The Orb - ’U.F.Orb’
No. 38 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
“Is there a Haile Selassie here?” — “No” — ”Could you possibly, if he does, he will come in very shortly, would you tell him that Marcus Garvey, ehm, phoned?” — “Uh huh” — ”And that I will meet him, well it's, meet him in Babylon and Ting?”
So Dr. Alex Paterson and Co. immortalized the cross-ways and intergalactic jams of Jamaican dub reggae and its homesick wanderings, with the psychedelic dreamtime of rave and the heady antics of the sample-verse. The Orb’s U.F.Orb remains perhaps Paterson’s greatest album even though many imitators and admirers have turned its innovations into tropes and clichés, giving it a dated quality to undiscerning ears. Unapologetically trippy and “out there,” yet sweet and uplifting, it launched an industry-wide race to chill and thrill, and exploded techno into a hundred new stylizations and genres, from ambient dub to trip hop to progressive trance.
While it’s true that The Orb’s debut double album, The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld was more historic and important — unfurling ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ into the defiant right to trip out — U.F.Orb made good on its promise and pushed Paterson’s crazy ideas into an accessible smart-bomb, reaching No. 1 on the UK Albums Chart. Which makes it a kind of miracle, or a reminder of an age of miracles, when people dared to dream that they could make peace through sound waves and beats and dance moves, and open the human imagination to worlds yet undreamed…
“Oh, is that Haile Selassie?” — “No, it wasn't him, it was a cab.” — “He's a, he's a Black gentleman.” The sample of satirist Victor Lewis-Smith prank calling London Weekend Television studios posing as Marcus Garvey (a Jamaican political activist and Pan-Africanist) to arrange a meeting with Haile Selassie (the Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974), at “Babylon and Ting” (a reference to an oppressive and corrupt society) is not just a fun skit and love letter to Rastafarian culture, but comments on the deeper meta-truth of 1990s electronica: that it owed its being not just to White German or English musicians and inventors, but much more so to the history and indomitable soul of Black music. Like rock ‘n’ roll before it, rave was that strange impossible hybrid of Jamaican, European and American byways along with Asia, Australia and every expression on the Earth spinning in on itself back to Africa.
Unidentified. Flying. Orb. As if spinning through the matrix, a new wave, a new “orb” of energy and ideas, of artistries and technologies, was carrying the whole world into the future. The album’s cover art perfectly captured that liminal moment of 1988 to 1992, with its sci-fi preoccupations with space, its nascent computer graphics star (The Orb’s original 2D logo coming to life in 3D), complete with its glowy baby blue lettering redolent of an ironic fascination with The Jetsons. Foreshadowing the countless desktop-published and Photoshopped rave flyers that would pepper Western civilization, its artwork represented the “state of the art,” even though truthfully it prefigured the ephemeral nature of an insta-speedy digital spark.
“You can’t have your cream cake without editing your meat and two veg first,” Paterson explained to Mixmag’s Lucy O’Brien on the eve of the album’s release. “You have to put a foundation down; you might ditch them at the end of it, but they should be there in the first place.” He was describing how there was indeed a through-line, or groove-line that went through The Orb’s music versus the soupy, aimless mires of so many New Age musics, the butt-end of so many jokes thanks to the UK’s more harsh journalists. Of course, The Orb was making those same journalists eat their words, riding a sensation of ambient house exhilaration that they had started along with former bandmate, Jimmy Cauty, of The KLF. Paterson, it seemed, was in a zone. Importantly, U.F.Orb’s aesthetic and art endured because of its busy simplicity.
At the release party, U.F.Orb shimmered and echoed to sequenced lasers at the London Planetarium, in some ways continuing the generational handshake between ‘90s ambient adventurers and progressive rock gods Pink Floyd. Following in the foot steps of his heroes, much how Pink Floyd took live performances into the interiority of humanity as much as it explored its exteriority through concerts and in films like Live At Pompeii, in old classical amphitheaters, Paterson perceived that rave like rock would need to project back out a greater human heritage. Their live shows then became important extensions of their universal rhythms. Yes, lasers, but also projections of sea life and stars and astral tunnels, as if inside a space cave.
