A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Band That Rules From the Centre of the Ultraworld: The Orb at the Queen Elizabeth Hall

It wasn’t planned.  It came to me as I waited. I could kill off ambient house music. In some sort of sound terrorist intervention smash up the stage and call the whole thing off. I hadn’t planned any of it but reading Bill Drummond lately has made me question why I should be here in the first place. I mean doesn’t Ambient House really belong back in the late eighties/ early nineties? I’m sick of this ambient house with its nods and appropriation of ‘world music’ and its offers of meditation and enlightenment. I’m sick of its dreamy dirge like nothingness that just drifts through me and over me without demanding that I listen. I’m sick of Eno and his crew lauding it over us all with his nods to minimal space and open thinking and no drums. I’m sick of all the colours and symbolism associated with a genre that has risen up out of experimental music and become a byword for really being the sounds in-between things.

I want ambient house to die.

I had travelled down by train early to get to the Southbank – no real reason to leave earlier than usual. I hadn't anyone to meet. Concerts are normally solidarity affairs for me. Even though I’m bursting with trivia and facts and want to discuss possible setlists and always hope to meet the artist in some sort of acknowledgement that I care and they care too.

I used to do this when I wrote a fanzine – made the untouchable possible and talked to people. Now crippled by age and a lack of energy I simply imagine all the things that could happen.

And it happened at The Orb tonight at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

Not interviews with artists nor hook ups just the simplicity of crowds letting go and finally feeling alive. It was clear that we weren’t out of it and certainly weren’t discussing what we were on. But there was a sense of abandon – well in the space between Row A and the stage. It all went off there.

But back to killing off ambient house – ambient music altogether. The KLF (that’s Bill Drummond and Jim Cauty) deleted their back catalogue at the end of their period of fame. They stopped. Literally pulled the plug and refused to make their sounds available. In essence they died. (Which is ironic considering they came back after 23 years as an undertakers) 

The Orb haven’t done this.

They have continued to evolve in modern times.

Releasing long player after long player. Which means they are creating something beyond the tags, the genre, the label they are often given.  They are creating sounds beyond the (little fluffy) clouds and at the edge of space. 

I will not call them an ambient house group.

A long time ago Jim Cauty was part of The Orb. In fact I watched Alex and Jim trying to create sounds with a DAT and decks in a corridor whilst Primal Scream played. Ketamine had zoned the whole place – no one could move  - there are flashes of them sat under a table and in all honesty at that point we could have called the whole thing off. There’s only so much extended reverb we can take – especially in that state. Ambience was a state of mind – not a soundtrack

But Alex carried on regardless. 

And I am glad that he has.

There’s a lot of Punk Rock in the good Doctor – in The Orb. I think they mean it maaaaan.

So my fantasies about killing ‘ambient house’ subsided over the course of the evening.  I entered the brutalist modernism of the Queen Elizabeth Hall (the building that boat tours on the Thames call a ‘carbuncle’ alongside the Royal Festival Hall and the National Theatre – mainly because they paraphrase would be King Charley – but also because they have no soul and don’t live in London) I was early and there was a fella done up in a ‘universe and planets print suit’ – I never spoke to him. But he was the real deal. He was Ambient in textiles.

And then The Orb tonight were a revelation.

Thomas Felhman wasn’t there as far as I could make out. This was just Dr LX and a young fella and a bassist. But that was actually enough. I’ve seen The Orb countless times and like The Rolling Stones (so I’m led to believe) they can be a hit or a miss – even with a ‘burger’ or two.  Which makes them unpredictable. Which is how it should be really – otherwise they might as well be a covers band. Which is odd because as I made my way home and ventured across the road in Blackheath there was a band playing in the Railway Tavern – they were playing Blur’s Song 2 – the singer was enunciating the Whoo Hoo – but as Whoo Yeah – it was flat as fuck. Perhaps I should turn my energy to killing that off? 

But I was happy though because what happened tonight was The Orb simply nailed it.

They made sounds that pulled at every element of being. Alex is simply the master of ceremonies. Curating (yes I said it) and dropping samples that lift people and places to higher states. Alex is able to conjure up an atmosphere with his wizardry at the decks – because that’s what it is. He plays samples – manipulates them and takes the crowd with him. He makes us follow in his dubbed out glory and uses machines to layer bliss amongst us all. And the audience weren’t tired all ravers who would be better off sitting down than moving a few limbs – the QEH crowd were a mixture of old and new – not so loved up as before but ready and willing to get on the orb bus that would carry them to orblivion. Obviously, I was part of the older set and as ‘Perpetual Dawn’ kicked in and we all gave way to getting down with it – it was heartening to see some people staying put – dodgy hips I presume. But they were smiling.

