Dream Producers: The Orb

Sep 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Bill Murphy

             

ALEX PATERSON AND MARTIN "YOUTH" GLOVER JOIN FORCES AGAIN ON THE ORB'S LATEST AMBIENT-DUB EXPLORATION

FIG. 1: Although Paterson (left) and Youth (right) hadn’t collaborated on an Orb project in 15 years, their musical synergy reappeared right away when they started working on The Dream.
Photo: Photography by Chris Davison

The last time Alex Paterson and Martin “Youth” Glover worked in the studio together for any extended stretch of time was the early '90s. Yet when the two got back together at Youth's Dreaming Cave studio — along with engineer (and band member) Tim Bran and engineer-programmer David Nock — for the sessions that led to the Orb's new CD, The Dream (Six Degrees, 2008), the ideas started flowing almost immediately (see Fig. 1).

“I think the overall chemistry between me and Alex is pretty much as it ever was,” Youth says. “We bring different things to the party now than we did then, but it's still a very natural process for us.”

Paterson wryly admits that Youth's influence on The Dream resulted in a different-sounding Orb album than those of the recent past (see Fig. 2). “Youth would come in and wave his little production wand over everything and suggest things — like more vocals,” he says with a chuckle. “I mean, if you've heard the Okie Dokie album [Okie Dokie It's the Orb on Kompakt, from 2005], there's not a vocal in there. And now suddenly we've got an album that's full of vocals and harmonies and choruses and bridges and things — it's kind of, ‘Blimey, what's happening there?’”

Back in the Day

One of the ways Youth influenced the production of The Dream was by convincing Paterson to bring in a number of vocalists, rather than making an instrumental record like the previous Orb release.

There was a time, nearly two decades and nine studio albums ago, when Paterson's mode of creation began and ended with three turntables, a bank of CD players, a few cassette decks, and an Akai 12-track mixer/recorder. As a DJ in the upstairs VIP chillout room at London's Heaven club, he was known for raiding everything from NASA space broadcasts to the ringing drone of Tibetan prayer bowls for his DJ sets — all of it grafted onto music by the likes of Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, Steve Hillage (who insisted on meeting Paterson the night he heard his own Rainbow Dome Musick album [Blue Plate, 1979] coming over the speakers), Tangerine Dream, and 808 State. It was the beginning of a new genre called ambient house, and it was the future of the Orb.

The group started out as a duo. Paterson would tap into his vast library of samples, sound bites, and snippets, while his bandmate Jimi Cauty (then of acid house “situationists” the KLF) used an Akai S900 sampler, an Oberheim OB-8 synthesizer, and his studio smarts to massage the whole into what were often beatless, dreamlike soundscapes. But it wasn't until a disagreement between the two sent them on their separate ways that the Orb really took off.

Paterson had been childhood friends with Youth, who had made a splash of his own in the early '80s as the bassist with the postpunk outfit Killing Joke before moving on to become a stellar producer in his own right. Heavily influenced by the low-end sound of dub reggae (which was also near and dear to Paterson's heart), Youth hooked up with Paterson to record “Little Fluffy Clouds” — a 1990 sampladelic club hit that put the Orb on the map.

It soon led to a full-length album (1991's The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld), but by the time the classic follow-up U.F.Orb had vaulted to No. 1 in the U.K., Youth's other gigs had pushed him out of the fold. Undeterred, Paterson soldiered on with Kris “Thrash” Weston, who had engineered most of Ultraworld and knew his way around a 24-track studio (as well as vintage Moog, VCS3, and Prophet-5 synths).

Tim Bran, shown here standing outside the Dreaming Cave, contributed both keyboard playing and engineering on the project.

Preparing for Liftoff

For the sessions that produced The Dream, Paterson, Youth, Bran, and Nock would meet at the Dreaming Cave (see the sidebar “Fertile Ground” and Fig. 3) — usually on a very tight schedule — and would often set up to record almost as a live band would, and track what were essentially jams. As a song began to take shape, any one of the three bandmates might work on seeing it through to the next phase, depending on whose ideas won the vote.

“We'd just throw down some jams,” recalls Youth. “We'd get a live performance and live dynamic going, and then a lot of it was arranged and edited later in [Apple] Logic [Pro].”

“Obviously there might be guest vocalists there, or other programmers helping out,” Bran says, “but the core of the music was Youth playing bass, myself on keyboards, programming, synths, and samplers, and Alex providing the soundscapes, beats, and samples. We all found that way of working very exciting. We did it in very short, intense bursts, however — two or three hours at a time, because we were all doing other stuff. So from 10 in the morning until 1 in the afternoon, we'd just have a burst of creative energy, and then come back to it the next day.”