Leftfield versus Orbital.........FIGHT!!!!!

Counterexample: "Kittens" is near the end of _Beaucoup Fish_.

I have to say fuck Leftfield. They were only ever a convenient re-working of the dance scene with more familiar elements for dinner party and TV sports show theme consumption. They've never done anything that wasn't utterly generic to the time it was made, and as such never produced anything as transcendent as Orbital.

Underworld are just boring techno with ranting over the top. They're just the follow-on iteration to Finitribe. Gold Chains are the new Underworld.

a) even at their most hardcore (and I'd say that by their second album they were already very removed from where "'ardkore" was concurrently), Orbital were always primarily about the melody-harmony-texture thing rather than the rhythms. Yeah their rhythms were frequently great and/or slamming, but they rarely sound like the focus of the track. It's one thing to use well- programmed beats and breaks, but its quite another to make them the point of the exercise.

b) "Are We Here" is clearly intended as a token jungle track. Its sound, approach and desired effect are all at marked odds to the rest of Snivilisation and everything they had done prior. In contrast The Prodigy's junglistic tendencies sound unconscious, a purely coincidental accident of proximity.

The fact that the "Are We Here?" is brilliant suggests two things to me - firstly, that your "hardcore gone sensitive" theory is correct, and secondly that Orbital could have easily made rhythms their focus all along and had a very different but equally interesting career.

But like Gareth I also have a special fondness for the behometh that is "Nothing Left" - in some ways a pinnacle still for maximalist (danceable) techno.

Juan Atkins "The Fusion" is pretty killer too.

http://www.rockness.co.uk/

RockNess is extremely proud to announce that LEFTFIELD will return with a live performance at this summer's festival - a first for over 10 years and a stunning exclusive for the fast-rising Most Beautiful Festival in the World, staged on the shores of iconic Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands.

Acknowledged as one of the most influential exponents of electronica of all time - LEFTFIELD were one of the first truly great crossover acts, trailblazing into previously unexplored territory and carving a path for a raft of great artists including Underworld, The Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy. The sheer brilliance of the band's debut album Leftism - a startling piece of work that even now remains peerless - firmly sealed a place in dance music history. Fusing epic soundscapes with intoxicating rhythms and guest vocalists including John Lydon, LEFTFIELD created a mind melting adventure deserving of the sweeping acclaim and lofty nominations bestowed upon LEFTFIELD.

An official statement from LEFTFIELD is expected soon.

http://www.mmalinker.com/forum/images/smilies/icon_rolleyes.gif

what i meant was http://www.mmalinker.com/forum/images/smilies/icon_rolleyes.gif

i'm confused by your rolleyes.gif. if i posted on every thread i thought was boring, i'd have a billion posts by now. anyway, Leftfield rule. i hope they do a full tour.

Quite enjoying the new Leftfield. Hardly groundbreaking, of course but very well put together. Their/his attention to sonic detail is always a pleasure.

I listened to it once and thought a lot of it sounded like an uncanny recreation of a DJ Hell album c. 2004. Of course a lot of the tracks may literally have been hanging around for that long. The Sleaford Mods one was dire.

I was extremely disappointed in the Leftfield album. They'd be better served collecting the remixes they did for other artists from 92-94.

on the flip side I've been enjoying the new sorta-Orbital album from Paul (called 8:58), it rests a lot on his laurels but it's entertaining, particularly "Nearly There" which is full on Orbital madness. some other good tracks too.

i like leftfield ok, never really cared for orbital. suppose i want to start with orbital, where would I start?

start with the green album, listen sequentially

if you want to just hit the green highlights: "Chime", "Satan", "Belfast", "Choice"

i like "halcyon" ... ultimately though orbital remind me of something like plaid ... pretty, but no strong rhythmic backbone. maybe I need to listen more

Of the first four In Sides is definitely the one.

pretty, but no strong rhythmic backbone

uh waht

let's set aside Snivilization and In Sides for a second; have you never heard "Satan"?????

