The Orb have been releasing records since 1989. During that time they’ve travelled through various line-ups and worked with a number of labels. While being branded the fathers / originators of “ambient house” they’ve tried their hand at a range of genres. They even covered The Stooges’ No Fun. As a consequence they probably mean different things to different people, dependent on folks’ age, and their own point of entry to The Orb’s on-going journey. 

Me, I’m an old fucker, and even caught The Orb live, before they were The Orb, spinning then experimental, pioneering DJ sets, weaving seamless soundscapes, upstairs in the VIP room at the acid house event, Land Of Oz. I once spent a whole night tripping, listening to their debut 12”, A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of Ultraworld, over and over again, so it’s the truly ambient slightly Sci-Fi Orb that I’ll always have the softest spot for (1). 

The Orb’s latest epic, 32-track, 2 CD, 4LP, retrospective, titled Orboretum, however, cherry picks right across their entire career and certainly has something for everyone. The early daze, when The Orb had their own imprint, WAU! Mr Modo, and were then signed to dance Indie Big Life, are hyped by a quartet of hit singles, dating from 1990 to 1992. The dance mix of the aforementioned A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain… , was a smash at the time for DJ Darren Emmerson, later of Underworld, during his residency at Nicky Holloway’s Soho venue, The Milk Bar. The angelic intro of Minnie Ripperton singing while at the heart of an amazonian jungle, siren-like synths launching as she hits her famous high notes, gets abruptly interrupted by a charging rhino beat. Bubbling with sound effects and serenaded by a cock crowing, the ambient OG is cut in and out ecstatically with a DJ cross-fader. Listening to its giddy gallop now I wonder if this was ground zero for progressive house.

Little Fluffy Clouds is also far from ambient, and actually a thumping floor-filling classic. Its central samples, Steve Reich and Rickie Lee Jones, were given to The Orb’s Alex Paterson by a friend, on a mixtape cassette. This incredibly inventive piece of innocent, introspective nostalgia-inducing synthetic psychedelia was, therefore, constructed largely out of lucky coincidence. Perpetual Dawn is a shot of uptempo skanking, that reflected Paterson’s passion for reggae, and also the sounds of his dubwise WAU! Mr Modo label mates, such as Zulu Warriors, Sound Iration and Indica All-Stars, who made righteous roots for ravers. The version of Blue Room included on the comp is a 7” edit, which downplays the Mad Professor / Aisha / “Ahh-ooh-waah-ooh-waah-ooh-waah-waah” vocal hook and instead focuses on Jah Wobble’s modal bass-line and Steve Hillage’s new age guitar. Proving that, unlike the Sex Pistols, The Orb didn’t hate, but loved Pink Floyd. 

The Orb were signed to Island for the rest of the 1990s. Their first studio album for the major was 1994’s Pomme Fritz. The title track is a weird and woozy bit of eccentric kosmische. Oxbow Lakes can be found the on follow up, Orbus Terrarum. Remixed by Sabres Of Paradise, it’s trip hop-tastic, with a Levee-breaking beat and pretty Plaid-like melodies. A head-nodding sonic sanctuary for stoners, it foreshadows the sound of Two Lone Swordsmen’s Fifth Mission.  

1997’s Orblivion supplies Toxygene and Asylum. Complex, multi-layered constructions of trance / techno. Intricate with brain-dancing detail for those packing a refreshed, expanded, and elevated consciousness. Like the bulk of The Orb’s art they take avant ideas like cut-ups and musique concrete, and turn them into something accessible and catchy. Where in amongst the subversive spoken word samples you’re still encouraged to move your feet. Flipping Funkadelic’s philosophy. Free your ass and your mind will follow.   

In 2001, The Orb’s stint with Island came to a close with the album Cydonia, from which the tracks Once More and Ghostdancing are lifted. The former has Aki Omori, lullaby-like describe an Orwellian dystopia, and is remixed by original Orb member Jimmy Cauty, using the moniker Scourge Of The Earth. The latter is a nice spooky slice of sinister dub, featuring the disembodied voice of Woodleigh Research Facility’s Nina Walsh. 

