The Orb |
|
Often
accused by the media of being an “ambient dinosaur”, the good doctor
has wisely stuck to his guns this time round, returning to the sci-fi
ambient reggae sound of yore. As custodian of The Orb, The Dream sees
Paterson take back under his wing numerous old faces such as Youth,
Steve Hillage, and Dreadzone's Tim Bran. The result is a return to
form, and the heady days of The Orb’s trippy, drug-induced sound. |
| How contrived were your earliest forays into ambient house? We basically created our own genre in a small kind of way by calling our music Ambient House, which nobody had ever done before – and we built our own blueprint. I’d been DJing in such an environment myself, knowing that it had worked within the realms of The Land of Oz Days in 1989 – and we’d been making music since 1988 anyway without finding our true path. But it wasn’t as contrived as that, only in retrospect by looking back at it and talking about it in that way. We were going out clubbing ourselves then coming home and saying, “well, what are we going to do now then?” And what did you do? We went into the studio and made really weird music. Luck was with us on that level. Working with Jimmy Cauty, who had his own studio in a squat in Stockwell - we had previous, so to speak. It just seemed like a natural thing to do for us at that point. You’ve often been compared as an electronic alternative to Pink Floyd, has this been a source of irritation? Yeah (Laughs]. Only because it put us on a huge pedestal and Pink Floyd are Pink Floyd, there’s no other band that are going to be like Pink Floyd. I really didn’t get it from the very beginning, because I was coming from club land, and I know Floyd never came from club land. We just had to live with it, rumour has it one of the reasons they called themselves Pink Floyd was after Floyd Paterson, the world championship boxer from the fifties. You can name what you’re going to do and you can get it out, but if people actually enjoy it as well then that’s a great buzz. How did the infamy of having a No.1 album with U.F.Orb affect you? Well I suppose having a No.1 album in Britain gave us lots of really big gigs across around the world. It then gave us this milestone tied around our ankles whereby we felt that we couldn’t compete or do that again – and why bother? We’d reached the pinnacle of what we wanted to do on that level, so Pomme Fritz was born. We were a new fish in a big ocean full of very, very large sharks. Did you find it difficult putting things in perspective as far as which direction your music should go? Well whatever decision you make is always going to piss somebody off that’s for sure. In those days, we were taking advice from people that we thought were looking after us but at the end of the day they were actually looking after themselves, and that’s part of the growing up scenario of being in a band in the rock and roll world anyway. If you can survive that you can probably survive anything. Many artists continue to make those “wrong decisions” throughout their entire career, is that because the industry is corrupt? Well yeah, but this industry is falling apart at the seams as we talk. It’s all going to be about free music, or 89 cents for a track, but the only good that I see about the demise of those record companies is that they take 80% of your earnings, give you 20% and say… there you are, you’ve been a good boy this year, we’ll give you an advance next year if you’re good and turn up at The Brits and tell everybody how brilliant the Brits are. That’s so fucking fabricated as well – it’s another reason why we suddenly went from being the press darlings to everyone not really liking The Orb anymore. We’d been nominated with the U.F.Orb album for The Brits, and we just basically turned round and said can you take those stickers off please? We don’t want to be associated with that kind of crap. They’d never supported us, why should we start supporting them? Has there ever been an Orb album that you were not entirely happy with? Erm, not really, not at the time of finishing it. But that’s only because of what happened in life. There are dark moments on Cydonia – but I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t get affected by people. Some parts of Bicycles & Tricycles are almost like a requiem. It’s like being a DJ, if you’re in a really good mood and project that in the music you’re playing, you’ll find your rhythm, but if you’re not in that mood they’re not going to fucking stand there and listening to you DJing like an arse. You’ve done about 80 remixes, which projects did you look forward to remixing most? Yellow Magic Orchestra was an amazing project in the sense that they came to us and wanted us to remix a 5-track mini album, about 50 minutes of music – Technodome I think it was. That was just really good fun; we basically went into the studio with a live drummer for the first time after using drum machines for yonks, and went back to old-school recording like I used to do with Killing Joke. When somebody else is paying you to experiment, why not experiment? Did you ever do remixes just for the money? Hmm, those remixes were in the days when we did Pomme Fritz and the U.F.Orb album and we were the flavour of the month. We were getting remixes every week almost and everybody wanted a piece of the pie in that sense. The money situation was that we were actually living in the style we wanted to live in, and if you get into an altercation with your management it’s pretty hard work. But we’re taking micro bits of my life - 85% of the time making music is brilliant fun. If the