What Were The Skies Like When You Were Young?

109 minutes 41 seconds, quite the length for your humble debut album isn’t it? just about enough time to read the names of all the tracks aloud in fact, but The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld is not a very humble release. Not that we are dealing with planet-sized egos and terminal muso bloat, more stoned giggles, cloud watching and piss taking.

Plus Pink Floyd stole the Orb’s idea of using Battersea power station as cover art by cunningly doing it 14 years earlier* what’s not to love?

Those fuckers!

Rickie Lee Jones, refers to the orb

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My entry point into the Orbosphere was twofold, firstly a girl I really fancied told me she loved that song ‘about the young fluffy clouds’ shortly before I knocked half a pint of cider and black into her lap**, secondly was their Blue Room single – all 39:57 of it. I then went back to 1991’s The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, which is a more sprawling, gentle psych experience than their sophomore LP.

Ultraworld^ features contributions, both voluntary and involuntary from Steve Hillage, Jimmy Cauty (a member before he KLF-ed off), Miquette Giraudy, Steve Reich, Rickie Lee Jones, Guy Pratt, Grace Jones, Kraftwerk, Bill Evans, Ennio Morricone, Minnie Riperton and of course Max Von Sydow. Plus various crazed American voices, Lithuanian newsreaders and NASA soundbites.

It is, suitably, a wonderfully eclectic bouillabaisse of sound, flitting between deep dub, ambient synths, freeform soundscapes, house and electronica, although it would have caused diehards in either camp to blanch as the cover hints this is where early 90’s dance met prog; presumably whilst scoring.

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Ultraworld lounges into view with ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’, fusing a news item on English summers, to Steve Reich, to a Morricone harmonica sample, to a great 4/4 beat (thanks Harry Nilsson) and all overlaid with that interview from Rickie Lee Jones. Pop goes the Orb, basically. I could listen to it for days on end, possibly because I find Ms Jones’ voice so, umm, affecting. ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ is by far the shortest track here at a mere 4:28, you’ll need to pack sandwiches for some of the other tracks here.

A masterful appropriation of the old Flash Gordon sample leads us to the pulsating, biblically slanted ‘Earth (Gaia)’, which is a real moody banger. I come back to this track more and more. Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy lend their talents to the next two spacey cuts, ‘Supernova At The End Of The Universe’ and ‘Back Side Of The Moon’ – the Orb are good at titles. Both tracks drift past slowly but don’t add too much in and of themselves for me.

‘Spanish Castles In Space’ samples Bill Evans, a Soviet documentary on fish and features Guy Pratt’s gentle bass playing, it is a fantastic post-coital glide. No friction here at all, just a divine sense of weightlessness.

Which makes ‘Perpetual Dawn’ and its up-tempo space-skank all the more rewarding when it hits. Ultraworld really invents/updates space-age reggae right here, layering discord behind the sweet beats in a rather clever fashion. The Orb would emulate, but not better this later on ‘Towers Of Dub’ later.

I think Ultraworld dips slightly on ‘Into The Fourth Dimension’ and ‘Outlands’, the latter of which does slightly curdle that Rickie Lee Jones sample cleverly, but neither cut is as good as all that came before, or after.

‘Star 6 and 789’ is a pretty, sound-affect laced treat. It has a gorgeous lightness of touch and the ghost of a beat occasionally peeking out from behind the synths. It is a gentle ambient track, more so than anything they made before or since and a real highlight for me.

I have written about the big closing number here before and so rather than bore you I will simply redirect you. Needless to say ‘A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld’ is a great track title, up there with that Floyd one featuring Picts. And as the foremost writer of our generation once observed, ‘You have to love a song title that takes longer to recite than some band’s discographies, well I do’^^.

In the context of Ultraworld, despite being shorn of its Floyd chords it is a fitting, maybe the only ending possible to the album.

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Ultraworld is ultimately a sprawling agglomeration of so many styles, ideas and smokes. I love this period of musical magpie-ism, the only limits being the artists’ imagination and sense of fun. In tandem with other IDM folks at the time, dance/house/whatever music was being set up as something you could listen to at home, after hours, in the dark – a bit like that Pink lot.

This isn’t the Orb’s best album, but it definitely is an unabashedly ambitious statement of intent. Moreover they are as fun as they are clever, which makes the Orb top funsters. All of which would equate to the square root of fuck all if they didn’t have the musical chops to weave pleasing soundscapes and great tunes from all those diverse threads they hold dear.

What were the skies like when you were young?
They went on forever when we lived in Arizona
And the skies always had little fluffy clouds

Buy this record it is, marginally, cheaper than space travel.

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My copy of Ultraworld is a fancy pants version dubbed as a ‘Special Classical Pressing’, which I assume just means that they took their time when making it, spacing the grooves across two records, as opposed to banging it out contemptuously. I have nothing to compare it too, other than a downloaded version, but it does sound really good on my system; the bass particularly.

Although I would issue the standard ambient-music-on-vinyl warning that getting up to change the record every 20 minutes or so is an atmosphere sapping nuisance.

Daft outdated format!

1327 Down.

PS: this is wonderfully of its time/technology:

*ruthless cynical buggers those Floyds.

**gentle reader, it may not surprise you to learn that I last saw her 34-ish years ago.

^as this album will now be known in order to save on pixels.

^^this same writer also described the Orb as “gonked out zonkonauts all of whom were off their collective tits on space drugs”. You just cannot replicate that sort of genius.