--------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Orb by Johan Kugelberg Reprinted with(out) permission from Your Flesh #27 The Orb (who sell shitloads of records) have received a pretty interesting mixed bag of reviews here in America (considering that they are bona-fide media-darlings back in ol' blighty). Some people hate them, I mean HATE them, with the kind of passion you usually save for landlords, poodles and New York Mexican food. Me, I like them a lot. Some of the best current dance stuff, preferably ambient house, has the same kind of trance-inducing qualities usually found on $200+ psych LP's, vintage kraut or Asmus Tietchens/Peter Frohmander/Jeff Greinke albums. The Orb work with found sounds, loops and keyboards in much the same way as TG, Cabaret Voltaire, SPK and Nurse with Wound did in the late 70's and early 80's, but with the development of midi-equipment and the now omnipresent sampler that kind of sound manipulation has become the property of everyman in a way that makes a lot of people (me included) kind of blind to a lot of the weird, experimental and down-right subversive stuff that goes on in the dance/hip-hop/house scene today. With the Orb it even goes a little further than that. Main man Alex Paterson has a solid background in punk rock, being a Killing Joke drum roadie back in times before Jaz Coleman's ego made that vessel sink faster that a hippopotamus dipped in melted lead. Alex also worked as an A&R man for EG, home of Penguin Cafe Orchestra and the lionshare of Brian Eno's back catalogue. Some people I know who really hate the Orb with a passion are pretty damn hypocritical in my book. I'd say that people interested in texture, soundscapes and the creation and development of mood-settings - be it hi-brow like Eno (or fuckin' Stockhausen for that matter) or lo-brow such as duh, I don't know, Dead C. or M.B. or the Luxurious Bags - should check these guys out. On the bands latest album UF Orb the combo have, um, borrowed heavily from releases by Canadian college geniuses the Tape Beatles, and hey, I think that thing on the live album is a pretty blatant Negativland rip-off. UF Orb was one of my top ten favorite albums of 1992. I had the pleasure of spending a day together with Alex Paterson at Dompsey's used clothing warehouse in beautiful Williamsburg, Brooklyn. After Alex had spent some of his dough on a bunch of corporate windbreakers with logo-emblazed backs we sat down at a coffee shop in the Hasidic part of Williamsburg to talk for an hour or so. This is an extremely condensed version of the conversation. YOUR FLESH - The dance scene is very different. The regular rock & roll personality cult thing is obsolete, almost. ALEX PATERSON - We remain quite faceless. We are not in this for the popstar thing because me make music; with house music it's always been sort of a faceless society - there are no rockstars, no people to idolize since it all comes out of a DJ culture. We are treated with respect and we respect the people we work with within the house scene, within the DJ scene. YF: How do you work in the studio? AP: It just spreads. We do write songs, I mean we do the bass line and the drum pattern and the rest of it, but after that it just evolves. We'll start adding weird noises or strange drum patterns and keep on adding, replacing and taking things off until we are happy with what we have. It's the normal process of people using samplers in that respect: Taking natural sounds and setting them to a rhythmic idea. YF: What do you think of the parallels between the house/techno scene and early DIY punk rock? AP: It's been going on for more than five years now in England, and it seems as it the big record companies and the USA are just starting to catch up with it. It's been much slower than the punk thing because that was still basically rock & roll. The music industry could still understand it. Record companies can't understand faceless music. They can't sell the music without a face, pretty or whatever. They don't understand how clubs can have the pull of 10,000 people through the doors every month just for a specific DJ. YF: How do you feel about the sort of cultish, macho techno scene of say, Long Island or Florida? AP: I really like the Detroit techno sound, the originators. We've got all these bad imitators in Europe, these cheap imitations. It's the same stuff that's popular in America now, this really ravey washing machine type howling blind fury techno. YF: I've been to a couple of raves outside New York. The music is like 235 BPM and it's like the mid-80's hardcore scene, moshpit, stage diving and all these adolescent jock types going through the same male-bonding, head-bashing ritual as the metal heads or whatever. Pretty horrible. AP: I totally agree with you, and a lot of other DJ's do too. In England, ecstasy knocked down those barriers of football (soccer) hooliganism where people would like each other instead of beating the shit out of each other. That was when the house scene was at its best. YF: I remember reading this article about the Hacienda and how it sort of fell apart because of drug dealers and guns and gangs. AP: It was mostly because ecstacy wasn't ecstacy any longer, it was speed and coke. YF: How does the live process work? AP: It is us using backup tapes, doing remixes live. Basically we keep the basic tracks and take the samples out and play the samples live. The keyboards live. We've got a hell of a lot of choices to fill in the gaps. There's loads of ambient drop-downs where we've got to fill in the gaps ourselves, otherwise it would just sound really normal. YF: Do you use flow charts or is the stuff improvised? AP: Improvised, pretty much. YF: The flow of the long tracks seems almost mathematical. They are really precise, like the tide or something. AP: Well, we do think about it now much more than in the early days. YF: How do you feel about the first four years of the Orb? AP: We are just trying to get our ideas across. The fact that we are not a band with drums, guitar, vocalist. We come from a club culture, a DJ culture, and this is accepted everywhere except here in America. Our American record company always seem to be trying to half our budgets and we always seem to double the sales expectations and they say "How the hell do you do that when you aren't a band?" There is a club culture that we know about and they don't. It's as simple as that. YF: Big Life seem like they've been great though. AP: They have. It's just that they need to have their asses kicked a bit once in a while. At least they are the only record company I know that have said "I'm sorry, we'll do it your way next time." YF: What's the story on the old rumor about the Eno collaboration? AP: EG tried to get Eno to work with us which was a really bad move. Eno is never going to go back to EG to anything which I didn't realize at the time. Even though I have nothing to do with EG any longer, Eno doesn't want to be seen singing the praises of his past employers. YF: Are there any collaborations that you are particularly keen on? AP: Working with Steve Hillage was great. I always thought of him as a really good guitarist. He came up to me and said that he'd like to make a record with me and that was the first time in 9 years that he'd collaborate with anyone. Me, I was like "What would you want to do that for? I'm just a DJ, mate." I was blown away by this guy. YF: Anyone you'd like to work with in the future? AP: Eno, Fripp or Kraftwerk. That would be three really good ones. YF: It would be pretty amazing if you could do something with Kraftwerk. In a way you guys have bridged the gap between their first couple of albums and their latest stuff. Do you think about the textures of your stuff in the same way? AP: No, not really. Our music makes you happy and you can relax to it. It's that simple really. --------------------