Product Description

A worthy successor to the group's first release, the watershed double-disc THE ORB'S ADVENTURES BEYOND THE ULTRAWORLD, U.F.ORB ranges a little further afield in composition and concept. With a keener sense of focus and a greater willingness to step outside the rave-oriented dance metres of the duo's debut, Alex Paterson and Kris Weston (a.k.a. Thrash) delvemore heavily into found sounds, samples, and audio collage.
The opener and the chimerical, mesmerising "Blue Room", demonstrate a particular affinity for manipulating sound into abstract, mind-teasing formations. The influence of heavy dub--the sort practiced by Lee "Scratch" Perry and King Tubby--is apparent here as well, especially on the aptly named "Towers of Dub". But the Orb still creates pulsing, beat-based music for this outing, particularly on the title track andthe tense "Close Encounters". U.F.ORB demonstrates the group's prowess at melding the rhythmic elements of house with the avant-garde, organic soundscapes of ambient music, and confirms its status as a highly influential act in the development of electronica.

Track Listing

1. OOBE
2. UF Orb
3. Blue Room
4. Towers Of Dub
5. Close Encounters
6. Majestic
7. Sticky End

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5650 in Music
• Released on: 1996-03-15
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
After the sprawling ambient opus that was their debut LP, Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld, The Orb voyaged into new interstellar realms for the follow-up. The languid rippling soundscapes and far-out samples persisted, but Dr Alex Patterson and Thrash introduced uptempo beats to the brew, lending the album a chunkier, less meandering feel which was reflected in its commercial success. "Blue Room" was the longest single in history at a touch under 40 minutes long, while the centrepiece was the staggering "Towers Of Dub", which married abstract electronica with some of the mightiest bass this side of Kingston. An LP which sees The Orb at the peak of their tripped-out talents, before their later slide into a self-indulgent, sonic miasma. --Ed Potton

From Amazon.com
An ambient-techno classic, UFOrb captures Alex Patterson and his sonic henchman at their early peak. While the Orb had already created a dance-floor and chill-out-room sensation in 1991 with Little Fluffy Clouds, this follow-up disc displays Patterson's talent for fusing ambient music with dub science and a club culture mindset. Incorporating psychedelicized samples over the era's reigning techno beats and deep reggae bass lines, heady compositions such as "Towers of Dub" and "Close Encounters" are excessive in length but consistently entertaining. The album's highlight is an 18-minute version of "Blue Room" (there's a 40-minute version out there, too), which features the sensual bass playing of Jah Wobble and the oscillating guitar of coproducer Steve Hillage. A most serious contribution to the legacy of the modern DJ. --Mitch Myers

Customer Reviews

One of the true Electronica greats...
This album is unquestionably one of the best Electronica records ever made...

You simply cannot be an electronic music fan without owning this CD. If for some unknown, crazy reason you don't own it, BUY IT IMMEDIATELY!

A timeless classic... 10/10

I'm actually on TV
Mine still has the 'Brit Awards Nominee' sticker on the front. I believe this got to number one in the charts, which was dead unprecedented for what was mostly a lot of multi-layered samples with some beats here and there. For some reason it all worked; I have heard bootlegs of the early sessions which led to this album, and there's no magic in the demos. The Orb's later albums were conceptually similar but uniformly rubbish. But U.F.Orb, whether because the band was going the extra mile, or because of some ineffable fairy dust, U.F.Orb actually worked, it was relaxing, funny, mesmerising, an excellent listen with headphones, as background music, and loudly to dance to in the bits which have beats. The samples are all well-chosen and I can still recite most of them; the bit where there is a snippet from Radio Moscow, followed by loud drums, is the best. The second side of the album is noticeably moodier, with 'Close Encounters' sounding as you would expect a song about UFOs to sound.

It's also a nostalgic album, for people in their early 30s. The pre-internet 'Wired'-era computer whizz-bang space-age techno-pagan futurism of it all was mirrored in contemporary releases by the Future Sound of London, System 7 and so forth, and although this kind of ambient space music is now as dated as krautrock was in 1992, it's heartbreaking to listen to. So many dreams and hopes smashed to bits.

Excellent way to show off a hi-fi system, too, because it has quiet bits and loud bits and they all sound top-notch. 'Sticky End' is a short joke track and 'Majesty' is a bit irritating, but it's otherwise an excellent way to spend fifty minutes or so. Shame they didn't include the lengthy 'Blue Room' single as a pack-in or bonus track (it was basically the album version looped a couple of times, with a different bassline).

And it's "Teilhard de Chardin", it took me ages to find that out; he's the one who conceived of a third world, a world of objective contents of thoughts.

The sound of an epoch
This is a condensed version of the original triple vinyl release of 'U.F.Orb', which came 'hermetically sealed' in blue-grey PVC and had to be cut open with knife or scissors - a typically elaborate Paterson/Cauty marketing gimmick that also seemed to say something about how they viewed The Orb as a cultural project. It was as if 'U.F.Orb' was a time capsule, a distillation of the sprawling experiments on 'Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld', a sealed container flung into space to show the rest of the universe what it was like on Earth (or at least in Britain) in 1992.

As a summation of a point in musical time, it's as evocative as 'Revolver' or 'Ziggy Stardust' or 'Sound Affects'. And like all of those, there's something ineffably British about the way The Orb took beats from Detroit, minimalist compositions from New York and dub from Jamaica, and stretched and warped them into a completely new form. If the clubs were full of house and techno, the bedrooms were full of smoke and ambient dub, and The Orb were responsible for much of it.

'U.F.Orb' is their finest achievement, proving that 'Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld' wasn't a novelty record but the herald (along with The KLF's 'Chill Out') of a new genre. The sound here is both denser and more dubby, with more going on but less dependence on the BBC sound effects records and slowed-down house beats that were the backbone of their earlier work. 'Blue Room' (here edited from its 39'58" single length) and 'Towers of Dub' are the standouts, but The Orb's legacy is even more impressive than their music. You can hear it not only in experimental 'dance' music from Shpongle to Monolake, from Portishead to Lemon Jelly; it's embedded in mainstream pop, soundtracks and muzak the world over. And if you still have that triple vinyl release, with the PVC intact, I bet it's worth a fortune.