success rate of a striker was 90% you’d be phenomenal, you’d be on for a £60-70 million pound deal, so I’m not complaining. When was your new album, The Dream, initially conceived? It seems like a long time ago; it was about two years ago. We had finished it Christmas before last, but we wanted to add lots of finishing touches. It was actually released in Japan last October. We wanted to go back a little bit and take the U.F.Orb and the Adventures album as a blueprint, make the music a bit simpler - a bit more poppy - and add a few more vocals as well. In essence there’s only 4 or 5 vocal tracks on the album, the rest of them are ambient epics. We wanted to keep a feel of yesteryear but more 21st century really… or even 23rd century, let’s go further. It seems a very cheerful record, perfectly at ease and comfortable with making the music you want to make? Well it’s great doing an album with really old friends. With Youth, we have a history way beyond the musical world we live in – we’ve sort of grown up together from school days. Having your mates come back and do an album together is brilliant; we were constantly in stitches because we kept remembering things that we did when we were 13, 18 or 23. Who has collaborated with you on this record? The main players were Youth and Dreadzone’s Tim Bran. Then we got some vocalists in, a lad from around my way called Corporal – an old dance hall toaster, a Japanese singer called Aki Omori – who did a single with us called Once More, and another girl called Juliet Roberts whose done vocals for Primal Scream and more bluesy bands – she’s got a lovely voice. We also got Andy Hughes to come in and do some engineering on a couple of tunes, a couple of mixes, and Greg Hunter – both engineers from the early days. What approach did you use in the recording of the album? Pretty much software really, it was done from Ableton to Pro Tools or visa versa. Towards the end of the album we were using lots of live drums and live bass – Youth is playing bass on most of the tunes. If he’s not playing bass once on one tune, he’s playing bass four times on one tune – lots of frequencies there. A few keyboards were thrown in, like the EMS 2000. Have you slowly moved from hardware to software over the years? We’re using a studio with a band called The Routemasters at the moment, and we’ve gone down the route of using really old school keyboards. We record most things live onto DAT and try to keep things as live as possible. There’s another project called HFB (High Frequency Bandwidth), and we have a studio in Berlin where I do a lot of recording as well – that’s based on Pro Tools with the odd outboard machine throw in. We’re kind of trying to give it that chill-hop vibe. There’s
more sampling on The Dream than ever, why did you use particular samples?
Most of them are
spoken samples, which have been replayed – or re-spoken, there’s not
really a lot of other samples. Where did we derive them from? That would
be telling wouldn’t it? I think we should move on really – it’s the
same old question and same old answer. We will continue to carry on
pushing the boundaries with sampling until my grandchildren die. |
"Kraftwerk was even interested in The Orb. They came round to our flat and had a cup of tea – then we said let’s go to the studio. They said no let’s have another meeting, so we said well we’re going to the studio if you don’t want to join us then see you later - and that was the end of that!" |
So you hold firm to the philosophy that you should be able to take whatever you want and use it however you want? People take music freely whenever they want and don’t pay anybody for anything so why shouldn’t we be able to? Some of the samples come from tape machines of people phoning up supermarkets and winding people up, where do you draw the line there? As Youth pointed out only the other day, Alex is the only person I know who’s got cassettes full of answer phone messages that he can pull out and start playing to people and they’re totally legit. A lot of people are very frightened of what might happen if they steal a sample and it becomes a very big record. What are your expectations for this release? I hope that we can get some good gigs in the summer and record another album. We’re actually releasing a covers album in the summer, called Orb Ups, which is almost like our own little remix project, except it’s cover versions. It will include everyone from Grace Jones to Lynyrd Skynyrd. What do you think about the state of electronic music today, both within the commercial domain and the underground? Well it’s got its own life – it’s never going to die! It’s been stabbed a few times by journalism and record labels but it’s still there. It’s 20 years old in essence and still going quite strong. In the attempts of record labels trying to destroy it, it’s become almost like an underground hip hop scene for young kids to get into. Does the affordability
of electronic gear allow it to flourish amongst the youth? That’s
exactly what it does. There are obviously very good musicians making
music under the guise of Techno, which makes it even more interesting
to listen to. The minimal glitch stuff I do like, the German sound
– trust me I’ve been round the world in the last month and that’s
where it’s at out of the UK. The stuff from Kompakt or Shitkatapult.
Sun Electric’s early stuff has just been re-issued and is going down
really well around the world. |
The name game with Alex Paterson Kraftwerk Massive
Attack Aphex
Twin Brian
Eno Gary
Numan |
The
Orb interview,
Barcode 2008 ©
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