The following few paragraphs are taken from the excellent booklet supplied with the Trance Europe Express Compilation. Its a good read and even more interesting in the fact that it was written in the early stage of Orbitals excellent career. Orbital were a major part of my introduction to this music and I still class their 2nd album (Brown) as one of the best ever.
Written By: Andrew Smith for "Trance Europe Express CD Compilation Booklet" 1993.
"It was in April 1990 that Orbital's majestic "Chime" crashed into the Gallup chart at number 17.They were the first act of thier kind to do it, the first forced into fighting what was to do with an instrumental record fashioned out of bleeps and orchestral sweeps and performed by a pair of skinheads standing behind a mixing desk, absorbed in the act of creation. In a sense, you could see their point.
For the rest of us, it was a good time. Dance records were starting to make a mass impact on the mainstream. Invention was in the air. For the Hartnoll brothers, on the other hand, it was confusion. Though the establishment classed them as another pesky dance act, DJs wouldn't play their tunes and, in the main, still won't - the music is too complex and multi-layered for all but the most adventurous jocks.
Neither did London Records yet understand what they had a hold of: something far more substantial than had seemed possible as the ink was drying on the newly-exchanged contracts. A series of running battles took place everytime another disc was due for release, with the corporation insisting on changes to make it more commercial and the boys steadfastly refusing. Now, they're left to their own. It's taken three years, two albums and seven glorious EPs for the world to catch up with Orbital. Few would deny, that it's been worth the wait.
What the Hartnolls have been doing over these years is quietly spearheading a movement away from the the utilitarian musical philosophies that had come to dominate on the club fringe: the idea that to fill a dancefloor for a few hours was enough-As Orbital, they wanted to make music you could listen to anywhere; they wanted to play live like a band, to improvise and challenge. That word improvise is the key. To this day, Orbital still decline to describe themselves as a "dance" act.
"I don't differentiate between electronic music and any other kind" says Paul who, at the age of 25, is the younger of the pair by four years. "I just see this music as a soundtrack to the computer age. Because we're living through a revolution. One day a kid at school is going to press a button on his or her wristwatch and access a history textbook. They're going to turn to a chapter on the Industrial Revolution, and read about the changes that are happening now. We're just learning how to use the tools that are becoming available to us, just as musicians once had to come to grips with the invention of the piano. I think people get too obsessed with the tools of the trade, rather than the energy that's gone into it and the power of the end result."
In other words, Orbital have helped to reclaim electronic music as an art form, one with a history stretching back more than 20 years. Take 'Chime' and the recent single, 'Lush', for instance, with their spiralling, chattering main theme and chaotic cross-rhythms - they have more in common with the work of avant garde orchestral composers such as Michael Nyman or Philip Glass. This is allied to a purity of sound most often associated with early electronic pioneers Kraftwerk (who, tellingly, first came together at a Stockhausen convention in '69). The stuttering electro beats of 'Oolaa', 'Remind' or 'Halcyon', on the other hand, bring to ming the vintage moves of Africa 'Planet Rock' Bambaata or Cabaret Voltaire circa 'Sensoria'.
The Lush upper textures are pure 'Dare'-era Human League, fucked-up and fried. Listen to early experimentalists such as the German group Can or the following decade's Mantronix and Sugar Hill Gang (as heard on the ground-breaking hip hop of Grandmaster Flash And The Furious Five's 'The Message' or Melle Mel's majestic 'Step Off'): fragments of all these echo through Orbital's two eponymously titled albums, but given a pleasingly direct, post-acid, '90s spin. You can dance to it if you want - you don't have to.
Are Orbital conscious of coming back from a particular tradition? "We are from a tradition of bedroom twiddlers," laughs Paul, not untruthfully, and with a twinkle in his eye.
The brothers' attitude to their art has everything to do with personal history. As a teenager growing up in the sleepy Kent hamlet of Sevenoaks, Phil, like so many suburb-dwellers of his generation, was fired by punk. To this day he sports an impressive collection of rings in his ears and a large and nasty scar on the underside of his left arm, the result of a failed and bloody attempt to tattoo an Anti-Nazi league logo on himself. He was 14 at the time.
"My mum came home and saw it and immediately dragged me down to the doctor," he explains. "He took one look and decided to try an experimental method of removing it. Basically, he took hold of the skin and cut it off with a knife, a great chunk of it, then cauterised the wound. I don't know what he was thinking of..."
Later, Phil trained as a builder, working on sites in his home town. ("They all thought I was gay, just 'cos I looked different and did different things to them. I hate that kind of small-mindedness.") This experience also convinced the elder Hartnoll that day-jobs were best avoided.
Stints followed with an unlikley array of bands (did someone mention New Romantic?), though the process of collaborating with groups of musicians proved equally frustrating. His main outside interests these days are his two young sons, Louis and Milo, and his cuddly green new VW camper van.
Paul, according to his brother, was more of a "second generation punk, into Crass and all that stuff". After school, he studied art at Hastings College, before leaving to concentrate on music. He's the dreamer, the gadabout music junkie who's to be spotted at clubs and gigs about town with awesome regularity. He was recently identified in the salubrious surroundings of The Marquee, taking in, of all things, Verve. The first records he remembers being into was 'Sugar Sugar' by The Archies. Paul also goes in for a spot of DJing these days, though he denies this has affected his own approach to music in any way. "It's just a sneaky way of getting to play our stuff before it gets released" he says.
Orbital's eclectic and often startling use of sampled material comes as no surprise when you know all this. On 'Omen' for instance, they took from ABC's 'How to be a Millionaire'. 'Choice' found them mugging anarcho-punk band Crucifix. 'Naked And The Dead' featured Scott Walker, while the luscious 'Halcyon' was fashioned from a looped segment of Opus III's 'Fine Day'
Artists namechecked in interview include Michael Nyman and Steve Reich, Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine - all people, the discerning reader will note, with a highly developed sense of drama. Rated contemporaries are Underworld, CJ Bolland, Psychic Warriors Ov Gaia and The Aphex Twin. Well rounded chaps, Orbital.
'Semi-Detached, which you're no doubt listening to now, began life as a projected remix of 'Lush'. But as they worked on it the boys reached a point where they realised that it had virtually nothing to do with the original. So they decided to make it into something different. This, chuckles Paul, is not the first time such a thing has happened. The track is something of a departure for Orbital, being more linear and trancey than anything they've released. This is, they say, an approach they're likely to be pursuing in greater depth in the future. Remember, you heard it here first. The title, according to Paul, was chosen for two reasons, one formal, one existential. "First, it was recorded in two halves and we didn't know precisely what it was going to sound like until we'd finished it - it was recorded more or less live, as a performance. Also, there was a lot of stuff going on with tours (most notably the MIDI Circus jaunts) and the LP ('Orbital 2'). At the time, it was a great release to pull ourselves away from that and make some music, to be semi-detached. When we were doing the track, we just got totally lost in it. It was exactly what we needed at the time, really enjoyable."
So, is this all part of the gameplan?
"Naw, we don't have one of them," grins Paul. "If you try to plan music things, they never go right and then you feel like you've failed. If you don't plan, surprising things happen."
Indeed they do, in Orbital's world, all the time."
That took a while to type...3 cans of Heineken later and a sore back, here is the tune from Orbital called Semi-Detached. More from Orbital another day.
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