The Orb arrived with no fanfare. Following a spaced out, dubbed out and clubbed out set from who knows – it wasn’t clear – but it was enjoyable – The Orb arrived.  Suddenly they were on and making sounds and ‘No Sounds Were Out of Bounds’ this evening – yet vocals were. No guests  - no additions. Just Alex and that fella and a bassist when required (if that fella is Felhmann then he is the new Dorian Gray) The audience were sat – respectful and appreciative. To be fair I wasn’t out of my seat from the beginning. But LX was casting his magick he was casting a spell in reverb and dub that we could not resist. There were snatches of this and that. Early sounds mixed with the new. And then out of the ambience came Towers of Dub – this incredible powerful repetitive calling. Heavy bass and dogs barking – the ultimate in dance friendly sounds. Yet we stayed put – to be fair I had lost it at that moment – I may have even closed my eyes in the sway (hey hey hey) I hadn’t heard 'Towers of Dub' that powerful in years. It was incredible and you could feel the will of the audience. Waiting for the right time to get up and get down with it. 

The Orb journeyed further following 'Towers' with  'Star 6,7,8 and 9' I was well and truly enthralled. I had decided that killing ambient house would not be possible this evening. There was clearly a place for it – well a place for this – as I said I think The Orb are creating something fresh and different and I didn’t want to ruin the evening for everybody else. Besides the magick had worked – I was swaying – putting my arms in the air and generally getting wide-eyed loon like. It was a mild mannered rave up for the middle class masses all washed and suitably booted and home by half ten but within those hours we were enthralled by The Orb soundsystem. Tune after tune declared their sonic prominence at the top of the pile – crafting huge pulsating monsters from decks and FX. And the crowd got more heady and decided that dancing the evening away was required. From the 'Back Side of the Moon' Alex and Co. created a sonic mix of bleeps and yelps and dubbed out dissonance to rock the masses, with new new grooves from the latest long player mixed in with the perennial crowd pleasers. I thought it was going to go off when that Millie Ripperton refrain drifted from the speakers as Alex mixed and chopped 'A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Centre of the Ultraworld' to wild abandon. And then finally as the curfew reigned in and with twenty minutes before ‘game over’ Joni was asked what were the skies like when she was young.

And she told us.

The skies had little fluffy clouds in them and ran on forever.

You knew it was coming but a song that is over 30 years old was still presented in a new form. It still had an impact. The Orb had won. The Queen Elizabeth Hall was awash with grins and arms aloft – ok so we were older and weren’t going to last much longer than 10pm but it was joyous and fun. Fifteen minutes of fluffiness.  The Orb are an electronic group who offer up a sound that is both comforting and challenging. A sound that is relevant and nostalgic. It’s a sound that is thirty years in the making – The Orb make sounds were no sounds are out of bounds – they do not make ambient house.

They are music makers of the finest quality. Just don’t call it Ambient House.

 
The Orb Sounds can be found here:  https://www.theorb.com/

Here's the full rendition of Little Fluffy Clouds from QEH 30th March, 2019 - thanks to Willy Billiams for filming it. 

Summer is here

It’s that hot part of the year. That hazy wind down time and feeling on your knees as summer finally arrives in this profession of pace and progression. I’ve found myself turning to the sounds of nature to calm and revive me. I was listening to a youtube film of a thunderstorm yesterday – there was ten hours of it.

I mixed Satie and Eno in there too in some sort of attempt to create an ambient super group – or was that System 7?

I’ve always listened to these sounds. Melting brain and mind moments. Today it’s the Aphex Twin – seeking refreshment in layered tones and liquid rhythms. When radio was FM – actually when it was AM – you could scan the airwaves and happen across tones and sounds and tests and trials. I have a cassette tape somewhere of birdsong – just endlessly going on and on – channelled through the airwaves – saying that  - I might just have taped the outside world rather than the sounds I thought were coming from my radio. You’re head gets like that when you’re young.

But laying restless in the night – all hot and bothered – I become ever more aware of those patterns and rhythms – screeches and squelches – distant engines and drifting conversations taking place in space. I’m enthralled to the sound of the city. And in the heat all that is solid melts into air. It may be the fact I work in a school – those drifting lessons – science lectures and shouts – open doors and the ever present gated reverb of corridors built in concrete.

