The Orb pioneered an innovative approach to dance music. Their songs are wonderful collages of sounds, finding inspiration in the club but also in nature. It’s hard to imagine the work that goes into writing and producing a song like “Blue Room” – a slinky, groovy banger with percussion that sounds like water drops – and it makes the case for the outfit as mad musical geniuses. Modern dance music owes a considerable debt to the Orb, and though their contribution to the genre has been somewhat underappreciated, their output is extraordinary.
The compilation Orboretum: The Orb Collection is a great chance to revisit their fantastic music. Compiled and curated by founding member Dr Alex Paterson, this set includes their most critical hits in various remixes and edits. The Orb sport a prolific and comprehensive discography that includes 17 studio albums, several EPs, and compilations. Their first LP, 1991’s The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, is rightly considered one of the greatest and most influential dance music albums.
That iconic reord is represented by three tracks that highlight the Orb’s fascinating creativity. The songs simmer with early 1990s club flair but throw listeners for a loop with some ingenious use of samples (not just songs but ambient sounds of nature like babbling brooks, wind, even a rooster crowing). The compilation wisely gives listeners a broad range of their output, not allowing for one album to dominate, including work that spans all three of their decades. While collecting all of the Orb’s records would be a daunting – if smart – task, Orboretum is a fantastic encapsulation of a very distinct and unique oeuvre.
Paterson is bright in chronologically sequencing the tracks because listeners hear the Orb’s growth and evolution and their progressive impact on dance music, particularly club, dance-pop, and ambient. The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld showed a broad audience how beautiful and intoxicating dance music is. The Orb – Paterson, along with collaborations with Kris Weston, Andy Falconer, Martin Glover, Miquette Giraudy, Steve Hillage, Guy Pratt, Jake le Mesurier, Paul Ferguson, and Thomas Fehlman, among others – forged the idea of dance music as being more than just fodder for the clubs, but beautiful works of sonic art. The music is a swirling, dizzying montage of different elements of popular culture, jumping off from various places.
The opening track, “A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld”, opens with the swoony soul ballad, “Lovin’ You”, by the late/great Minnie Riperton. When the single came out in 1989, the Orb used the original 1974 classic before replacing Riperton’s scale-climbing vocals with an uncanny ghost vocalist (think a rave version of Marni Nixon). The song powers through, hurtling at top speed, picking up sounds and noises, allowing a natural link to its following track, “Little Fluffy Clouds”. Another fabulous artist is sampled, Rickie Lee Jones, who waxes rhapsodic about her childhood as the club beats clang and strut behind her. The Orb’s absorption with audio samples makes the dub sounds of “Perpetual Dawn” seem like a natural and easy fit into their library.
The Orb’s first album is seminal, as is their sophomore release, U.F.Orb, released in 1992. The sole track represented in this compilation, “Blue Room”, speaks to the sublime development of their sound. On a sinewy house beat, samples and sounds buzz, breaking up a funky grooviness that marries the ambient 1990s club sound with 1970s funk soul. The song is one of the Orb’s greatest hits because it finds a sweet spot where their idiosyncratic artiness intersects with mainstream pop. (It’s one of the Orb’s highest-charting hits despite its original running time of over 30 minutes.)
If the first two studio albums showed the Orb on an ascent, they proved to have legs when they released their fourth album, 1997’s Orblivion. The hit single, “Toxygene”, ensured they could move through the 1990s, building on their distinct sound while remaining current. The Orb’s sound was regularly celebrated as being ‘spacey’ with science fiction elements and sporting a mordant sense of wit about culture. Orblivion found nuanced facets in jungle, bass, and garage, folding into a dense yet thoroughly listenable brand of electronic dance music.
More so than most of their peers, the Orb maintained an impeccable string of excellent releases throughout the 1990s. Things proved to be trickier upon entering the new millennium. Cydonia’s sound was multitextured and undulating, like a tossed quilt. However, the work pointed at far more conventional pop sounds. So, a song like the dreamy “Once More” is rich but represents a slight dim in the innovation of earlier singles. The slightly sluggish “Ghostdancing” sounded like a retread of the midtempo, downbeat trip-hop that the Orb were revolutionizing several years earlier.
In 2004, Bicycles & Tricycles found the Orb digging in their heels when it came to putting out dance music. It pulled together all of the seemingly disparate sounds of the previous releases and pushed it through a 2000s filter. A song like “Gee Strings” brings it to the runway with early 1990s supermodel glory. “Aftermath” flirts with hip-hop and trip-hop and recalls Massive Attack, with a charismatic appearance by rapper Soom T.
The grinding stomper “From a Distance” is most exciting, which sounds like an affectionate nod to their history, with its crowded, busy production rippling with sonic breaks and waves. Bicycles & Tricycles seemed to be an essential bridge between the Orb of the 1990s, which were dominating the dance scene, and the Orb of the 2000s, which were inventing in an era in which music, particularly dance music, was becoming far more scattered as the internet disrupted the music industry.
As the Orb approached their 30th anniversary as a musical act, they avoided the trap many vet acts fell for: The Orb weren’t a nostalgia act. Paterson was intent on experimenting and growing. Released in 2018, No Sounds Are Out of Bounds is a large, cinematic type of record that felt, at once, like the work of a legacy act that could still make fresh and vital work. It’s not the towering work of the first two albums. Still, the record’s title felt apt: The Orb sound excited and adventurous on the record, deliriously delivering an appealing cacophony of noises and styles. “Rush Hill Road” is an especially ingratiating track with a shiny, catchy pop hook, charming vocals, and a haunting melody.
Abolition of the Royal Familia, the Orb’s 16th release, coming out in 2020, four years after Donald Trump’s election and Brexit, and the exploding popularity of the alt-right throughout most of the West reflected some of that street on the record. The record found geopolitics and topical issues among its tracks, yet it’s not a dour record.
“Hawk Kings (Oseberg Buddhas Buttonhole)” is a bright, spunky track that leans into the Orb’s affection for the 1990s-era house. Steven Hawking introduces the record with a spoken peace as mesmerizing synth makes way for ballroom-style house-pop. It’s a glorious record and arguably one of their best. Even more moving is “AAA (Violeta Vicci Remix [Hung, Drawn & Quartered])”, a sweeping, orchestral number that looks not only to the Orb’s ambient past but to contemporary classical music, creating an echoey, cavernous soundscape that sounds elegant.
The most recent studio album, last year’s Prism, is represented by a single track, the final of the record, “H.O.M.E. (High Orbs Mini Earth)”. It’s a seeming summation of the Orb’s sound and musical persona, creating an intergalactic sound piece that sounds formless before the beat drops and the song becomes a glassy, sleek dance track. It’s a curious way to end this compilation album because it draws this sprawling and exciting musical story with a whisper instead of a shout. It’s also an excellent bookend to the thumping first track – the two songs couldn’t be more different, as the late 1980s dance of “A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld” contrasts with the downtempo house of “H.O.M.E.” It shows an evident maturity and brilliance early in the Orb’s tenure as well as a relaxed confidence in its current state.
Orboretum is an exhaustive collection, but it isn’t overwhelming, mainly because the songs’ strengths lie in how intelligent and absorbing the sounds are. The Orb use technology and culture to craft truly astonishing music. Orboretum isn’t just a greatest hits album but an engrossing history.