“Then the music begins to suggest other things to your imagination. They might be, oh, just masses of color or they may be cloud forms or great landscapes or vague shadows or geometrical objects floating in space.” — Deems Taylor
“Drawing as much from Pink Floyd and Doctor Who as from Brian Eno, the album slows down the manic pace of techno and fills in the cavernous voids of earlier ambient fare. [...] The Orb injected goofy antics and insane-asylum effects into the stiff technophile genre, influencing the course of ’90s dance music along the way.” — Rolling Stone
Music—like any other art form—is fundamentally subjective, both in terms of how the artist produces it and how we choose to digest it. Some albums shoot for grandiosity, some aim to be grounded in reality. Some pander to the lowest common denominator, others are thematic. Some albums are inspired by static ideas and parsed through a dynamic prism.
Some albums are seen as hopelessly boring. Or even pretentious.
The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, the debut album by The Orb, is an album that attempts to envelop you in the concept of space and atmosphere. The original UK double album release clocks in at just under 110 minutes, which could easily seem like too much to most casual music fans but at the very least this album acts as a terrific virtuoso execution of long-form thematic expression. Ultraworld is like the auditory equivalent of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
And therein lies the rub: how many people are willing to listen to an album that is twenty years old, has an average track length of nearly ten minutes, and is a concept album about space and atmosphere? Probably not very many, I suppose.
“Over the past few years to the traditional sounds of an English summer, the droning of lawnmowers, the smack of leather on willow, has been added a new noise.” — John Waite
Luckily, The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld begins with “Little Fluffy Clouds,” the only track on the album that conforms to anything remotely resembling the structure of a single. “Little Fluffy Clouds” centers around the sampling of an interview with Rickie Lee Jones, a sampling that would ultimately result in Jones bringing forth a lawsuit against The Orb’s record label Big Life.[1]
In 1991 electronic music was primarily all about high beats per minute and loud beats, resulting in a lot of music that moved away from the ambient and cerebral stylings of the ’70′s (Brian Eno, Kraftwerk) and the pop sensibilities of the ’80s (Soft Cell, Gary Numan) in favor of a sound that (mostly) either mimicked the scattershot intensity of a strobe light or tried to ease you out of a K-hole with an energetic brand of aethereal sound. Or both. “Little Fluffy Clouds” falls into the latter category rather than the former while also—like the rest of the album from which it came—existing on its own plane; this song would be at home playing in a London club or through the headphones connected to the head of someone who would rather listen to Pink Floyd than most of what the electronic music genre has to offer.
I bring up Pink Floyd because The Orb—which is essentially Alex Paterson—is greatly influenced by them, from the US release of Ultraworld having an alternate cover showing the Battersea Power Station (the same station that graces the cover of Animals) to the fourth track on the album being titled “Back Side of the Moon.” But beyond the obvious nods to the Roger Waters-helmed Pink Floyd, Ultraworld also borrows from Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd as one cannot help but to think that the album’s core can be seen as one giant exploration that uses “Astronomy Domine” and/or “Interstellar Overdrive” as its starting point.
“Little Fluffy Clouds” begins with a rooster crowing and the sampled BBC audio above, followed by the sampled interview with Rickie Lee Jones. Everything about this song is perfectly calibrated, a complex launch sequence reduced to an understandable summary; a marvel of musical creativity whose end result is something that is so spot-on in its ambient and mellow beauty. Listen to how the word “little” ping-pongs across the speakers during the chorus. Listen to how perfect Jones’s voice is (unbeknownst to her initially) for this song—the way she says “purple and red and yellow and on fire” in a tone that seemingly emits both childlike wonder and a borderline sultriness.
“Little Fluffy Clouds” is an outstanding song on its own accord. It’s easily one of the best electronic songs on the ’90s. Within the context of the theme and arc of The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld it is the perfect song to introduce the listener to the grand aspirations of the album’s whole. “Little Fluffy Clouds” is like the first chapter of Moby-Dick or David Copperfield, the Call me Ishmael, the Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life…; the beginning of an opus about discovery.
“What were the skies like when you were young?”
“They went on forever. They… When I w-we lived in Arizona, and the skies always had little fluffy clouds in ‘em, and, uh… they were long… and clear and… There were lots of stars at night. And, uh, when it would rain, it would all turn… it… They were beautiful, the most beautiful skies as a matter of fact. Um, the sunsets were purple and red and yellow and on fire, and the clouds would catch the colors everywhere. That’s uh, neat ’cause I used to look at them all the time, when I was little. You don’t see that. You might still see them in the desert.”
There are varying degrees of what constitutes great art. Some art is great in an all-encompassing way; its greatness is multi-faceted. Some art’s greatness resides in its static sketches and focused themes; its greatness lies not within its dynamic scope but rather its attention to detail with regards to a few finite things. And so you have The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld which so clearly falls under the “static sketches and focused themes” category of greatness. It is not an album founded on accessibility. I reckon many people would find it to be an absurd album—one that has no problem repeating the same melodies for long stretches of time. But it is a great album. It aims to take you to places that you never been to and it does so quite brilliantly. It, like 2001, is not concerned with dialog/lyrics; its beauty lies fully in the abstract.
And it all starts with a song that revolves around an interview with a singer that most people do not know by way of an album title, or by three track names. If you have never listened to Ultraworld, you should. Sit back and let “Little Fluffy Clouds” be the bridge to one of the best concept albums of all time.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
[1] The other samples in the song are: the above audio from John Waite from an episode of the BBC’s Face the Facts, Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint: III. Fast,” and Ennio Morricone’s “Man with a Harmonica.”
