Orbital - Classic or Dud?

Playing In Sides now for the first time in a billion years...

I thought Paul Oakenfold or someone made that teak desk comment? Maybe he ripped it off.

straightforwardness and proggy complexity are something we have to choose between

they shouldn't be, right? I have Weather Report and Jeff Beck on here, right? Except that I can chuckle at them because yeah EVERYBODY knows those guys are trying too hard/wanking/self-indulgent/goofy but Orbital (on this thread) gets a pass for the same shit because they run in through a hardware sequencer and market to people who do a different brand of drugs. Fuck that. It's masturbatory prog. Worship it at your own peril etc

said "proggy complexity" exists in their work as far back as "Satan".

which is the biggest piece of trash on the green album by a long shot, even beating desert storm.

i never 'got' the brown album, not totally.

i think the single versh of 'halcyon' is one of their best ever things and the elpee mix is not quite as good. 'impact' is also a total fave but better in the live version and the version on 'diversions'.

apart from those, though... it's more dancey, but it's still not *that dancey* is it? feel they fell between stools a bit w. 'lush', 'remind', 'walk now'. whereas even on the not-dancey 'snivilisation' you still have 'are we here'.

plus brown album reminds me of 'shopping' -- sonics much more of their time than the other lps, imo.

^ OTM I think.

"I have Weather Report and Jeff Beck on here, right? Except that I can chuckle at them because yeah EVERYBODY knows those guys are trying too hard/wanking/self-indulgent/goofy but Orbital (on this thread) gets a pass for the same shit because they run in through a hardware sequencer and market to people who do a different brand of drugs. Fuck that. It's masturbatory prog."

So, Tombot, what you're really saying is "we don't have to choose between simplicity and complexity, as long as we only think of complex music as a joke."

go fuck yourself

having to explain my distaste for their overwrought bullshit on In Sides and everything afterwards has only served to make me more extremist in my views and I am seriously like five minutes away from deleting everything by them off my hard drive

yes, Tim, "trying too hard" is a sin, in music and everything else, whatever. Indulging it without recognizing it for what it is is some coldplay/dave-matthews spectrum bullshit. go put on a ballcap and see about that open mic.

WORK SMARTER NOT HARDER
polyphony is the hobgoblin of small minds
etc

chillax

You couldn't be wronger about this.

The thing that Orbital is good at, possibly better than all of their contemporaries, is making maximalism seem effortless. I'm listening to "Are We Here?" right now and the beat-crafting going on in that track combined with the seamless blend from one music section to another, the stereo panning, the sung and spoken vocal sample placements... even down to the moment when they turn up the tinny reverb on an isolated drum loop then drop back into the main warm sine wave motif a little over 8 minutes into the track... It's great. There's nothing wrong with proggy maximalism if you know what you're doing and it's patently obvious these guys know what they're doing.

You seem to be on some "multiple layers of music is always bad" horseshit here, which is really is really just a Geirism in a funny hat.

(For the record, I really like what I've heard of The Weather Report and I don't really know Jeff Beck so I can't comment, but your analogy kind of doesn't work if other people don't actually agree with you about the artists you're comparing them to, either.)

I don't really see where this is going because the Brown album and (especially) Snivilisation are JUST as proggy and overwrought as In Sides, considerably more so in Snivilisation's case.

And except maybe Are We Here, I don't think of any of this stuff as that complex or polyphonic either. InSides for all its self-conscious grandeur is actually a much more intimate listen than either of its predecessors, perhaps this explains why that material didn't work as well live.

I'm specifically thinking of InSides in contrast to something like Dominik Eulberg's Fauna & Flora here, which which aims for that same combination of psuedo-classical intricacy and intimacy and big gesture grandeur but works better as functional dance music, maybe it's the sense of space or a more obvious pulse, I dunno.

You seem to be on some "multiple layers of music is always bad" horseshit here, which is really is really just a Geirism in a funny hat.

Not just Geirism in a funny hat but pretty much the opposite of everything I stand for musically. Can we also ditch the vituperative descriptor "proggy maximalism", please?

My point, really, is that minimalism and maximalism both work really, really well if the people doing them are "good" at it. There's nothing inherently better about one vs the other; you can find just as much awesome in "Out There Somewhere" as you can in Exposure's "Peak Experience" or F.U.S.E.'s "F.U.".

TS the fact that Dan is basically right vs 'what's the world coming to if techno people can't take positions of ridiculous dogmatic inflexibility?'

This thread is silly.

haha Matt

Wow Tombot did Mozart kill your entirely family or what.

How long before someone marches onto this thread, tears up a poster of FSOL and shouts "Fight the real enemy!!"

What the...:

Man, FSOL have made a crapload of songs...
-Yes. Yes they have.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=lfo

I worry a bit about Headphoneus Supremus -- not his opinions on the albums so much as that sig of his.

Actually maybe Mozart DID rise from the grave and kill Tombot's family:

ZOMBIE MOZART

OMG the LOLs on this thread.

. Can we also ditch the vituperative descriptor "proggy maximalism", please?

