Orb

Alex Paterson was one of the seminal musicians of the 1990s. Orb, in fact, coined a new musical genre: a kind of dance music that denies dance, a kind of electronic music that denies electronics, a kind of rock music that denies rock and roll. Orb’s music emerges at the intersection of Brian Eno’s impressionistic landscapes, the postmodern ideology of recycling, new sampling techniques, and techno music. They transformed the disc jockey into a composer of modern classical music and brought the art of collage into electronic music. Paterson carried out one of the most influential operations of the fin de siècle.

Jimmy Cauty, fresh from the revolutionary records of the KLF, joined forces with Alex Paterson (former Killing Joke roadie, Brian Eno employee, and DJ) to form Orb.

Paterson was one of the DJs hired by Paul Oakenfold for the “chill-out room,” where anyone wanting to rest between dances (or between one “high” and another) could relax listening to slow, gentle electronic music. Paterson was therefore one of the inventors of “ambient house.” In 1988, he was commissioned to create two tracks (Tripping On Sunshine and Suck My Kiss) for separate compilations, both credited to Orb. The following year, an EP under his own name, Kiss, was released. He was then invited by Cauty to participate in the sessions for Chill Out and finally to join him in Orb. The idea was to focus solely on trance-dance, concentrating on Cauty’s specialty, without Drummond’s humor.

The collaboration bore its first fruit with the EP A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld (Wau! Mr Modo, 1989), a cosmic mantra of water, wind, and synth arpeggios, not far from the popular new age of the time; yet for acid house clubs, it was a revolutionary novelty.

By this point, Orb consisted of Paterson and a few friends (including Steve Hillage and Kristian Weston). The album Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld (Wau, 1991 – Big Life, 1992) came out during the full boom of “ambient house.” The album contained only ten tracks, totaling around two hours of music.
Opening with another gem of the genre, Little Fluffy Clouds (sampling Rickie Lee Jones narrating stories from her childhood), the album culminated in the ritual celebration of Earth (tapes of natural sounds, biblical recitations, ecstatic atmosphere) and the Gregorian-mass-with-violin-and-African-tribalism of Into The Fourth Dimension, all over a house-rhythmed bed that was simultaneously soft and frenzied.
The thin arrangements, with amateur-manipulated sequencers (at least compared with the Wagnerian harmonies of 1970s German ensembles), actually contributed to the hypnotic effect of the music. Paterson’s good sense of humor prevented him from taking himself too seriously or degenerating into the pretentious suites common to many KLF imitators: the year was rounded off by the absurdist reggae of Perpetual Dawn (Big Life).

The next release, U.F. Orb (Island, 1992), steeped in dub sounds, became the first best-seller of ambient techno.
The locomotive of the title track was essentially an accelerated dub beat, which was then split and multiplied to create an “ethnic” effect.
The album actually presented a more experimental form of music. By fusing tribalism and cosmic music—combining African rhythms with sequencer patterns in Close Encounters, indulging in exotic sounds (Talking Heads-style polyrhythms, female vocals, and Hassell-like flutes) in Majestic, exploiting Sherwood’s rhythmic teachings to the fullest in the monumental Towers Of Dub (whose rattling minimalist repetition, propelled by a blues harmonica, culminates in a strong staccato dub beat), and inserting minimalist techniques of obsessive repetition of simple phrases in the thirteen-minute O.o.b.e. (sequencers and “ethnic” flutes in a tangle of slowly rotating atmospheric sounds), Paterson perfected the “ambient” idiom and abstracted it completely from its cultural origins.
The pinnacle of Paterson’s skills in sound “assembly,” mixing, sampling, and filtering is, however, Blue Room, a 17-minute track recorded with the help of Steve Hillage and Jah Wobble, among others. It is music without borders, infused with sidereal hisses, soft and very slow drones, sprinkled with small aquatic dissonances, far closer to new age than dance music. Even when the rhythm arrives (in the second half), it feels more like reggae than techno. (The track set the record for the longest single at 40 minutes.)
Even though each track is introduced (in a somewhat annoying way) by sampled voices and “found” noises, the result is worthy of masterpieces by Brian Eno, Harold Budd, and Jon Hassell—the great triad of ambient music.

The singles Assassin (tribalism, Kraftwerk, and Tangerine Dream) and No Fun (another forty minutes) fueled the myth. Meanwhile, Paterson also played with Steve Hillage’s System 7.

The live double album Live ’93 (Island, 1994) seems to transpose to the rave world the custom once reserved for proletarian rock, which itself was intended for large arenas. The style is even more psychedelic, closer to the Pink Floyd sound that Paterson mimics on the cover. Plateau, a long psychedelic “journey” with a cloud of indecipherable noises cycling around a frenzied yet graceful beat, and Valley, with a heavy dub cadence upfront and refined samples embedded in a gelatinous texture not far from Robert Rich’s electronics, are the manifestos of this new course.

