REVIEW: The Orb - Orbvs Terrarvm (Island)

- Joe Silva

Across the now vast ambient sea, Dr Alex Paterson in his guise as Orb Commander, continually buoys along the surface. To the mainstream he is undoubtedly the ruling personage, vaguely challenged in notoriety now and again by that Moby guy. But to the faithful, he's just one jewel in the trance/dance crown - yet to do much, if any, wrong in his cosmic warblings.

Since the almost comic proposition of their double live album and his invite to Mudstock, he and former sidekick Thrash (recently departed to groove on solo) issued forth the odd and oddly received mini-LP Pomme Fritz. For the length and breadth of that project, Alex and Co. seemed to deconstruct the rules, disavow all the standard approaches, and then stand back to mull over the outcome. Since Orbvs is more kin to Fritz than either of his other hookier and structured predecessors, he apparently liked what he surveyed.

The rift that has kept Alex at a rudimentary distance from the pack, has always been the playful elements he electronically fuses into his soundscapes. His ability to stare down the morbidly serious, rave savvy purists (who'd rather ritualize their product than remember that the genesis for all this was essentially party music to begin with) is paramount. So Fritz came off as just an obliquely weird side of Alex; something the equivalent of a sonic aside. But while he's hasn't reached the level of others who sequence out substance for an endless looping sample of some lost Mayan Yak pipe they've come across at a yard sale, Orbvs is a structurally dispersed as anything bleating out from the NPR New Age specialty show's playlist. He ambles from his familiar dub laced pathways to places of almost total anonymity and back again. Tracks like "White River Junction" contain some of his now signature sounds and tangible direction, but the longish "Occidental" doesn't have much terrarvm to stand on. Slug Dub is the classic riddim-bent Orb stuff of U.F. Orb, but until the moment in Oxbow Lakes (or is it Montagne D'or? They melt into one another in any case) when the short lived percussive assault rains down on the listener, the notion that might have once anchored the track have somewhat dissolved into the ether. Whether Alex is in mode transient is hard to say because you can never extract much commentary from his wispy presence to latch onto his aim anyway. This record may simply be the flux point though where Alex readies his listeners to leave his ultraworld for another plane, with new aural perspectives and more of Orbvs's distinctive wavelength to lift heels in that blissful direction.