What was this Orb then? The point of it was mystery. The point of it was a formlessness. The point of it was movement set against stillness, and stillness in unison with movement. And like The Black Dog’s Temple of Transparent Walls, the cocooning of the Internet world and its butterfly imaginings, in search of communion with the timeless through the technologic, painted in mind-caves of darkness — but a darkness that accentuates the lightness. So not a cave cave, but a sky, a firmament, a wide open universe. Because while its rituals were mostly nocturnal, The Orb and its brethren painted with light. And instead of cave-painting animal hunts or herds of ungulates, they dreamed of talking with sea mammals, picturing oceanic change.
In 1992 and 1993, The Orb’s star was rising and then orbiting the planet. The Orb appeared twice on the covers of New Musical Express and Melody Maker respectively. They would tour Europe and America multiple times, and then Asia and Australia. In many ways, they were taking their ambassadorial duties seriously and articulating a pictographic language and instrumental musical aesthetic that could speak to more and more humans, and perhaps, in their more whimsical moments, even aliens and other species. In 1991, only a few months after U.F.Orb climbed up the charts that summer, NME caught up with Paterson and co-pilot Kris Weston (AKA Thrash), in Paris, as they circled the Louvre museum’s glass pyramid — taking in the Sun.
“‘Good morning!’ chirps Alex. ‘Good morning!’ chimes in Thrash,” wrote the NME’s Stephen Dalton, taking in The Orb. “Perfectly normal earthling behavior. Except it is four in the afternoon.” The “deep space explorers” were no doubt on their very own interstellar clock. Later that night, after talking about Timothy Good’s U.F.O. books Alien Liaison and Above Top Secret, guitar god Robert Fripp calling up to offer his talents the day before they finished mixing the album, their punk backgrounds, of being an “experimental albums band,” and The Bible’s dodgy historical accuracy, Dalton joined their Paris launch event at another planetarium, Cité De Science.
“Dolphins float across the night sky. A giant pyramid looms overhead. Panoramic vistas open up onto galaxies more immense than human minds can contemplate. Somewhere, the gods are madly spinning a cosmic radio dial across nine billion frequencies,” wrote Dalton of their performance that night, chronicling The Orb tugging its audience and the global imagination into a new kind of music of the spheres. He noted the invitation promised in broken English: “Smarts Drinks,” a cocktail served by it turned out, “absurd waiters in blue radiation suits,” and a conversation with someone named “Trash.” Never mind the extraterrestrials.
In its own strange funny way, The Orb represented the sloshing together of international cultures — from different languages and religions to superstitions, conspiracy theories and quantum theories — the grand emergence of a new kind of electronic consciousness, what Dalton both teased and admired insofar that The Orb was bending the rules and testing the waters, unbothered by the demands of fame or the lure of pop millions. Dr. Paterson was keeping his hand steady on the wheel, even as his mellow submarine traversed subliminal skies and oceans. “Outside, a million splinters of light stream by in the Parisian murk,” wrote Dalton of their ride into the night. “Some are streetlamps, some are stars, but all shine like crazy diamonds.” U.F.Orb took such impressions and animated them into a cosmic digital storm.
So that when one listens to the album’s opening song, ‘O.O.B.E.,’ (or ‘Out-Of-Body-Experience’), it feels almost as if one is floating through a sonic blizzard of digital snow, a pastiche of the Internet’s tentacled storm of dreaming and yearning for tomorrow. And yet The Orb was about the Now more than the Future. It was sensuousness more than abstractness. This was music you could feel, less sublimation of the cerebral in sound, and more immersion of the body in a revolutionary ideal: the power to change the world through little electronic transmissions from keys, buttons and knobs. Was it human? Was it real?
Which brings it back to the other end of the equation, not the creators but the receivers, the ravers, the other dreamers out there. For rave was indeed an important movement and The Orb was one of its early flag-bearers, so that the track ‘U.F.Orb’ in one sense sounds like so many ambient techno songs of its time, at once generic and emblematic of a simple and unpretentious flirtation with groove and grandeur. It’s that sincere and one can now say innocent faith in the future and the goodness within all explorers of the psychedelic frontier, that also makes U.F.Orb an oddly moving testament to the rave era’s fierce and almost goofy belief in technology, its determinism and its idealism: that hatred could be erased forever.
