The Orb
(Joseph Martin 4 XLR8R)


I remember lying on the terrace of a beach house in Hawaii at three in the morning, listening to the Orb's "Blue Room" and watching the migrating whales play in the moonlit ocean. I remember falling asleep and dreaming water-washed dreams to the sound of "Majestic". The Orb creates saturated environments of sound and motion, soundscapes which integrate themselves into the dreams and memories of listeners. Ambiance can transcend music; it can become part of life. As leaders in the current explosions of ambient and dub sounds, the Orb opened the way for many of todayM-Us sonic flavors.

The main body of the Orb is composed of Kris Weston, aka Thrash, and Dr. Alex Paterson. Visiting luminaries such as Thomas Fehlman, Steve Hillage, Jah Wobble and Robert Fripp add to the gaseous composition. I had a chance to spend part of the Day of Love chatting with the good Dr. Paterson about Lollapalooza, UFOs, his new label, new studio, and carrots. Over a background of bleeping and sucking electronic sounds, Paterson fed cold fish to his pet terrapins and gave the lowdown in a slow, glazed British accent.

XLR8R: Well, today is Valentine's day.

ALEX PATERSON: Indeed.

XLR8R: I just wanted to know, who's your valentine for today?

Well, I suppose my girlfriend is, but she's ... what's she doing tonight? Well, she's gone for a dress rehearsal, because she's going to be a parrot ... no, not a parrot, a carrot. She's going to be a carrot in a show on Friday. There you go.

XLR8R: So what's your favorite way to celebrate Valentine's day?

Having my girlfriend be dressed up as a carrot, I suppose.

XLR8R: Always popular! [Laughter] So, what have you been working on for the past few days? What are you working on right now?

Um, we're just getting a studio together at the moment, actually. We've built a studio, and we just have to get the equipment in. Mixing desk, the wiring, get all that stuff in. It's like an empty shell right now. So that's just finishing off M-Q we should start mixing the new album ... next week, really. For the last few days I've just been taking it easy.

XLR8R: That's great ... so what does the next year look like for the Orb? When is the new album going to be released?

Hopefully in May. The single will come out a couple of weeks before it. We should be doing some type of an American tour of some proportions this summer as well. You know, you're the first journalist who's talked to me about what we're really doing this year. Every other journalist I've had to be really, really cynical and sarcastic. Sorry if I bring that up straight away, but I've had to talk to some girl about future sex ... she asked if I realize how many people are having sex to my music. Just bizarre.

XLR8R: So what is your touring schedule going to be like? It sounds like last year's tour went over very well.

Yeah, it did ... unfortunately, we didn't do that many gigs. I mean, we just had five. But we did that only because we wanted to test the water, see if people remember us M-Q and from that, it's pretty obvious that they do. I mean, before we had just been told how we were doing by a record company that we totally mistrusted, who really wanted to put us across in America as a pop act. We were just very unsure what the Americans would expect of us. The main man at Big Life always said that "Perpetual Dawn" would be the track that would break America for the Orb, and that was really scary for us. That led to the pop version that's on the American release of [Adventures Beyond the] Ultraworld. That was really beyond my control, which severely pissed me off. I mean, people have said that to me, but I really didn't like having my album split in two. They originally wanted me to cut every track down to five minutes, and stick it on that way. I mean, imagine that ...

XLR8R: Rumor has it that you'll be touring America as part of the Lollapalooza tour.

Rumor has it well. We've said so M-Q I've said so, and Kris has said so. We'll do part of the tour M-Q maybe a month, maybe six weeks. I can't see us sticking out for a whole summer of touring in America.

XLR8R: How does this look to you? You'll be touring with bands like Nirvana, the Beastie Boys and Smashing Pumpkins M-Q a totally different situation from other Orb tours.

Well, we'll probably take the piss. We'll probably do sets with no beats whatsoever. But at the same time, we're probably going to surprise a lot of people as well, because we'll have M-Qyou might as well be the first person to know M-Q we're got Paul Ferguson, who used to drum for Killing Joke, who's going to be joining us to play live drums. So there's going to be some oomph there as well. But none of those bands scare me whatsoever. Potentially, we have music for you that will blow the living daylights out of all that stuff. Maybe the early Beastie Boys stuff from the first album might be on par, but Nirvana are not a worry.

XLR8R: Are you going to be playing on the main stage with the rock stars, then?

I have no idea. We'll probably be put on a stage of our own, though. One of the things we said is that we wouldn't do it unless we could go on at nighttime, because of our lights M-Q which will make complete sense when you see our lights. So, I have no idea, really. Maybe we'll be the band playing on the alternative stage at nighttime. I don't know how it's going to work.

