PLANET TO PLANET: The Orb   by Neil Strauss
Option Magazine #48, Jan/Feb 1993 pg 62

	In England, people don't go to see a band now, says Alex
Paterson, the turntable-whiz behind the Orb. "They go to see a DJ.
This has been going on for like five summers. Punk rock never Iasted
five years so that probably shows you the strength of dance music."

	More than anyone else, the Orb has taken dance music and
turned the form on its head, stretched the notion so wide that it no
longer necessarily includes dance beats. Try tapping your feet to
either of the Orb's first two albums and you'll discover that Alex
Paterson is more concerned with recreating the progressive rock of his
youth than hitting the perfect beat. With spacy synthesizers churning
for five, ten, up to 20 minutes behind chanting monks, ringing phones
and sampled TV chatter, Paterson's music is no different than his club
mixing: both are ambient house attempts to capture the feeling of
"Perpetual Dawn," as the title of an Orb song reads - or "3 A.M.
Eternal," as his former callaborators the KLF put it.

	Until last year, Paterson was still doing DJ gigs at clubs,
most ohen spinning records in a chill out room at London's Land of Oz.
"I'm not going out looking for big-time DJ spots anymore," he says.
"There's no need. It's gone over the top now that the Orbs managed to
get to number one on the [U.K.] album charts."

	lt's not surprising that Paterson was once an A&R man at EG 
Records, home of Brian Eno and birthplace of ambient music. There, 
he learned that you can make unobtrusive songs interesting. But it 
took a trip to New York - and visions of something Eno-esque in Tony 
Humphry's dance mixes on KISS-FM - to teach Paterson that ambient 
music might be as appropriate on the dance floor as in the home. 
Years later, in 1989, he released his first album, the directionless 
Kiss EP, in a limited edition of 1,000; it was never reissued.

	However, Paterson's two follow-up tracks created a buzz on the
rave scene. The 18-minute "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That
Rules From the Centre of the Ultraworld" was a fusion of avant-Kraut
electronics, Minnie Riperton and Oxy 10 ad samples; "Little Fluffy
Clouds" incorporated the voice of Rickie Lee Jones waxing dreamy abaut
her childhood into bubble beats, crowing roosters and Ennio Morricone
samples. Both were included on the Orb's first American album, The
Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, along with collaborations with
Brilliant bassist Guy Pratt and ex Gong guitarist Steve Willage. The
cover, an altered photo of the four-stack power statian last seen on
Pink Floyd's Animals, clued prospective buyers into what they were
purchasing prog rock with turntables, samplers, CD players, and Pet
Shop Boys beats. Few tracks on the original British album clocked in
at less than 10 minutes (though Mercury slimmed the songs clown for
the damestic release). "We've come back with real bastardized dance
music," says Paterson. "but we've come back with our own version ."

	The Orb's follow-up, U.F.Orb, takes the experiment further,
discarding more beats in favor of electronic noodling and
experimentation. It includes sounds of prank phone calls to Haile
Selassie, the Rasta godhead and former Ethiopian emperor; discussions
of Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere la hypothetical "orb" of thought
around the world); and samples of animal body functions.  The
highlight, perhaps, is "Tower of Dub," a 15-minute lesson in collage
that matches blues harmonica and heavy reggae guitar samples with
barking dogs, shimmering gongs, snippets from past Orb singles and
dizzying spatial effects.

	What makes Paterson, a former Killing Joke roadie, such an
important personality on the ambient/dance scene is that he's made it
possible for DJs to transcend themselves, to become autonomous
artists; still dependent on other people's records, but only as
outlets for their own creativity. Though Paterson is not currently
taking DJ gigs, he hasn't abandoned the artform. "I still see myself
as a DJ," he says. "The Orb has managed to incorporate a band within a
DJ structure and get away with it As opposed to the main body of a
group being a singer and a guitarist, the main body of our band is the
DJ as engineer It's just a different way of looking at things."

	Paterson has helped to further enrich the DJ's standing as a
musician, bringing new blood to pop music, and twisting club culture
with gems like the 40-minute single "No Fun." Most importantly, he has
created a dance music designed for listening. "I use different ideas,
as opposed to a musical idea, he says. "I use a strange noise idea.
Hopefully,that will give a lot of confidence to anyone who listens to
our stuff and thinks, 'Well, cor, I wonder if we can do that?' All you
gotta do is get some ideas and really weird noises and a sampler -
which, believe me, is good fun."