The ‘Blue Room’ is where The Orb ended up in that search for universal love, for its perpetual dawn. Named after a mythical “blue room” at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, where investigations, evidence and reports on U.F.O.’s were held from the 1940s through the 1970s. It is a perfect black box for The Orb’s active and even some might say overactive imagination. Alex Paterson, who adopted “Dr.” as an honorific, the mastermind behind The Orb, reveled in headspace music, in the hallucinatory power of electronic music specifically and its seemingly endless possibilities, revealing a sort of mad scientist obsession with sound.
And yet he had one foot firmly in the past, and always had been an excavator and obsessor over the psychic travels and sonic gems of yesteryear. ‘Blue Room’ is one of the purest manifestos to the past, present and future that electronica has to offer. Like an Ent, it takes its time to “say” what it needs to say, the original single version running at 39 minutes and 58 seconds. It’s more an aircraft hangar than a room. For inside its phantasmic cave are the long glacial cascading electric guitar moans of the great Steve Hillage, a 1960s progressive and space rock maestro who has traveled, morphed and fused with techno’s kindred ethos, even evoking Pink Floyd’s supernatural ‘Echoes,’ reminiscent of David Gilmour’s scintillating solos.*
Its bass line, written by the legendary Jah Wobble, emerges out of a soup of primordial consciousness, bomb sirens going off, melting into a blipping, bubbling ocean of utter weirdness. Its sparkly, fizzy dub tugs us into a dreamy stream of easy come, easy go chants, the beat of the ‘Blue Room’ chugging like a train heading for the heart of the universe, Wobble’s subterranean groove grounding its extraterrestrial emissions in warehouse raver divinations. Like winds on a desert planet, Hillage’s ghostly guitar glissades through the ‘Blue Room’ as a heavier bass kicks back in, Wobble’s riffs wobbling deliciously to a deep vocoder growl — communicating with the beyond through the medium of sound in a submersed Jamaican reggae sea-riddim.
“The blue womb,” wrote Dalton of the U.F.Orb’s inter-dimensional trip. “Dolphins weave between the stars above us. So peaceful down here, so soothing. Endlessly undulating soundwaves spiral upwards like bubbles from a deep ocean trench, desert island discs becalmed in a sea of tranquility.” And here Dalton made a vital connection to the Caribbean and dub’s escapist drift. “Welcome, mesdames et messieurs, to the amazing undersea world of Dr. Alex Paterson.” For a generation raised on the oceanic voyages and deep sea explorations of French filmmaker Jacques Cousteau — Wes Anderson’s 2004 homage to that deep dreaming era, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou also echoes in — the amniotic wobble of dub was cosmic in its versatility.
Flying saucers. Satellites. Radio waves. The other dreamers out there picked up on The Orb’s startling, warped signals. Freedom of thought. Digging into the timeless. Marching to the wobble of the Earth’s axis. The Internet echoes with the strange, beautiful frequencies of the ‘Blue Room,’ from memories of camping trips in the wilderness set to its cosmic swirls to the masterminds behind the So-Cal Raves listserv blaring its radical sonics from the rooftop of their college’s U.C. Irvine administration headquarters onto the school plaza in the middle of night — impossibility as the curious currency of innocent intellectual insurgency.
Running at seventeen and a half minutes on the album — marking a kind of intersection in The Orb’s journey — the end of ‘Blue Room’ percolates into the upper waves of contentment. On Top of the Pops, the BBC’s long-running music charts TV show, Paterson and Thrash said as much through their actions on July 18th, 1992. Dressed in white space suits, the two played 3D chess with little skyscrapers, one hilariously holding a Monty Python Holy Grenade and the other cradling a stuffed sheep that they named “Fluffy,” after The Orb’s breakout hit, ‘Little Fluffy Clouds,’ trippy visuals cascading and flowing all around them, blue-purple sea lions and spinning star-orbs, cross-cutting lasers, and those same swimming dolphins.
