While constructed primarily by Alex Paterson and Michael Rendall, The Orb’s latest album, Buddhist Hipsters, is still a typically collective, extended family, affair. Rendall and Paterson have been working together since 2010’s Metallic Spheres, and a few of the folks involved have known LX a little longer than that. 

System 7’s Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy guest on the opening, Spontaneously Combust. Hillage’s guitar and Giraudy’s vintage EMS singing like sea mammals over a shot of old school ambient house – the genre The Orb helped to define over 3 decades ago. Its dub bass-line driving its new age nuances amidst strange speaking-in-tongues chants, while a spoken sample shares details of a groovy LSD trip.  

Youth, Paterson’s life-long partner in crime, lends his bass to the pop-house-reggae of Sacred Choice, which harks back to previous chart hits such as Perpetual Dawn. 

Violinist and composer Violetta Vicci, who first joined the party for 2020’s Abolition Of The Royal Familia, accompanies death row inmate and activist Rrome Alone, on Arabeonics, a boom bap rap based around an oud loop and Vicci’s strings. 

Andy Caine, who’s been in The Orb’s orbit since Marathon’s Movin’ – and was famously the soulful voice behind the seminal `90s Basic Channel smashes Round One and Round Two – returns for It’s Coming Soon, a smooth, optimistic, uplifting 303 workout. Something that could easily have appeared on Top Of The Pops back in `88, alongside The Beloved, Seal and Carlton. 

Andy Falconer, who Paterson describes as an “ambient god”, has been on board since 1990, helping to shape both The Orb’s studio and live sound. He also currently partners Paterson in the Sedibus project. Here, Falconer contributes to the session’s most chilled cuts. The first of which, Under The Bed, is way out there. A dense, deep listening whirl of instruments and obscure sources reduced to washes and vapour, which slowly evolves into something still spectral but symphonic. Kharon, named after Pluto’s sister planet, then closes the album with more shimmering stillness, where Roger Eno’s peaceful piano picks a path through Dominican / Gregorian prayer and purloined period postulations on the space race. The track’s echoed pulses and oscillations like post-rave waves left in the wake of the last train to Transcentral. In its coda, a musical minstrel, lifted from crackly 78 shellac, bidding us a final “goodnight, goodnight, goodbye.”

The Orb’s Buddhist Hipsters can be ordered directly from Cooking Vinyl.