It’s like a Joe Meek and Spector soundclash.It’s a sound I like.

I used to make ambient tapes – way back when I couldn’t (still can’t) mix. I’d use tones and stretches of sound to meld into something else. A tape loop or a found sound merging with a Beaumont Hannant track or Autechre (first album folks – on vinyl too) and make my super friend Daryl listen to it in post comedown revelry on drives from Venus (the club – not the planet) as we wound back to our communal town of shite and steel. Just listening as lights went out and the sun came up. Heady – easy days – my friend. That late eighties early nineties explosion of sound. It seems an age ago. Do you know what I mean?

It is – in fact twenty four years ago.

Nineteen ninety four was twenty four years after The Beatles – they  seemed ancient then – so I guess me blethering on about The Orb and all sorts of sonic business – must sound like that old lag in the bar – harping on about the ‘real’ stuff. Richard (composer – one part Pale Blue Dot) and I once met a guy in a local public house reminiscing about the festival circuit – we named him ‘Tone Henge’ – we all know an ‘Anthony Henge’. I’m becoming one – except I’m talking about sequencers, samples and psychedelia.

I haven’t ever seen the Aphex Twin. I don’t want to really. I also don’t know that much about him. Every now again an interview will surface and revere the sounds and add to the status. Which is fine by me. They’ll be an allusion to his time in a bank vault – or when he played sandpaper at a concert – it’s all fine by me. Because Richard James has made some incredibly interesting – non conformist electronic music over the decades. I was listening to Daft Punk – at home – they hadn’t come to play at my house – it was just a CD. And I was lazily invoking Kraftwerk and Adonis and DJ Pierre and Master at Work. They have made something of this ‘electronic music’ lark and then suddenly – I’m switching from Daft Punk to the true pioneers and I’m mining the Richard James back catalogue – and here you see that uncompromising approach to electronica – there is no sympathy for the modern world. This is a Kraftwerk feeling that a future full of robots is actually quite a daunting prospect – Kafawerk – see what I did there?

Or on the other hand it might just be that the Aphex Twin likes a minor key. I dunno.

Caution: failed artist attempt sentence approaching. I once made a sound installation with a wonderful artist – it was just someone walking up the stairs – just walking around – played over a projection of a room – I hid the speakers in the ceiling. There were no stairs in the room. It was unnerving. In my mind anyway – Aphex seems to tap directly in to that feeling – Xtal wheezys and gasps for breathe and beats pound relentlessly as your chest tightens – ambient sounds for the asthma generation. Wave your inhalers in the air. It combines that Vicks loosening congestant with rave culture capital.

It suits that state of mind here at the start of summer.

Richard D James has released so much music under so many monikers it would be impossible to document the scale of electronic manipulation and creation that has come from his mind to yours (ours) but I often find myself returning to those early ambient works. Those moments of genuine freedom when he wasn’t necessarily thinking of careers  - there’s that wonderful feeling of possibility when you’re young. You’ve yet to reference Stockhausen, you didn’t have immediate access to the back catalogue Kraftwerk or Transmat Records or Metroplex Records – you’re just trying to make sounds that exist in your mind a reality so you can play them to someone else – well even play them to yourself. You just let time disappear as you endlessly change an LFO modulation or move the VCO to change the frequency.  Days ran into weeks when I became wrapped in the micro manipulation of wav forms that emitted squeaks and bleeps from my Roland Juno 6.

You just make music.

The Juno 6 sits in the garage now. Alongside sequencers and old drum machines, tape reverb systems and blown speakers. But it’s not me I’m concerned for -  with the start of the holidays that Gove wants to snatch away from children – you worry for the future Aphex Twins – in bedrooms with time on their hands and sounds in their minds. You need to lose time as well as sleep to commit sounds to tape.

You need to have no other distractions. Let the summer begin. 

And here is Xtal from Selected Ambient Works 82 - 95

I should paint the [blue] room

There was a time when I immersed myself in electronic sounds. Those synthetic beats and the squelch of the 303. Around then – back in the early nineties - the band I was in [which was mostly in my head] had mutated to a three piece – drum machines, analogue synths, sequencers, tape decks, guitars and dub bass. I would set up elaborate recording sessions – those bedroom beats – emanating from the record deck or sequenced on the Korg – with the Roland Juno 6 providing the arpeggiated pulse of the post summer of love.

I was no Aphex Twin.