It was the psychedelic rendezvous-vous of many peoples and generations — television not so much but the almost telepathic vision of the sounds and sights that The Orb was orchestrating. While some critics would later dismiss The Orb, and the countless imitators and successors they inspired as lost-in-the-womb dub children, deploying thin Freudian psychoanalysis to justify their own subjective prejudice — a potent innocence giving way to the “realists” and the pessimists — Paterson always understood that his art was timeless. Which is why he was so drawn to dub, in 1993 declaring he intended to go even deeper into its echo-verse. In the years ahead, he would work with dub pioneer Lee “Scratch” Perry on multiple albums. He would collaborate with Gilmour too, admitting to Melody Maker in 1993 that Meddle, a landmark Pink Floyd album, was one of his favorites going back to when he was twelve, the two bridging cosmic techno, cosmic rock and cosmic roots reggae.
‘Towers of Dub’ continues its tip of the hat to Meddle-era Pink Floyd, bringing in harmonicas and dogs barking a la ‘Seamus,’ but then dips into altogether deeper waters with dub bass that wakes the mind to the world’s first technological music — dub — retracing its roots in modern dance music to Larry Levan’s collaborations with reggae rhythm-masters Sly & Robbie. Sampling The Revolutionaries’ ‘Bamba in Dub’ from 1977, ‘Towers’ reimagines its classic bass line in a more urgent, flowing manner, while the name of the track alludes to the pirate radio booming across London in 1991 and 1992 from tower blocks, eluding the police from one channel to another.**
Its lullaby melody contrasts perfectly with what sounds like the spouting breaths of whales or the scratch of slowed down record slides, the deep dive of ‘Bamba in Dub’ taking us down into the collective unconscious, a harmonica guiding us through the rivers of Rastafarian incantation, of echoing piano vamps and trance-inducing clock ticks. Lewis-Smith’s prim English accent warbling at the inflow, his fantastical skit of two towering Black minds meeting at “Babylon and Ting” ricocheting through our heads, its bass strutting the city and the country like a giant among skyscrapers, mountains and clouds, walking into a global outflow. The dog barks echo again, snarling synthesizers snake through the hills, the drums shake the sky, and the skittering reggae chords shatter up into the heavens — up, up, up, and around.
Babylon goes back to before 2,000 B.C. It started as a town in Mesopotamia and expanded into a legendary city with its fabled Hanging Gardens. It’s also the Babel from the Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis in The Bible — a mythical tower built to reach the heavens by a humanity that spoke one language; because of our hubris, God fragments humanity into the world’s many divided tribes and languages; Babylon also represents in reggae lyrics the rapacious appetite of empires and colonizers. It is the zone of despair and oppression. And what is Ting? That’s easy, it’s Thing. And yet, Ting could be anything, from a beautiful woman to that special something — ganja perhaps, what Rastafarians believe opens the mind, or any late night thunderclap.
“As they worked, Case gradually became aware of the music that pulsed constantly through the cluster,” wrote the cyberpunk author William Gibson in his masterpiece, Neuromancer, published in 1984, describing a makeshift space station circling above the Earth, its five Rastafarian crew members helping connect the book’s protagonists to their tête-à-tête with a beguiling artificial intelligence called Wintermute. “It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of community.” So dub and roots music in this interstellar flying Zion tethers its passengers to a more righteous orb. For Zion “smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja.” Escape vs. escapism.***
Back to Earth, and its onto ‘Close Encounters,’ the album’s glorious highpoint. A collaboration between Paterson, Thrash, and Slam’s Orde Meikle and Stuart McMillan of ‘Positive Education’ fame — later penning in 1993 the ever-morphing trance techno classic and acclaimed album Headstates — ‘Close Encounters’ in many ways perfectly captures the promise of progressive techno at the very moment it split into countless directions and inspirations. It starts off with what sounds like chirping robo-bird calls answered by distant howls of some alien enchantress — or is it a spaceship circling the horizon? — slowly coming tighter and tighter into focus. An arpeggio rings the atmosphere followed by hypnotic bass that would make Chicago house’s Adonis proud — pumping and stabbing and zapping and wobbling through every space.
