Audio Journal: 18/10/2013 - !!!, The Orb

!!! Thr!!!er

If I was to look at what album I've listened to most over the past six months it will undoubtedly turn out to be Thr!!!er by !!! (you pronounce it chk-chk-chk). Thr!!!er was released on Warp, once the pre-eminent home of UK electronic music, but now much more interested in more eclectic concerns.

I didn't go out of my way to buy this. My family and I were in holiday in New York and we stopped in at Other Music to pick up some CDs that we'd been contemplating buying but hadn't gotten around to. In fact, it had been a while since Mrs S. or I had splurged on buying music, it was chucking it down with rain outside and the staff in the shop were so friendly that we just kept picking stuff up. It was like this last year, and also when we were there in 2005 (apart from the rain). I bought Banks by Interpol's Paul Banks, the debut Chelsea Light Moving album and a second-hand Cabaret Voltaire CD, while Mrs S. loaded up on all sorts of stuff, including the !!! album.

$100 odd dollars and another downpour later, we were sat in our hotel room trying to dry off before contemplating going out for dinner, eating soggy cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery in the Village and a sandwich from Peanut Butter & Company, and Mrs S. put Thr!!!er on. I was hooked from the opening snare hit on 'Even When The Water's Cold' and from that moment on it's been the soundtrack to many a car journey, commute to work or stay in a hotel for work.

I'm not sure totally sure why it's captivated me so. I saw the band live once supporting the Chili Peppers and they didn't exactly excite much, but there's something about the sleek disco-punk-funk on Thr!!!er that has made it a firm favourite. Mrs S tells me that this proves she has better taste than me; I concede she's probably right.

The only thing that's taken the edge of this new-found interest in this band was a recent Daytrotter session which was less slick and more sloppy, but otherwise, if it was possible to wear out a CD like people used to wreck LPs, I'd probably need a new copy now.

Listen to an Anthony Naples remix of the hedonistic and strangely wistful 'Californyeah' from the forthcoming remix EP here and below.

This week I found myself listening to 'Blue Room' by The Orb for the first time in probably ten years. I wasn't a fan of this when it first came out but intrigued me on some level (the weird 'performance' on Top Of The Pops where Alex Paterson and Kris Weston just played chess, the fact that the full length version lasted a proggy forty minutes) and shortly after its release I found myself drawn to ambient music as part of a push to try and find some means of calm in my life. I was a stressed-out teenager with all sorts of angst, and ambient music seemed to overcome that.

The Orb 'Blue Room'

I distinctly remember buying The Orb's U.F.Orb (which includes 'Blue Room') the day before my father went into hospital for an operation in 1993, and I found myself listening to it over and over in the car in Warwick Hospital car park the next day while waiting for him to come out of theatre. Later I'd turn to Brian Eno's The Shutov Assembly whenever I wanted some form of meditative state to wash over me, but for a long time it was U.F.Orb, and 'Blue Room' in particular, that usually did the trick.

Listening to it now, its forty-minute duration seems over far too quick and it remains absorbing enough across its length to never feel anything other than deeply engaging for the mind.

Audio Journal : 31/05/2010

Work from home playlist

Two unusual things about today – one, I worked from home and two, I had the house to myself. Here was today's work from home playlist, three albums selected at random to help me concentrate and be more productive.

The Orb Live '93

I first got into The Orb about a year after they released U.F.Orb. Before that I didn't really get the point of ambient music and I also thought The Orb in particular were just a huge joke. Their 'performance' of a hugely compressed single version of 'Blue Room' on Top Of The Pops saw the duo of Dr. Alex Paterson and Kris 'Thrash' Weston sitting either side of a chess board bathed in blue light, and I just didn't get it. Later I realised that there was humour inherent in their chill out music – that's what happens when you work with Jimmy Cauty from The KLF – but it wasn't meant to be a joke.

By 1993 however, I'd just finished my GCSEs, a lot of family stuff was kicking off, mild teenage angst was developing and I needed to find some way of calming down. U.F.Orb was the antidote. I bought it on cassette the day before my father went into hospital for an operation, and spent the entire length of his op sat in the family car listening to the album. It spawned an ongoing love of textural ambient music, but nothing – even some of The Orb's later output – ever came close to hearing that album for the first time.

The only thing that topped that album was seeing The Orb live at Warwick Arts Centre in 1995 with a school friend. It was an incredible evening, though possibly not as incredible as the people stoned out of their nuts found it. I genuinely regarded that concert as my musical coming of age, much more affecting in many ways than any of the usual landmark life events that ensued.

The problem is that I don't remember much about that night beyond the fact that in the post-concert DJ set I shook Dr. Alex Paterson's hand and gave him a massive thumbs up. The closest I can get is this 1993 live compilation which draws together tracks from various performances, including a seminal 'Tower Of Dub' – ex-PiL bassist Jah Wobble's low-slung dub rhythm pushed to levels that I recollect when played 'live' (by way of a sampled loop) back at Warwick Arts Centre made me think my chest was going to cave in.

Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works 85 – 92

Hooked on ambient music as I became in 1993 after purchasing U.F.Orb, it didn't take long before this album fell into my mits. Aphex Twin, by the time of this collection on the Belgian R&S label, was already established as a electronica enigma, a musical auteur who claimed not to have heard any of the music that his music was compared to; he made music in his shed, in Cornwall which at the time wasn't exactly regarded as a techno centre.

Richard D James, Aphex's given name, had a particularly unique take on the ambient genre. In few cases on Selected Ambient Works do you find the wispy, pulsing electronica which characterised vast swathes of this particular substrata of electronic music. Instead you get heavily reverb-ed slowed-down 'ardcore beats, icy synth lines and Willy Wonka samples. It prefaces the Warp label's fascination with clanging distorted beats and provides the bridge between the likes of Autechre with the industrial music of Cabaret Voltaire; not that James would have claimed to have consciously known this.

Warp released Selected Ambient Works II a few years later; it had no track names, just images reflecting each of the tracks. I borrowed it from the library the same day as I borrowed Brian Eno's The Shutov Assembly. I remember thinking that both albums sounded pretty much the same.

David Bowie Christiane F. - Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo



I had never considered buying Bowie until I read Christopher Sandford's Loving The Alien biography at University in the mid-Nineties. I don't think I've ever elected to read about an artist before actually having any of their music, but something about the book in the campus's branch of Waterstone's caught my eye and I decided I'd give it a go.

What emerged was an attraction to Bowie's 'Berlin' period – the trio of albums Low, Heroes and Lodger – which were produced by Bowie and Eno while the erstwhile David Jones was a resident in the city. I think it was an interest in Berlin as a cultural influence, and the influence of Low on Joy Division, more so than Eno's engagement, that hooked me in to that trio of albums. I bought the trio of albums over a period of a couple of years after reading that book and initially found them confusing, challenging listening experiences. In a bizarre way I didn't feel like I was entitled to listen to Bowie; I didn't understand his vernacular.

Since then I've moved either side of the Berlin period, specifically the Velvets-influenced Ziggy albums, but it's to the Berlin albums that I always return. This soundtrack album effectively works as a greatest hits of the period, drawing together album tracks and sundry oddities; the best of these is '“Helden”', a German version of the mighty '”Heroes”', in my opinion one of the most uplifting songs ever recorded.