The Orb are electronic music pioneers, innnovators who expanded on the idea of house music early in the advent of raves, creating slower, often psychedelic-sounding tracks which would be embraced by partied out ravers at the end of a night, as well as home listeners who could find more complexity in the carefully crafted compositions. Named after the “intoxication orb” in the Woody Allen film Sleeper, The Orb was formed in 1988 by Alex Paterson and Jimmy Cauty (one half of The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu and later The KLF). The group took inspiration from ambient music pioneers like Can, Tangerine Dream, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, and John Cage. Their first release was the acid house anthem “Tripping on Sunshine”, based on a sample from “Walking on Sunshine” by Rockers Revenge and released only on the Eternity Project One compilation.

In 1989, The Orb released the Kiss EP, a work heavily influenced by New York’s Kiss FM. Paterson began DJing around London at this time when he met Paul Oakenfold. At Oakenfold’s behest, Paterson began DJing at Land of Oz, the chill-out room at the notorious London night club Heaven. Paterson mixed sound samples, including BBC nature recordings and NASA space broadcasts, into the music of ambient music pioneers such as Brian Eno. Around this time, Paterson also began collaboration with Steve Hillage, with Hillage contributing to Orb tracks, and Paterson working as part of the production end of Hillage’s band, System 7 (also known as 777 in the USA due to copyright problems with Macintosh Computers).

In October 1989 The Orb released the twenty-two-minute single “A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld”, which contained large chunks of Minnie Riperton’s “Loving You”. The single reached the lower end of U.K. music charts. Although Paterson and Cauty had been working on a debut album, the two split in April 1990. Cauty removed Paterson’s contributions to the album and released the remainder as Space.

In April 1991 The Orb’s debut full length album, “The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld”, was released by Big Life/Mercury Records in the United Kingdom to critical acclaim. The double-album reached the top thirty in the UK charts. The highlight of the album was the ambient house track titled “Little Fluffy Clouds”, which has since become one of the most commercially successful ambient releases in history. The track is well known for its sample of a woman recounting her childhood watching clouds in Arizona. The sample was apparently from an episode of the PBS-TV children’s program Reading Rainbow, containing Rickie Lee Jones’s dialogue with Levar Burton. Jones sued The Orb over the use of the sample, but Big Life (the music label which released Little Fluffy Clouds) later settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. The song also uses a harmonica sample from Ennio Morricone’s The Man With The Harmonica, and parts of Electric Counterpoint, a piece for multitracked guitars composed by Steve Reich and recorded by Pat Metheny. The track saw a great deal of exposture again as the music to a Volkswagen commercial in the late 1990s.

In June 1992, the new single “Blue Room” hit the British Top Ten. At nearly 40 minutes in length, it was longest single in UK chart history. It’s success earned the Orb a spot on British music tv show Top of the Pops, where during the broadcast the group played a chess game and waved at the camera while a shortened of the single played in the background, much to the chagrin of TOTP producters. The album U.F.Orb was released that July, and kept with an interstellar theme that Ambient music had been cultivating. (The actual “Blue Room” is the military storage facility where the evidence of the 1947 saucer crash outside Roswell, NM is supposedly kept. The album hit number one on the British charts, and fueled the group’s sold-out tour of England. The song was featured on that year’s full lenght album U.F.Orb.

Over the next 6 years The Orb continued to release albums with varying themes and varying degrees of success, with 1994′ Pommes Fritz doing well in the charts, but falling flat critically. The 1996 album Orbus Terrarum marked a more earthy turn for the band, featuring heavy use of natural samples. 1997 saw the release of Orblivion, which featured another of the group’s most successful singles, Toxygene.

The past 5 years have seen a marked move from beat-less music by the Orb, perhaps spurred by numerous lineup changes (Dr. Alex Paterson being the only everpresent member of the group). The more pop-oriented album Cydonia was released in 2001, despite having been completed in 1998, due to issues with their record label.

2 years ago Orb released Bicycles & Tricycles, an album which flirts with more modern, glitchy production techniques, while still harkening to the early ’90s ambient house music which was Orb’s bread and butter. An example of more modern-sounding production is the track Gee Strings, which is a moderately complex house track, but ends up beind just that: a house track.

The Orb’s most recent release is last year’s Okie Dokie It’s The Orb On Kompakt. As the title suggests, The Orb is now on German record label Kompakt, and the album marks what may be the peak of Orb’s maturity, with tracks that successfully meld the old and the new, with Alex Paterson collaborating with producers who he influenced and is in turn inspired by.