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbs6GvLeEXQ

Love the beat on 'I Wish I Had Duck Feet'

Snivilisation/InSides are basically front to back incredible imo; earlier work very much excellent but not quite on that level

basically Orbital 2 -> The Middle of Nowhere is one of the best run of albums in anyone's discography

xp yeah those two work best as albums I think, the first two are both excellent but each is less of a coherent whole than the subsequent two

xp it's up there with tom waits, prince and stevie as far as i'm concerned, yeah

xxp - definitely. don't listen to any comps or anything, just those 4 albums front-to-back. I think Wonky is about that good as well. Green is absolutely not a good place to start, though the singles are must-haves.

I'm trying to figure out what Orbital songs you could possibly have encountered to form the impression that they have no strong rhythmic backbone

Cheapo box of the first 5 Orbital albums

their albums probably deserve the full reissue treatment like Underworld, lots of good alternate versions, remixes, live tracks etc. to be brought together

I just saw reissues for Green and Brown. Not sure if they're official or not. The sleeves have been redone and are kind of gross, so I assume they are official.

This thread reminds me that after going gaga over it, I hadn't actually played anything off Wonky in years besides the title track and "New France". Rectifying that right now.

I think it's fair to say Orbital's music generally isn't particularly rhythmically showy or 'sick'. Mostly very straightforward, not even especially syncopated. Although that could be one definition of "solid". The breakbeat stuff on Snivilisation seemed sweet and naive compared to what was happening in Jungle a year or two previously.

As someone currently on an Orbital listening binge, I can't find a single song of theirs that doesn't feature rhythmic and melodic syncopation from any point in their career.

Okay "Quality Seconds" doesn't have rhythmic syncopation in it but the entire melodic theme is a simple syncopated figure repeated for a minute; that is the first one I've found that isn't using syncopation in both the rhythm section and the melodic lines.

This thread reminds me that after going gaga over it, I hadn't actually played anything off Wonky in years besides the title track and "New France". Rectifying that right now.

i revisited wonky recently! it rules so much

Not intended as a damning criticism, it's just what they do. Rhythmically I think it is mostly quite simple, and not what i'd call highly syncopated. There also isn't much variation in fills and turnarounds for instance. Not to say it isn't well done or appropriate.

There's some insanity being talked about here re Orbital but I see DJP has already done my work in response and more comprehensively.

I'm not saying there's no beats just that the beats that are there seem like an afterthought compared to the pretty melodies

I actually half-addressed this over a decade ago upthread, but the idea that Orbital lacks a strong rhythmic backbone seems rooted in an assumption that melodic detail and rhythmic detail are in a zero sum game with one another. I think it's true that when one thinks of an archetypal Orbital track, typically it's the melodies that come to mind. In truth though the focus of their work isn't really on melody per se so much as the idea of interplay at all levels - melodic / textural / rhythmic.

So from one perspective what you don't typically get from an Orbital track is the minimalist intensity of really stripped down house and techno (or drum and bass, where the friction between just one or two elements (say, a beat and a riff) is writ large and dominates your sensory awareness. Orbital zoom back out to show you layer upon layer, and yeah the rhythm typically comprises only one or two of several, but to castigate them from that seems rather to miss the point - it strikes me as the equivalent of saying that a film with good acting is problematic because the good acting necessarily distracts from the cinematography somewhat.

My sense has always been that Orbital were mostly aware of this. Upthread ages ago I talked about "Are We Here" and how it sought to replicate the kind of melodic/textural interplay they're famous for almost solely at the rhythmic level by swiping ideas from jungle. What's interesting about this is the specificity of how they "get" jungle for this purpose: possibly a rip-off of A Guy Called Gerald, though impressively on-point if so - Gerald only struck on these ideas in 1993 with "Nazinji-Zaka" and "The Glok Track" and "Take Me", and along come Orbital with a slowed-down jazzsteppin-in-space take on same within 12 months. And kudos to them for realising how perfectly that approach fit their aesthetic, treating the breakbeat samples as the warp and weft just like they'd ordinarily treat arpeggios. And then that darkside moment which is like every Foul Play remix of 1993/1994 playing simultaneously.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQT08NFsf4w

Having done this, Orbital evidently never felt the need to try it again, but In Sides is quite remarkable for the casual intricacy of the rhythms and how they intersect and interact so fluidly with the melodic and textural motifs.

