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Thursday, 09 July 2009 23:07 |
 [Press Release] The mighty Orb return on September 7th 2009 with new longplayer Baghdad Batteries, on Malicious Damage Records. An album of classic Orb elements combined with new twists, Baghdad Batteries utilises years at the forefront of the ever-changing spectrum of electronic sub-genres. For the uninitiated, The Orb are national treasures and musical pioneers.
These startling electronic odysseys were hatched by Orb founder Dr Alex Paterson and with long-time collaborator Thomas Fehlmann, The Orb’s Berlin connection. Setting the controls beyond any earthly confines, the duo’s jaunt is laced with humour and passes many moons of dub, techno, minimal, ambient, house, rock steady and the avant garde on their journey through the cosmos.
The title comes from a major archaeological find discovered in a village near Baghdad in 1936 dating back around 2,000 years to the Mesopotamian Parthian period, and thought to be the world’s first primitive battery . The album is actually the third volume in the Malicious Damage ongoing Orbsessions series, but whereas the previous two were compiled from nuggets trawled from the vaults, these are new tracks recorded at Thomas’ Berlin studio, which also provide the soundtrack for Austrian director Werner Boote’s film Plastic Planet.
The opening Styrofoam Meltdown rains in with similar sense of extra-terrestrial shock and awe which would levitate the heart-strings when The Orb revved up their live shows with O.O.B.E. in the early 90s, a kind of heavenly carwash explosion of interstellar frequencies, which here sees the inter-acting pulses joined by kick drum and at one point, even invokes the ghost of Giorgio Moroder’s I Feel Love.
Chocolate Fingers starts as a beatless piece, drenched in shimmering keys with shining melodic strands setting off an aural firework display, stun-quotient doubled when the chord changes kick in. The title track is gorgeously haunting as marimba tones melt over swirling effects before one of the highlights – the pastoral Raven’s Reprise, a poignant tribute to the late Killing Joke bassist. This celestial electronic space symphony is followed by another…oh bollocks, they’re all highlights!
Dolly Unit is a dense, throbbing tech-flavoured pulser, sprayed with bluesy guitar peelings, giving way to an ancient rock steady beat before the muted house shuffle of Super Soakers. The beat carries on into Suburban Smog, deploying spaced tribal percussion and lush, organic ambience. Big Hammond chords highlight Orban Tumbleweed before the spoken interlude of Pebbles. Old mucker Max Loderbauer from Sun Electric came in on the breezy sax and bleep vamp of Woodlarking while the creaking resonance of OOPA takes the album out – actually a non-movie nugget first released on noted German electronic label Skitkatapult last year [the initials stand for Out Of Place Artefact].
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Last Updated on Thursday, 09 July 2009 23:07 |
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