XLR8R: What projects are you most excited about right now?

Work-wise, last year we did an album. It started out as an Orb track with Robert Fripp's guitar on it, and it's now turned into an album project, with another Orb album in the pipeline, and two more albums next year M-Q so that's four albums, and we'll do selected dates next year, touring it. We'll be calling ourselves FFWD, which is Fast Forward. Fehlman, Westman and me M-Q you might hear the name Duncan, which is quite possible, because that's where the "doctor" comes from.

XLR8R: What direction do you think the future is going to bring for the Orb? There's definitely a different feel to the new tracks on the live album.

It's going to be very electronic. Less samples and more electronic music in there. We don't really want to try and be on the forefront, but maybe we are, without meaning to be. So therefore we're going to veer off a little bit, maybe add a few surprises to our album. But then we have another five albums to do after this one, and we want to do at least another four of those albums this year, so we can mix them whenever we want to and mix them to the right sounds of that particular year. In the meantime, while we're doing it, we'll find and use a lot of new stuff. I haven't got a crystal ball. I can't tell you what's going to happen in the future, but what we're doing is probably as far into the left field as you can go. And maybe people will try and push farther into that direction, but we open that door. And good luck to them, all the people around us, because I think we've got a nice happy little family of musicians and bands over here. We all know each other and talk to each other M-Q we talk to Black Dog, we talk to Aphex Twin, B12, Stan Robertson, various people in Berlin, in Detroit ... we do talk to a family of bands. Maybe we just happen to be sticking out a little further than those other bands right now, because of the touring aspect. We're talking to a lot of agents now who are afraid of booking these type of bands because they don't know who's going to go M-Q if anyone. So you see, in what we're doing, they might start booking this type of band. We're off to Japan in May, with Orbital and System 7, which is really good, because they're both new bands over there. I must say, the Japanese are one of our biggest fan bases as well. It's really good over there M-Q we get a lot of companies signing up, wanting to use our music for adverts and stuff like that, which shows that this is a sound they consider the future, even though we look at them and see the future even though the future isn't really there, because they mass-produce the future. But we see it as the future over there, because of the culture. We won't talk about the technology M-Q the west coast of America, that's where all the technology really is coming from.

XLR8R: Now that you're a major live artist as well as a studio artist, how does that change the way you work?

Well, we get hassled by the postman to listen to demo tapes. And same thing in the line at the grocery store M-Q this bloke keeps handing me tapes, it's really embarrassing. Other than that, my life hasn't really changed very much. I might be a bit more frantic now and again with friends, but I think they understand I've got far less time than I used to have to be myself.

XLR8R: But how do you think it changes your music, now that live performance is as much a part of the Orb as studio mixing?

Well, we play live in the same way we play in the studio M-Q as if we have a band in sound booths, and it's going into the mixing desk. Kris is mixing all of those pieces M-Q the bass guitar, percussionist, ambient noises M-Q through twenty-four tracks of music coming through the mixing desk. We do play these things live M-Q it's not like a rock band, get your rocks off, ha ha ha, or anything like that M-Q but on the same point, there's also the visual aspect. It's almost like we're conductors, and everything is going on behind us. By the end of the gig, no one has actually noticed or seen us, which is nice, because that's not what we're after. We're not after that sort of an ego kick that a lot of people who do music are after. We don't really need it. We didn't really have to go out on tour to sell the first album; the first album sold because it was in the shops. But then we decided to go on tour to see how much better it would be. Kris hates touring; I've lived on the road since I was seventeen, so I have no problems with it. So there's a complete north-pole south-pole there. We're going to tour this year, but next year we may never tour again. But at the same point, he might change his mind in a couple of years time; but at that point, I might change my mind and decide that it's a good thing to hang me boots up. But this will probably be the last year we're going to tour for a long time anyway. We're going concentrate on the studio M-Q we just take the studio live anyway. Those mixes you hear on the live album are done to a mixing disk live on stage, on the tour. The albums are done the same way, but in the studio.

XLR8R: What do people get out of a live Orb show that they don't get out of other live shows, that they don't get out of just listening to your music at home in bed?