But those moments exist – locked down on C60s and C90s – waiting to explode again when I eventually buy the Amstrad Studio 100 from ebay – to reanimate them and revel in more nostalgia. [but i said no more nostalgia rides]

These [acidic] experiments were fuelled by the electronica that was slowly filling my waking and walking hours and drifting ever more into my dreams. I was a postman at this point, in communications you see – after all that degree had to count for something. Being a postman had its pluses – its positives – you get to the sorting office – you sort your letters – pop them in the frame – bag up [I am carry bag man] and get out – the time is then yours – through those concrete streets, that when you wondered stopped you going under.

And at weekends I would fill my head with electronic sounds. In the clubs at volume – through purchases across northern record stores and Nick, Danny, Darryl or Chris’s recommendations

And over the last week I have attempted to listen to The Orb.

It had been a week of oddness, of vagueness and cravings and hallucinations as infections rolled around my face and seeped into my teeth. I’ve felt like this many times – all full of something and reeling. And wanting to paint the house - but not moving a muscle - feeling that draining feeling and not sleeping. 

And I always return to the ambient ways of the techno pioneers. Lying upstairs as Smokebelch slowly beats its 13 minutes into my skull and soothes the gums that swell and provide far too much heat in my face. And then mustering the energy to get down stairs and selecting The Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume Two – whilst putting on Football Focus as Papa Doc Crookes and Robbie Savage banter over Swindon’s form or whether Blackburn deserve it this season.

I think I first heard Aphex Twin on John Peel – Analogue Bubblebath or possibly Didgeridoo - all analogue production and rolling acid lines. That DIY approach – recorded on cassettes and cheap four tracks. I remember getting our first computer – a Spectrum 128+ - Daley Thompson loaded in bleeps and whirrs – and simple programming to make it hold a note. You could get a Cheetah keyboard to link up with it – I coveted that keyboard. Never bought it or received it – but imagined the possibilities of machines making music. Richard D James made the sounds in all our analogue heads – those echoes and arpeggios that soothed the soul and chimed with the industrial backgrounds of steel towns.

Washed out and slow – rhythmic but not precise.  Pure ambient work[s] for the sleepless youth.

But I was talking of The Orb and their ambient riffing. I have been trying to listen to them. Not lots of Orb songs – just Blue Room. The epic prog –ambient tune that made it on to TOTP. It’s 47 minutes long. Taking me back to those days and nights when sleep was not required.

It was the day of my twenty first birthday when Alex and Thrash played chess on Top of the Pops – this odd appearance on a pop show for the teens all awash with dub bass and swirls and squelches. I watched it with Paul and then ventured to The Beefeater on a roundabout on the way into town to buy my own and others drinks as I came of age. Listening to The Orb live was a wonder – a vibrant dubbed up sonic experience for the new age. I remember Kilburn Ballroom – bedecked in laser light and smoke – all dark corners and exchanges as their dub merriment carried us upwards and onwards. Music was opening up back then. We were listening to all sorts – everything and anything went.

Thrown in the mix by the good doctor.

And I guess that’s the same for all the young ones today – as they raid the vaults and collide the sounds into new spaces and experiences for their own long nights and emerging dawns. But these electronic sounds are just as important as Heatbreak Hotel – this chain reaction from machines to man through minds and switches and chains and patches – as musique concrete gave way to loops and moogs and the radiophonic workshop switched us on to the low LFO [the work of the good doctor again – except this was a different one – Alex has yet regenerate]

Thrown out at two o’clock onto Kilburn High Street all disorientated as lamp light beams stretched and radiated glows signalling the way home. We decided not to get the night bus – navigate our way through streets and across roads – back street suburbs and mansions as eyes widened to the dark and laughs and nonsense came readily from our mouths.

The Orb could have that effect – all soothing and safe in their ambient arms. And on this magical mystery tour of North London past Abbey Road and houses with one light on – I glanced a bin bag – a simple black bin liner. No reason to get it in my sights – but I fixed on it nonetheless – as we made our way to Trafalgar Square – when buses could drive all the way around it – and between us we opened this bin bag up – a random sack on the roadside and out tumbled ‘Turtle Crazy’ by The Toy Dolls – all glaring cover in a two colour print.

It was a sack full of them – unplayed and unplayable I suppose – but a sack full nonetheless - I would say it was a unique moment – but things like that happen when you’re young and fancy free. But finding them in that sack somehow chimes with the Orb’s sense of fun – that playfulness that keeps your feet dancing and your head expanding.

It was good to listen to The Orb – it was good to get back to my electronic roots – and in the midst of revisiting that room in my room – I stumbled on this – what The Orb do best.