The mini-album Pomme Fritz (1994), perhaps inspired by Irresistible Force’s Flying High, abandons entirely the dance clubs from which Paterson originated. The title track undulates in a minimalist, gamelan-inspired sway; We’re Pastie draws freely from Dadaist and musique concrète traditions from half a century earlier. However, the avant-garde aspirations are hampered by the musician’s indolence, as here he seems more to be dozing in his jungle of keyboards.

With Orbus Terrarum (Island, 1995), the novelty had already grown old. The surreal quality of Oxbow Lakes (cyclical loose piano chords, pressing percussion crescendos, fade-out of cosmic hisses) is what remains of the classic style. Montagne D’Or deepens the dance music aspect with the overwhelming echoes of Valley. Slug Dub (an organ riff borrowed from Miles Davis’ Calypso Frelimo) picks up where it left off. The sprinkling of samples in White River Junction is no longer remarkable, and Occidental disappears into that fog of indecipherable signs, suggesting that the limit of this rarefied style is the total disintegration of sound.

Paterson also participated in the ambient supergroup FFWD (Inter-Modo, 1994) with Robert Fripp, Thomas Fehlmann (of Palais Schaumburg), and his trusted Weston. Their first album is a classy, lighthearted enjoyment in the field of electroacoustic contemplative music.

Paterson was at the peak of his mixing skills on Orblivion (Island, 1997). A track like Delta MK II is essentially a summation of his career: samples, Brian Eno–style synthetic polyrhythms, “cosmic” keyboard hisses, hip-hop scratches, and vertiginous drum’n’bass. All the tracks adhere to this principle of frenzied collage: they are very easy to compose and perform, given a recording studio of that quality. More than ever, Paterson seems a diligent disciple of Brian Eno. The melodic vignettes and rhythmic eccentricities of these tracks are in every way a continuation of the futuristic instrumental music program of Before And After Science, simply updated with modern production tools.
Within that school, Paterson’s true talent is not so much his ability to operate mixing machines (Passing Of Time attempts to be the album’s tour de force, but is merely a tedious flow of banality), but the sly way he places melody within the most hostile sonic landscapes. The minimalist music-box of Ubiquity carves its way through the comical bubbles of synthesizers and the tectonic syncopations of rhythm boxes. That of Molten Love is camouflaged within a triumph of metallurgical and ethnic cadences. The playful novelty of Tokygene is built on a robotic rhythm and cartoonish samples. In Asylum, the distorted keyboard choruses weave a web of electronics over mechanical percussion.
The single Toxygene, by contrast, is a humble return to origins, to the chic disco sound.

Cydonia (Island, 2001) simply continues the string of poorly inspired albums of the 1990s. After a long hiatus, Paterson returns with a mediocre, chill-out exercise that a few progressive touches in Terminus and Hamlet Of Kings can't fully redeem. Four mediocre songs (delivered by two guest vocalists who don't seem to be up to the task, unless the idea was to parody his own compositions, Once More and Plum Island being the least tedious) may open a new phase in Paterson's career, but the rest is self-indulgent recycling of old ideas. And not his best ones.

Voyage Into Paradise (Liquid Sound, 2001), a work at the border between dub and musique concrete, is credited to Dr Alex Paterson.

Bless You (Shanachie, 2002) collects assorted collaborations between Alex Paterson and other ambient musicians.

The saga of Orb continued with Bicycles & Tricycles (Cooking Vinyl, 2004), an album rather irrelevant in the scene of 2004, whether they try to repeat themselves or to update their sound to the new generations (downtempo, trip-hop, drum'n'bass). The Land Of Green Ginger, From a Distance, Abstractions, Tower Twenty Three are mildly interesting in the latter camp, whereas the rap experiment of Aftermath (a first for the Orb) sounds like a desperate move. The simpler and steadier Gee Strings and Hell's Kitchen turn out to be more fun.

Battersea Shield (Malicious Damage, 2005) is a collaboration with Meat Beat Manifesto.

Orb tried to update their sound on Okie Dokie (Kompakt, 2005), de facto a Fehlmann solo album, to minimal techno, hip-hop, dub, industrial music, and so forth, with mixed results.

Sticking instead to the classic sound of Orb, The Dream (Stereo Deluxe, 2008) is, mostly, a sign of graceful aging (especially the glossy production), but sample-based ambient dance-music is hardly relevant in 2008, as the single Vuja De indirectly implies.

Baghdad Batteries: Orbsessions Vol. III (Malicious Damage, 2009) was influenced by minimal techno.

Metallic Spheres (Columbia, 2010), later revised as Metallic Spheres in Colour (2023), contains two multi-part suites (the 28-minute Metallic and the 20-minute Spheres) that are de facto collaborations between Alex Paterson and Pink Floyd's guitarist David Gilmour. As it is often the case with collaborations, the sum is rarely equal to its parts. At one point they also remix Graham Nash's Chicago, with help from producer and bassist Youth of Killing Joke.

Orb then released the remix album C Batter C (2011), The Orbserver in the Star House (2012), a collaboration with dub master Lee "Scratch" Perry, Moonbuilding 2703 AD (2015), COW / Chill Out, World! (2016), No Sounds Are Out of Bounds (2018), Abolition of the Royal Familia (2020), Prism (2023), and Buddhist Hipsters (2025).