The Orb then connected with Kompakt, and there are four cuts on the comp culled from singles and E.P.s that mark the start of this partnership… and they are an eclectic bunch. Ranging from Gee Strings’ looped-up house to Aftermath’s opulently orchestrated rap and Dilmun’s great grainy, glitchy ambience, while From A Distance is an electro glam stomp (2). 

Appletree In My Backyard is a bit of a rarity. Released in 2005 on a compilation put together to raise funds for those effected by the devastating catastrophic 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, it’s a lovely call back to Little Fluffy Clouds – with a female narrator reminiscing about sunsets and the same trippy gating effects. Mellower than the OG, but with loads of melodic nods, this track alone should be enough to make completists cough up their cash. Golden Clouds is another homage to Little Fluffy Clouds, this time with The Mighty Upsetter, Lee Scratch Perry acting as your playful, Puck-like ad-libing MC. 

Metallic Spheres momentarily had The Orb return to a major, courtesy of a collaboration with The Floyd’s David Gilmour, who added weeping whale-like guitar to an album designed to raise awareness of the plight of Scottish hacker Gary McKinnon. Having targeted NASA, McKinnon was looking at 70 years in a US prison, and possibly, very probably a stay in Guantanamo Bay. 

Alpine Meadoes comes from 2016’s COW / Chill Out World concluding The Orb’s Kompakt contract, before joining Cooking Vinyl. The three LPs resulting from that relationship are all represented on Orboretum. The string-sweetened boom bap, Mo Wax-seque, Doughnuts Forever, the tabla-tickled dub of Wish I Had A Pretty Dog and the party-starting skanking Pillow Fight @ Shag Mountain are all nuggets from 2018’s No Sounds Are Out Of Bounds. 2020’s Abolition Of The Royal Familia offers the filtered disco of Daze In Dub, Hawk King, a trance-y tribute to the celebrated theoretical physicist and cosmologist, Stephen, the seductive melodica-led Say Cheese, and Violeta Vicci’s classical reimagining of AAA. Tracks from 2023’s Prism include the big Juno b-lined house of H.O.M.E. and the brilliant uber Balearic bumper, Why Can You Be In Two Places At Once, When You Can’t Be Anywhere At All. Chopped up rock guitars carry this groove, which the breakdown / bridge reveals to be sourced from some forgotten exotic Middle Eastern or Eastern European tune. 

The tracks on Orboretum are sequenced pretty much chronologically, and while separated by over 30 years, they comfortably shimmy side by side. You can’t spot the join. 2018’s Pillow… for example could have easily appeared on 1991’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld. The fact that despite being birthed in differing decades they create a completely cohesive, solid collection definitively demonstrates just what a forward-thinking outfit The Orb was / is.

Orboretum can be ordered directly from The Orb. 

NOTES

(1) For me, some of The Orb’s highlights were the irreverent nose-thumbing remixes of pop acts, like Erasure, which deconstructed songs and expectations with righteous punk relish and were a two-fingered salute to record company executives hoping to cash-in on acid house and The Second Summer Of Love. In my eyes / ears they were runners up only to Andrew Weatherall. They shared similarly unbounded studio imaginations, but sometimes lacked the DJ’s lightning-in-a-bottle, never to be repeated Ecstasy-fuelled dance floor detonating dynamics. A case in point would be Weatherall’s remixes of The Orb’s Perpetual Dawn, where a slight tweak – particularly on Ultrabass 2 – radically raises the track’s energy. Right through the roof. The Orb and Weatherall were, of course, very good mates. Alex told me that they all – him, Kris “Thrash” Weston, and Weatherall – met by chance when they moved into the same Battersea estate. Their joint remix of West India Company’s O Je Suis Seul was one of, if not the, first time Weatherall had been in a studio. He also worked with Thrash on versions for Airstream and Meat Beat Manifesto. They all famously shaped Primal Scream’s Screamadelica and then infamously supported the band on tour.
(2) These singles were collected on the Japanese CD, Bicycles And Tricycles, which was later picked up globally.