I think it's just being with everyone, and the visuals as well M-Q it's an added effect. A friend of mine who's also a journalist wrote about it, and what he said about it is pretty much true: that when people come to see the Orb, it's not because they're a house fan, or a rock fan, or a reggae fan M-Q they go there because they just like the Orb. And to me, that's the biggest compliment we can actually get. But it's also very true. It just happens that way. We just happen to be very lucky. Maybe we won't be so lucky in the next couple of years M-Q maybe we'll have a bum break on the North American tour. But who cares? I don't particularly mind. I think that for what we started out as, a chill out band to just do Sunday afternoon sessions, we've done extremely well at it so far. So there you go. I can't be too modest.

XLR8R: What projects are you involved with right now outside of the Orb and musical collaborations? There are rumors that you're working on a movie and a new video.

We've been approached to do a couple of film soundtracks. We're waiting for Chris Blackwell to get back to us on that. Other than that, I'm getting my own label together. We're releasing about four acts this year.

XLR8R: What kind of acts are you releasing through your studio and label?

What we consider pure ambient music, in a lot of respects. Very industrial ambient music, as well. There's probably some dark space in there as well. Juno Reactor is releasing something called Luciano, Juno Reactor 2, which is a furthering of a project that Ben Watkins started with Mute. The label is called Intermodo now, instead of Wau! Mr. Modo, as it used to be. That will be released around May, along with the FFWD project. There's another band called Autocreation who put an album out on Warp; they've just recently signed to us. Various other tracks, different artists. I can't really explain it in ten minutes; it would take all night, really. [Laughter]

XLR8R: It seems like ambient music is becoming more and more another form of popular music. Here in Seattle it's still fairly underground, but in San Francisco next month there's going to be a big event with ambient music as the main attraction, rather than a side event. What do you think about ambient music becoming pop?

Unfortunately, I think that's not what it's really about. What you say is M-Q in a lot of respects, why do people go see the Orb? The lights, being together with people who like the Orb. That might work at an ambient event if everyone liked pure ambient music. But then if it grew into so many people that people came simply because it was the latest hip fashion, there would be a total reaction against that. I don't particularly want to start or be part of something that will be so huge that there will be a reaction against it. That would just be giving more fodder to society, because that's how everything works. That's human nature.

XLR8R: A lot of people trace the roots of ambient music to very avant-garde composers like Brian Eno or John Cage, but looking at ambient music as pop music, there's definitely a connection to seventies progressive rock. And punk started as a backlash against that.

Yeah ... I used to be a punk rocker. I was there. In those days, here, living in London, getting beaten up for being a punk rocker. Going out, getting spat at by people, being chased down the road. There was a real reaction against it. There you go ... that was in 1977. Nineteen seventy-seven, I wish we'd all go to heaven. I know what you're saying, but I don't want to be part of that. I don't want to be part of some mega-band scenario, where thousands of people will turn up for one event. I mean, we've been asked to do a gig at Wembley with Mixmaster Morris, and we turned that down. There's only so far we'll go. The biggest we've ever done, other than festivals, is the Academy, in London. It holds four and a half thousand people. If you go anywhere bigger, it's shy M-Q no atmosphere, you don't know what security you're going to get, who the fuck you'll be dealing with. With the Academy, we know that place inside out M-Q I know that place inside out, because I used to roadie there, years ago. I used to roadie for some really shit bands, some really good bands. We know the security, the people backstage, so it's no problem. And it's the only place around that gives you a 6 a.m. license, so you can finish at 6 a.m. and have a really good night out. You know the bouncers who are there, they aren't going to beat people up and take their drugs. They're just going to let people chill out. If they see people smoking, they'll get thrown out, but it's not a problem. That should be the way it is, anyway. A lot of places in New York are like that, and a lot of places in San Francisco are like that. There's a hell of a lot of places that simply don't tolerate that type of behavior, and that's really sad. There's a lot of bouncers that will exercise their right to beat the fuck out of you just because you drank in excess of twelve pints of beer. They just come up with excuses. It's the same old story. Everyone's been saying this for years, it's not even worth mouthing off about it. It's stupid. People should just legalize cannabis and get with it.

XLR8R: How do you feel about the legalization of hemp for industrial purposes in the UK?

Amused. [Coughs] To be sure, very amused. They've done that, but at the same time, this week they're trying to pass a law through Parliament where if you're caught with possession of Class B drugs, which are amphetamines or cannabis, you get fined from 500 up to 2500 pounds, which is ludicrous. That's not stopping crime M-Q that's making turn to more crime. People will say, "Well, I've been busted for two and a half grand, so I'll have to go nick something to pay that back." [Laughter]

XLR8R: Here in the United States, our prisons are filling up at a rapid rate because of minimum mandatory sentences for possession of narcotics.

