632 The Orb - UFOrb (1992)

 632 The Orb - UFOrb (1992)

Studio Album - Ambient Dub


About the Act:

The Orb are an electronic music group from the UK. They have exited since 1988 but came to fame in the early 90s as the rave/house scene exploded in the UK.

About the Album:

This was their second album and is over an hour long. 

My History with this Album:

None

Review:

So, my initial impression of The Orb was that they were a house music outfit. There were several around when they came to fame. This impression was only partly right. I heard more of them through an album they did with Dave Gilmour, which I really like. To some, it might seem like an odd combination, but it really worked.

I have listened to this album three times, although "listened" might not be the right word. I have had it on as I did other things. It is spectacularly good background music to do other things to, I did programming mostly. It fits right into my programming groove. Often, when I am having a long programming stint I put on Last Train to Lhasa by Banco de Gaia (3 CDs of ambient dub), and this album slots in exactly as that sort of thing. 

It's long-form rhythm-based ambient. The word ambient applies because it changes slowly, but mostly it has a beat, a pulsing dum, dum, dum, and then on top of that there are built soundscapes, snatches of instruments, basslines, synths. It doesn't so much have a structure as an evolution, fading things in, changing things, processing. It doesn't have singing, (maybe snatches) but there are spoken voice samples used quite a bit, particularly between tracks as a hiatus to set up the next track. There's a particular kind of feel to it, I guess some might call it trance music.

Unusually, I kind of know the origins of this sort of thing, back in the early 70s from Krautrock, and people like Klaus Schultze and Tangerine Dream, later Mike Oldfield and Jean Michel Jarre, definitely Jean Michel Jarre. I don't feel bad for not listening intently to it, because that's not the best way to enjoy this music, it's an atmosphere rather than an experience. It's good driving music, it's good thinking music, it might be good going to sleep music, and it's definitely good programming music. It's apparently good coming down from drug trip music, but I have no experience of that.

I guess the reason that this is on this list, is that it has been influential, it may have been one of the first of its style. It really is, to me, indistinguishable from Banco de Gaia (I guess most readers may be more likely to have heard of The Orb though), and given that I really like Banco, I really like this.

8/10


Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/43IjwHiCTNByxDGZFpZ4Sb

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP59Fs_hB7C2Z2NlxQyhGHyjOhH0-JMzT

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.F.Orb



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