The Orb

The idea of ambient house was nothing but an oxymoron before the Orb got a hold of it in the early '90s, handcrafting such instant drift-away classics as "Little Fluffy Clouds" (later adopted as the soundtrack to Volkswagen's Beetle relaunch) and the slick, groove-locked 7-inch edit of "Blue Room." (The original version is three seconds away from the 40-minute mark, making it the longest single to ever crack the U.K. Top 10.) Chill-out rooms haven't been the same since, as ravers from the past two decades let the Orb's ever-expanding catalog wash over them like the classic, ambient works of Brian Eno and Tangerine Dream. Oh, about that discography — as our Next Steps reveals with every synth swell and steady beat, the Orb has changed a bit over the years.

Alex Paterson's right-hand producer (James Cauty) left the Orb for even stranger pastures (acid-house legends the KLF) before the pair could finish their debut album. Not that you'd realize it while soaking in the 100-plus minutes of The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, a Dark Side of the Moon for the Ecstasy generation, from its conscious acid-flashback approach to its ingenious use of sampling ("Star 6 & 7 8 9" shifts from chirping birds to wind chimes to wheezing motorcycles). Patterson hasn't stopped reinventing the Orb or ambient house itself since his genre-defining debut, either, right up through the minimal techno flirtations of 2005's Okie Dokie It's The Orb on Kompakt. And to think we haven't even gotten to the Orb's greater remix output —something that's thoroughly explored in our Deep Cuts.

Nothing is what it seems in the unparalleled universe of the Orb. While many electronic musicians treat their remixes as slightly tweaked singles and build their own tracks from scratch with the help of fairly recognizable samples, the Orb goes off the deep end by obliterating the source material in all their songs. "The Perfect Drug" sucks Trent Reznor into a black hole where vocals flutter and fade like water in a wave pool, "Higher Than a Skyscraper" is like the shaky snow globe songs of Fennesz without the fuzz tones, and the hypnotic haze of "Higher Than the Sun" is a genuine rock-as-rave turning point on par with anything the Prodigy or Chemical Brothers produced.

It's hard to believe the Orb's longtime leader (Alex Paterson) once dragged amps and axes for Killing Joke. After all, he left that roadie gig for the "Land of Oz" chill-out room in Paul Oakenfold's Heaven club. It was there where he tested out the ambient house template of the Orb, from its effects-laden Eno references to its unpredictable strings of shrewd samples. Take the towering single "Little Fluffy Clouds": aside from its infamous use of a dazed-and-confused Rickie Lee Jones interview, the song swipes a harmonica from Ennio Morricone, a dense guitar piece from Steve Reich, and drums from a track Paterson still won't divulge. Which is fine with us — we're more than happy being swept up in the Orb's madness, whether it's in a super-club context (the sensory-overload songs of Live 93) or with a pair of headphones (see the rewarding returns of nearly everything the Orb's written).