Building up and breaking down, building up and breaking down, over the course of five minutes it patiently hovers over new vistas and ranges, coming back again and again with growing urgency and vim, dropping down the hips, bending the knees, and then — peace, glorious bittersweet peace, a melody bequeathed from the gods, the sky worshippers opening the arms, leaning back the head, the light of the rising sun traveling across over 90 million miles to us. The drums and airs grow in frenzy, followed by a kind of collapse in the whirling sands of time, the groove search: pilgrimage to the meccas in all of us — “Good morning!” — the encounter with universal mystery and beauty and spirituality — the sound of myths and bliss.
It truly is one of techno’s greatest wonders, with time even more so perhaps than ‘Towers of Dub’ and ‘Blue Room.’ While the other two are slower and more at a dub reggae tempo, ‘Close Encounters’ took that deep intuition about our connection with our mothers — a yearning birthed in the shantytowns and the transatlantic slave hub of Jamaica and bequeathed to humanity through its soulful music — the universe and Mother Nature, and gave it just enough acceleration and levitation to move The Orb’s dream from islands to planets. To hear Dr. Paterson tell it, the odyssey of U.F.Orb is a story about extraterrestrials on their way to Disneyland getting captured and held at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base before escaping into the pirate waves of dub, then boring through the center of the Earth, and encountering astro-traveling dolphins somewhere in the Pacific, their spaceship cleansing the planet with their flood.
“Wake up! Wake up!” repeats a voice, and onto ‘Majestic,’ the album’s last full composition. Drafted in the more quintessential vibe of the time and produced by Youth (Martin Glover), it jams to a breakbeat-laden pulse, its bass rolling like a Slinky. The slightest echoes of the ‘Close Encounters’ howl gives it just a touch of moodiness before bouncing to an effervescent funk that’s not too distant from Deee-Lite’s ‘What Is Love?’ but dancing on desert-dry lakebeds, or at the bottom of big cosmic oceans, dervishes whirling in the head, a flute saluting the Great Unknown, as a liquid blob of goodness orbits our expanded world with the closing ‘Sticky End’ — oh yes, this Orb has landed. Or has it taken off? Perhaps both all along all at once. For we’re at the intersection of space and time, the city, island, and the sea — Jamaica and Africa.
From the wind-piping of ‘O.O.B.E.’ played by Tom Green and written by future core partner Thomas Fehlmann — an electronic music dynamo in his own right — to the down-the-drain, up-in-the-brain ‘Sticky End,’ Paterson flies his U.F.Orb with gusto and a wicked sense of humor. Other hands have always helped steer The Orb forward: besides Weston and Youth, Hillage was joined by his wife Miquette Giraudy; and harmonica player Marney Pax along with Fehlmann made ‘Towers of Dub’ the extraordinary and winsome tale of cowboys-go-to-Kingston and London.****
In 1993, a year after U.F.Orb circled the world, a weary Mixmag reporter named Stephen Leigh would capture not only the The Orb’s globetrotting ways but how their music itself could spin to its own planetary rhythm, like the Moon. “An icy warm sun begins to loop over the fathomless sea, infusing the sky with a glorious brightness,” wrote Leigh of their Ultramarine show in Copenhagen’s eastern harbor. “It’s just the sun rising, just the final pyrotechnic in an Orb experience,” he remarked, noting the “long, testing journey” and Paterson’s devotion to the “perfect morning moment.”
At the core of The Orb was Magpie Paterson, the Doctor, the Madman, making it cool to dig prog rock again, bringing minimalist electronic composers out of the chambers of obscurity, dreaming of U.F.O.’s and dolphins in harmony, sirens and singers howling, and space-bass washing the ivory towers with dub’s sticky principled irreverence — rebellion with a revolution of the mind and the spirit as much as the body politic: It’s Selassie and Garvey sublimated, taking us all back to life’s beginnings.
Because before world peace, we will need new revolutions in consciousness, not only jokes and 3D chess, but dancehall encounters in the pyramids and planetariums of the soul. For the human-dolphin high has its roots in the muck of music — where the heroes of sunrise will one day meet at Babylon and Ting.