You can get twenty years for maybe bringing in a bit of hash, and some bloke might rape three girls and get six years for it. Where's the sense in that? I think we're both in the same boat here. I just hope that as we get older, the generation we're dealing with now will be dead and gone, thank god, and then there won't be this primitive way of thinking. I can't see why they don't legalize it anyway, because they can make so much money out of it by taxing it.

XLR8R: Do you see the Orb as part of a larger trend within society? You've been classified as part of the "rave" movement, whatever that means.

Tell me, I don't know. Horrible word.

XLR8R: Do you see yourself as an aspect or part of a larger movement?

Furthering UFOlogy research is one of our interests. Other than that, really, musically we can go a long way. Maybe we'll fall down flat on our faces, but at least we've given it a try. That's our main thing as the Orb. There are things we want to get into, but we just haven't got the time, incredible as it may seem. As they say, Rome wasn't built in a day M-Q these things take time. To get into full time videos or full time visual ideas would be fun, but it takes money and time. Maybe we'll have the money and the time right now, but at the moment we haven't got either.

XLR8R: The album U.F.Orb was about furthering UFOlogy and conspiracy theory. What have you been doing with that lately?

I've been reading a few books, but that's as far as it goes. That's where I got all the information from before, reading books. I met this journalist in Canada three years ago who gave me a copy of the Majestic Papers which had been circulating throughout America for a few years. It was about the meetings these twelve people, the Majestic Society, had in the blue room, letting each other know about the UFO experiences and how they should cover it up. It's been deemed a fake now, but it's another thing that was in my head.

XLR8R: What's the best book you've read recently?

Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein. I don't know if you know anything about the book M-Q it was reedited and rereleased right after he died in 1989. It's about a third bigger now, because a lot of pressure was put on him by the FBI or the CIA, one of the two, to not release the book. They didn't want people to get the idea that there was another race of people walking around in 1962 in America. They didn't want them to feel like there was another conspiracy going on, so he had to rewrite a lot of the book. When I read the book, I talked to my older brother about it. He had read the older version, and there are a lot of things in the new version that he hadn't read before. I advise you if you haven't read the new version, to read it. The other one I've read recently is The Twelfth Planet, by Zachariah Stich, which is full of mad ideas. I love ideas. They aren't just ideas, they're other humans' thoughts, which are the same thing, really.

XLR8R: What have you been listening to? Could you give us your top ten albums?

Not really. The Red Planet 5, with 4 dots on it ... a few things on Fragile ... album-wise ... Galaxy, which I recently re-found on CD ... a couple of Eno ones I've been getting back into recently. There you go, really. I've been mostly listening to the FFWD project and some other Orb-like mixes. Our new single, "Pomme Frites" ... I'm sure we'll be remixing or mixing on that again next week. We did some mixes in Berlin in January. When you're working on a track, you don't really listen to anything else ... you just sort of lose it. You have to just stay in there, then maybe take a couple of weeks off, then go back to it.

XLR8R: The theme of the issue we're putting out in just a few days is going to be goats ...

Goats?!

XLR8R: Yeah, goats ... we were just wondering how you feel about goats and other farm animals.

I don't have any problems with them ... I think every house should have them. I don't have a goat, but I have some terrapins.

XLR8R: What are their names?

Victor the Cleaner and Michelangelo. Michelangelo for obvious reasons M-Q or unobvious, for those who don't know. [Laughter] My girlfriend named him Michelangelo, from the Ninja Turtle ones. My turtle is named Victor from La Nikita M-Q don't know if you've seen the film. There's a particular bloke in there she rings up after she's killed someone, he's called Victor the Cleaner. He comes around and cleans the body up. They just ravage things. When you called, I had just given them fish, and so my hands are really cold. They're brilliant when they're eating fish.

XLR8R: If you could be any farm animal, what would it be?

If I could be ... that's the old Freudian question, isn't it really?


XLR8R: We could do some word association ...

No, please don't ... [Laughter] I suppose a pig, really ... don't ask me why. I saw an amazing pig last year, which was like the best animal I've ever seen in my life. I've never seen an animal so big and happy.

XLR8R: If you had a message to send a message out to all the inhabitants of the world, what would it be?

Me? I'd have to think about that, really ... that's the message: "I'll think about that ...". Hmm ... I have no idea. I'd probably go on and go on for quite a while. What would you say?

XLR8R: I'm not sure either. Hard to decide, isn't it? I was hoping you'd have some ideas.

It depends on how many words and sentences you've got to say it ... anyway ...

XLR8R: Maybe someday you can get your own TV station.

Maybe one day we could be like U2 ... you never know.