Hahhaha I agree. I mean yeah I know, Dan is basically right and all, but shit dudes we're talking about techno here. We don't have to GO THERE>>>
Right? There's a huge difference between what Orbital do and a long wanking guitar solo.

i don't really get why orbital is being described as 'prog' at all. their basic M.O. on every song i can think of is to stack loops excessively until there's a ton of shit going on.

i do think that Orbital and a LOT of ambient and techno stuff is coming from a similar mentality to that of musicians who get into long jam sessions.

But they're not showing off their instrumental virtuosity, their tracks are all very thoughtfully and purposefully constructed. Jam sessions are more about 'hey, look what I can do, aren't I great'.

It's more akin to the long, elaborate, completely un-improvised instrumental passages in the proggier end of thrash metal, in many ways.

i know that the 'look what i can do' thing is a key aspect of some types of jam sessions, but another aspect is riding a 'groove' and interplay between musicians. anyone whose been in a garage band knows how fun it can be to just get into a zone where the rhythm section finds a great groove and the leads take turns throwing shit over it. to me, knob tweaking over a great rhythmic structure is exactly the same feeling.

i've always believed that Orbital's writing process was probably the two of them in a studio with a ton of synths, just improvising until something kick ass stuck and then just riding it out.

^^^^^^^ I suspect this is OTM.

I reckon they did that to come up with the initial riffs and then carefully pieced it all together in a manner geared to cause maximum awesomeness.

Tombot in this thread depresses me somewhat. We need MORE complex, intricate, multi-layered techno, not less.

And yeah, STOP with the "prog" label, just because something progresses doesn't mean it's gotta have a term of derision attached to it. ALL good music progresses to some extent.

Anyone have those records from when FSOL had yet to become FSOL and called themselves Mental Cube? "Chile of the Bass Genearation" 12"? OMG that is the shit. In fact, it was so good someone stole it from me right after I played that record on the air once. I know exactly who stole it, too.

Anyway...

We need MORE complex, intricate, multi-layered techno, not less.

I agree, in a big way. Orbital were doing something quite daring at the time they first started, first two albums...challenging the norm of dance music entirely. To hear them was to think "why aren't there more acts like this?"

I do think the green album is probably unfairly maligned, but the truth was that the sounds just didn't age all that well. And once you've heard the Joey Beltram mix of Chime, the original will always sound like a slow, boring turtle in comparison.

Also I would like to express how weird it was to be attending chemistry class wearing an Orbital shirt, since orbitals are talked about in said class. My professor noticed my shirt and I must have seemed like the world's most slavish teacher's pet. And all I wanted was for someone - anyone - to tell me they knew this techno duo. *weeps*

ALL good music progresses to some extent.

Not all.

Yeah I was gonna say...Beatles are verse/chorus/verse/chorus right?

"We need MORE complex, intricate, multi-layered techno, not less."

I disagree with this, at least if it's meant to imply that most dance music isn't intricate enough.

I actually sympathize with Tombot's suspicion of pro-Orbital arguments, which often do rest on dodgy assumptions about the need for dance music to be more emotive, melodic, "compositionally rich" etc. I think that's largely been avoided in this thread thankfully.

i think the only real problem with prog/'intelligence' is 1) the terms themselves 2) flowing from this, the idea that greater complexity of a certain kind is a sign of superiority and 3) the assumption that, in effect, all music should be aiming for a certain ideal.

so when the straw people say 'in sides is above dance music', that's a problem; but i don't think minds will be blown by the idea that it's aiming for something functionally different from most dance music, even if it has shared roots.

when a certain music journalist talks about 'funktionality', why is he -- dread word -- valourizing the dance floor over other listening contexts?

I don't care about all this intellectual shit it's fucking brilliant, In Sides.

oh word

xxpost - I think it's a contained argument though. If we're talking about music that holds itself out as dance music then it's legitimate to ask how effectively it works as music for dancing to. Especially if people around you are importing other tests (in 2008 though this is a strawperson - where anti-functional strawpeople still exist they're not arguing in favour of Orbital).

I think this stops being true of Orbital after The Brown Album though - from then on they're basically home-listening techno, and, as you say, assessing them as dancefloor music mostly misses the point.

Listening to the brown album now, I'm surprised at how much ravier it is than I seemed to remember, especially in comparison to their subsequent stuff. Why did I love this so much amid my danceabphobe period? Well, it's pretty obvious, I guess.

And for a period of time when I was 10, Halcyon was my very favourite song.

classic

i thought I owned all their stuff, but I'd never come across this one

nice, but it could do without the abc sample though.

holy shit, In Sides is so much more amazing than I remembered it. The Box two-parter is something else.

i see they've jumped on the old reform bandwagon, festivals and gigs this year but dunno if they've got new material on the way.

I'm not really bothered about any new material because I have a feeling the time for that has passed and it would probably be crap. A few of us are going to the first Brixton gig and I'd say Glastonbury was a nailed-on certainty.

didn't realise Omen wasn't that well known.
its on an old cd single i have hidden away.

would love them to do all of Brown and In Sides live

and Sniv too yes

I would leave after Keine Trick Wasser

Trink

WARNIN WARNIN NUCLEAR ATTACK

+ how could you not want to hear 'Attached' live?

Meh to Attached but Are We Here? would be incredible. Not sure I'd want to hear that album in its entirety live, but a whole performance of Brown would be beyond awesome.