In a banner year for dance music’s elder statesmen, Ambient pioneers The Orb have returned (after a number of dub inflected works) to show the younguns how to rave.
Their new album, Moonbuilding 2073 revisits the pure moods that made their 1991 epic Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld a seminal dance music classic.
The all too brief set of brilliantly sprawling tracks, Moonbuilding finds the good Dr. Alex Paterson & Thomas Fehlman extolling the virtues (and frankly fundamental aspects) of psychedelia.
At the risk of being somewhat age-ist and overly “get off my lawn” about it all…I generally get the sense that this generation of Dance music devotees have been weaned on an all too formulaic kind of experience that has more to do with the immediate satisfaction of a video game, as opposed to the necessarily transcendental experience of actually being swept away.
There is a lot of turning up and not enough tuning in.
Instead of dropping out, kids are simply waiting for the drop.
Every generation finds its way, but there seems to be a disconnect between now and the history of Electronic Dance Music which has historically been rooted in a journey, kids.
Not some Frankenstein’d collection of internet sample packs with readymade drops that you see coming a mile away so that the proverbial you and proverbial wolfpack can jump up and down to in geeky unison to. You shouldn’t be microwaving your trip, boys and girls.
No strangers to the 10+ minute long excursion, The Orb require a level of patience that seem antiquated in this climate. And perhaps it feels extravagant (dare I say, even insulting) which is precisely why it’s such a welcome return.
Granted, there is and always has been a marked difference even 20+ years ago between the “turnt up” techno music of yore and what The Orb has always done…but, the universal truth of yin is that there must be yang.
The dark side of the Moon is only half the story.
There’s also a whole other half to the damned thing…and the good Dr and Fehlman choose to build on it.
I’m not trying to browbeat you kids…I just feel like it’s high time y’all got wise and spent some time with them there. And remember what it’s like to trip ultimately, like it’s 2001 or 1992 or 1968.