KLF Communications label, whereas Paterson wanted to ensure that the group did not become a side-project of Cauty and Bill Drummond's KLF.[18] Because of these issues, Cauty and Paterson split in April 1990, with Paterson keeping the name the Orb.[14] As a result of the break-up, Cauty removed Paterson's contributions from the in-progress recordings and released the album as Space on KLF Communications.[6][19] Also out of these sessions came the KLF album Chill Out,[8] on which Reynolds (1999)[20] and Prendergast (2003)[21][2] report Paterson appeared in an uncredited role. In a 2011 interview with Magnetic Magazine, Alex Paterson corroborated his involvement and contribution to the Chill Out album and said he had in fact been "ripped off" by the KLF and notably Jimmy Cauty, stating:
Themes and influences[edit]
Inspiration[edit]
The Orb's members have drawn from an assortment of influences in their music.[81] The Orb's central figure, Alex Paterson, had early musical tastes and influences that included King Tubby, Alice Cooper, Prince, Kraftwerk, and T.Rex.[82] Among these, Paterson cites Kraftwerk as one of the most important, claiming they created the foundation from which all modern dance music has been built.[1] While in Brixton with Martin Glover as a teenager, Paterson was also exposed to a large amount of reggae music, such as The Mighty Diamonds, The Abyssinians, and Bob Marley.[1] The reggae influence on Paterson and the Orb can readily be heard in tracks such as the single "Perpetual Dawn" and U.F.Orb's "Towers of Dub". The earliest ambient influences of the Orb came in 1979 during Paterson's roadie days with Killing Joke. While with the band in Neuss, Paterson listened to Brian Eno's Music for Films while on LSD and watched "the Ruhr steel works explode in the distance", noting that "[t]he scene seemed to be taking place in the music as well".[2] The same night, Paterson was also inspired while listening to Cluster's Grosses Wasser and found that the steel works' "huge metal arms were crushing molten rocks in time to the music", which was something he'd "never seen, or heard, anything like it before".[1] Along with Cluster and Kraftwerk, Paterson was also influenced by other German experimental music from Can and composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.[11] Modulations calls Paterson's music a "maximal" version of Brian Eno's "minimal" ambience,[83] though according to Paterson, Eno resents Paterson's use of his music as an influence.[16]
The Orb have often been described as "The Pink Floyd of the Nineties",[84] but Paterson has stated that their music is more influenced by experimental electronic music than progressive rock of the 1970s.[1] He has noted though that the Pink Floyd album Meddle was influential to him as a child in the 1970s.[24] The psychedelic prog-rock similarities have led critics to describe the Orb as hippie revivalists;[85] Paterson has strongly rejected the tag, claiming that even as a youth, he was "one of those punks who hated hippies".[86]
During production of Cydonia and Bicycles & Tricycles, Paterson's biggest influences were drum and bass and trip hop music, as seen on the tracks "Ghostdancing", "Thursday's Keeper", and "Aftermath".[87] The Orb's more recent influences consist largely of German techno producers, such as Triola, who were inspired by the Orb's earlier work.[54] Paterson cites the music of Kompakt as one of his primary modern influences and claims it to be among the best modern ambient music.[88]
Imagery[edit]
Imagery has always been an important part of the Orb's persona.[89] This is most prominent during live performances, where they often project surreal images against onstage screens. Common images include morphing faces, futuristic cityscapes, and aliens.[90] They have long associated their act with absurd symbology with images such as floating pigs.[87] This has carried over to their music videos, most of which are spacy, brightly coloured montages of surreal images including astronauts, clouds, and neon dolphins. Because of their use of psychedelic images at shows, the Orb's shows are frequently compared to those of Pink Floyd, who also used in-show imagery and films.[90] Paterson cites Godfrey Reggio's and Philip Glass's film Koyaanisqatsi as a primary influence to their concert imagery.[44]
The Orb's album art features much of the same imagery as their live act. Graphic design group The Designers Republic created the cover art for the earlier work, including Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, U.F.Orb, and the singles from those two albums.[91] For their next album, the Orb poked fun at their Pink Floyd comparisons with the cover of Live 93 featuring a floating stuffed sheep over the Battersea Power Station, which had appeared on the cover of Pink Floyd's Animals.[92] The artwork found in Badorb.com releases was similar to the Orb's odd artwork of the mid-1990s, as it was stylistically similar and contained little writing.[32]
Science fiction and space[edit]
Some of the more prominent motifs in the Orb's work are outer space and science fiction, including alien visitations, space flight, and mind control. These have included the use of samples from serious sources such as NASA transmissions to comedic clips from films like Woody Allen's Sleeper. U.F.Orb especially expressed a fascination with alien life with its bizarre sound samples and in the album's title itself.[27] The title of its most popular single, "Blue Room", is a reference to the supposed Blue Room of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which was investigated as a possible UFO evidence holding room.[86] Their 2001 album is named after the Cydonia Mensae region of Mars.[4] Due to Paterson's focus on science fiction and astronomical phenomena, The Guardian described Paterson as "pop [music]'s primary spokesperson on aliens".[5]
