Forty Minutes Of The Orb

Dr. Alex Paterson has been in a rich vein of form in recent years  with The Orb and various side projects rediscovering and revisiting the sounds and elements that made The Orb so good in the 90s- widescreen ambient dub house liberally peppered with vocal samples and the feel of the weightlessness of space. It seemed only right to stitch some of these together into a forty minute mix, the only problem being Orb songs are sometimes of such a length that it could easily have been a three song mix. It was only once I started putting it together I realised that some of the Orb's recent works have a particularly current resonance...

Forty Minutes Of The Orb

• Dohnavùr: New Objectivity (The Orb's Rest And Be Thankful Mix)
• Sedibus: Toi 1338b (Edit)
• OSS: Wow Picasso!
• The Orb: Ital Orb
• The Orb: Alpine (Prins Thomas Short Yoga Break Version)
• The Orb: The Weekend It Rained Forever- Oseberg Buddha Mix (The Ravens Have Left The Tower)

Dohnavùr are a Scottish duo on the excellent Castles In Space label. The Orb's remix is on a remix package that came out in January this year. 

Sedibus is Alex and original Orb man Andy Falconer. Their album The Heavens came out in May 2021 and was one of the records that sound-tracked last summer for me. 

OSS (Orb Sound System) are Alex and Fil Le Gonidec. Enter The Kettle, a six track album, came out in either November 2021 or July 2022 depending on whether you got the digital or the endlessly delayed vinyl. 

Alpine was a single from 2016 with the Prins Thomas mixes following shortly after. At this point The Orb were Alex and Thomas Fehlmann (who has since departed). 

Ital Orb and The Weekend It Rained Forever are both from the album which was one of the sounds of the first lockdown, released just a couple weeks after the country shut down- March 2020's Abolition Of The Royal Familia. On Abolition Of The Royal Familia The Orb were Alex and Michael Rendell with contributions from Roger Eno the lovely piano on The Weekend...), Youth, Steve Hillage, David Harrow, Gaudi, Miquette Giraudy and Nick Burton and it sounded then and still sounds now like a 21st century Orb classic. Have the ravens taken flight yet?

Whippersnapper

The sheer quantity of new material coming from The Orb stable could be a bit overwhelming; alongside the Royal Familia album and the remixes version, the recent further adventures of The Orb remixes of other artists, the outstanding Sebidus album from Alex Paterson and Andy Falconer, not to mention the Chocolate Hills album from 2019, there's now another new album in the pipeline- Enter The Kettle from OSS. OSS is Orb Sound System (or On Sum Shit), a collaboration between Alex and Fil, friends from both being Killing Joke roadies way back and with Orb history dating back through various albums and gigs. The first taster for Enter The Kettle is Whippersnapper, a track that sounds like it started out in the same space as the Sebidus album, space travel and widescreen ambience, but on OSS Fil brings a tougher edge to the sound, a metallic, industrial ambient groove. 

The album isn't out until November and it seems a bit depressing to be looking and pre- ordering an album that far ahead, when summer will be long gone and winter in front of us, but I'm guessing that this is in large part due to the problems in getting vinyl pressed by the limited number of pressing plants available and the major labels block booking plants for their own releases.

The quantity of releases Alex has been putting out across the Orb board, to go back to the start of this post, would be too much of the quality wasn't high but the entire Orb operation is at the top of its game at the moment and OSS looks like being another genuine contender.