Middle of Nowhere is similar but perhaps more interesting to me for how Orbital superficially appear to retreat to more straightforward electro-tilted mid-pace techno rhythms, but actually across all the music in their discography the melodies and rhythms and textures never felt as completely and indivisibly intertwined as they do here, like on "Spare Parts Express" how the rhythm almost imperceptibly transforms from burbly electro to a kind of tom-heavy 'ardkore breakbeat when the tune goes all gothic organ darkside, then flips back for the coda. Or how on "Know Where To Run" they imagine rave emerging directly from Cabaret Voltaire and bypassing house altogether: scrungy industrial snares --> the breakdown with the single drum beat --> the rave-synth section with this almost Jamaican syncopated kick driving home the chord changes. Maybe best of all the sheer hyperactivity of "Nothing Left", like four Mad Mike Banks tracks playing simultaneously.

No I think Vahid is right in a way, with the exception of the Brown album (which is totally the one you should start with), and a couple of obvious exceptions (Are We Here?, I Wish I Had Duck Feet), you don't often get a sense that the beat is the foundation stone of everything. Unlike a lot of techno you don't get a sense that they're starting with the beat and composing upward from there (even the drippier end of Kompakt is constructed like this), Orbital tracks are often anchored around a melodic hook and the job of the beats is to interweave with that. Even Chime is propelled by the synth chords, and it's also a case for the mid-period stuff, even things like The Girl With The Sun In Her Head that literally build from the beat up. The result of this is that they can often be rhythmically quite limber without the beats ever forming the main focus of the music.

Plaid works as a comparison in that regard, except they often used that resultant rhythmic freedom to do more with meter than most of their contemporaries (virtually everyone except Autechre).

The take-home from this thread is that no one cares about that boring new Leftfield album.

(xpost)

Did you write this review on discogs too?

Dj.ungle Fever WAS Cologne. Then the the overwhelming miasma of endless pretend genres of masturbatory boredom tightly grasping the throat of the Techno community today intruded their unwanted, fake faces and never let go.

nah, not me. Although I think what killed techno was endless splits, rather than detroit-inflected minimalism, which was initially refreshing amongst hardcore and acid gear, as a kind of heads down no nonsense back 2 basics jackin sound. See the Black Scorpian technotron ep and Ian Pooley Celtic Cross ep, as well as Robert Hood internal empire. All totally uncompromising.

it was good when trance sounded like this, like a coldly cosmic take on EBM. But then Sasha Digweed and people like Leftfield, Underworld had to come in and invent prog trance which was like soppy indie goldsmiths graduates of the 90s crying on the dancefloor to Be as One. And orbital was their chillout music of choice. Yuck. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bCVLHkh5p4

.. anyway, i need to correct myself, paul wrote chimes _before_ going to the pub.

that and other interesting bits here: https://www.soundonsound.com/people/orbital-recording-chime-london-studio
and here: https://www.soundonsound.com/people/classic-tracks-orbital-chime

this particular quote is interesting in the context of green album -> brown album -> snivilisation -> insides progression, it wasn't just growth in terms of confidence level but intent also. this is after the brown album:

"We're a lot more anxious about things now," admits Phil. "We've now got the responsibility of getting a track finished 'cos it's going to be on a record. You become more analytical of your stuff." Paul: "I still have to fight with that idea — the last month has been quite bizarre, with us trying to work out what the next record should sound like. For example, I've been trying to dodge using a constant 909 bass drum 'cos a lot of our records over the last four years have got that. But then I think, 'Hey, if we were at home making music then I wouldn't hesitate to use that if I wanted to.' You know what I mean? And I'm forever trying to draw the line somewhere and work out why, if we weren't making records would we have used it? Because we just felt like it! Now we think twice about it; you start to think 'Hey wait a minute, isn't that just getting pompous?" Phil: "Consequently you're in the studio, set to do your next recording, and you end up spending three weeks just talking about it!"

leftism feels like it's trying so hard to prove something while pretending it doesn't

new leftfield

SAD!