Track Listing:
1. O.O.B.E.
2. U.F.Orb
3. Blue Room
4. Towers of Dub
5. Close Encounters
6. Majestic
7. Sticky End
*The Orb would collaborate with Gilmour in 2010 on Metallic Spheres and in 2023 on Metallic Spheres In Color. In addition to Lee “Scratch” Perry, the UK’s Mad Professor is another unseen influence on U.F.Orb, his wild echoic dub experiments and remixes with their big shattering shapes, is evident throughout the album. He would in fact remix ‘Towers of Dub’ for Paterson on the ‘Blue Room’ single.
**The supreme importance of dub reggae and West Indian culture in the life of rave music cannot be overstated, helping bless UK acid house and its children with a key part of its power — this is of course most evident in the creation and rise of drum ‘n’ bass which has many of its roots not just in hip hop and breakbeat techno but dub. The Orb’s obsession with dub is therefore central to its sound but also its story.
However, house music also has reggae reverberations, whether we’re talking Larry Levan’s DJ sets at the Paradise Garage, the fat bass grooves of Chicago’s Adonis or further back to Levan’s critical experimentations on Gwen Guthrie’s ‘Padlock’ and ‘Seventh Heaven,’ where he remixed Sly & Robbie’s reggae grooves into magic.
Dub reggae was in many ways the first remix music, “dubs” being altered or rearranged edits of reggae songs originally, then evolving in analogue, electronic and machine-based ways in terms of studio technology. The mixing console was elevated as a true instrument by dub pioneers like King Tubby and Augustus Pablo. Concept albums are a thing in almost every genre of music, but with dub, electronic artists could extend and materialize “experience” more than lyrical messages.
Which is why with artists like The Orb it is incredibly potent — both as a tradition and as a sonic cousin. As O’Brien recorded, with U.F.Orb Paterson was inspired by rumors of secret U.F.O. airbases in America, and envisioned The Orb returning to Planet Earth from the “Ultraworld” — to lead all the ravelings on a sonic revolution. As he explained in detail to O’Brien, the U.F.O. or U.F.Orb hits some snags.
“It wants to go to Disneyland but ends up floating into the Blue Room on the airbase. After being caught by NASA and taken to the Towers of Dub, it burrows to freedom through the center of the earth, and meets a spacecraft full of swimming dolphins, who have to flood the polluted world with their clean water,” O’Brien writes. “According to Alex, ‘It all comes to a very sticky end.’”
And yet while the synthesis of dub with techno and ambient can sometimes perhaps engender a slapdash mindset because of its endlessly versatility, it is nonetheless a very powerful music. Many artists like The Orb, Pole, Deadbeat, Monolake, Porter Ricks, Swayzak, Mike Ink, and of course, Berlin’s Basic Channel crew, have recommitted again and again to its more mystical and spiritual concepts.
***I do not condone nor do I scold the usage of “ganja,” but its role in dub reggae music and more chilled electronic music is significant. It is ultimately the sacrament of the Rastafarian religion. Cannabis has psychotropic effects that have been studied by scientists. It seems to slow one’s perception of time and accentuates sound and novel thoughts. For some, it can have deleterious effects. For others, it’s mana.
More importantly, in terms of Gibson’s description of dub as part of his cyberpunk vision, the key insight to me is less about the lifestyle or beliefs of Rastafarianism, but Gibson’s emphasis on “worship” and “community,” and how he foresaw in 1984 its immense influence on the future course of world music, especially “digitized pop,” which one can say is indeed electronica and in time so-called EDM.
Dub music is in essence the use of studio technology to reimagine music in its most altered form, using echo, reverb, delays and other sonic tricks to conjure immersive music. Dub has an extensive history and has affected if not spawned many genres. And yet core to its spirit is ultimately what Gibson perceived in terms of a cluster above the Earth with people at the center — it’s grounding in humanity.
****In 2012 and 2013, Paterson and Fehlmann would follow their love of dub to one of its original sources, collaborating on three albums with the legendary Lee “Scratch” Perry. And not to be missed, The Orb was commissioned by Trojan Records to DJ, compile and mix a double-album of dub reggae gems titled I’ll Be Black — with a cheeky inner sleeve that proclaims, “The Trojan Orb destroys the Death Star.”