January 10, 2023 1:23 pm
One of the many questionable aspects of the so-called rave decree (which came into force after several adjustments on December 31, 2022) is that, in essence, it is a story that repeats itself every time a country is led by a right-wing government. The Criminal justice and public order act, wanted in 1994 in the United Kingdom by the Conservative government of John Major, gave an authoritarian and police squeeze against a series of behaviors defined as “anti-social”. And i free party, which had proliferated throughout the country since the late eighties on the wave of the spread of acid house, had become the excuse with which to criminalize forms of alternative sociality, resistance or protest such as occupations, boycott actions against hunting , the environmental principals of woods or forests and all forms of nomadism. Stirring the bugbear of drugs and squatting, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act passed unmolested (thanks in part to an ambitious Labor man named Tony Blair who turned a blind eye) and allowed a Conservative government to silence any form of youthful or countercultural.
Laws and decrees, however, have not stopped music, on the contrary, if possible, they have accelerated the coagulation of a culture and an aesthetic of techno resistance that survives in various electronic albums released in the United Kingdom between 1990 and 1995. Among these works stands out for its ambition, musical intelligence and depth Orbital, the second album by Orbital, the electronic duo formed by brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll. Orbital’s first album, released in 1991, was also titled Orbital: to distinguish the two works, fans identify the first as “Green album” (green album) and the second as “Brown album” (brown album). Streaming platforms, in their prosaic cataloging anxiety, simply call them Orbital 1 e Orbital 2.
The name Orbital suggests the atom and electrons revolving around a nucleus and much of the band’s graphics seem to support this interpretation. However, the Orbital is also the large motorway junction (M25) that surrounds London, an immense loop, a circular non-place along which the first rave parties took place, giving rise to the acid house scene of the late eighties. To learn more, I recommend reading London Orbital by Iain Sinclair (Il Saggiatore), a suggestive literary reportage (on foot) along this large London ring road. Right from the name they chose, the Hartnoll brothers claim that history and their roots in the nomadic and interstitial movement of the first English clandestine parties.
In 1990 Orbital have a first, unexpected success with Chimea techno piece they had produced at no cost the year before in the basement of the house with their father’s four-track recorder. Chime goes straight to the charts and the Hartnoll brothers meet from their basement to play their piece on the TV show Top of the Pops. Orbital aren’t even born and they’re already starting to get excited: they want to play live, but the production forces them to go into playback like all the other artists and they show up on live TV with a dancer in a raver outfit and t-shirts against the poll tax, an unfair tax reform desired by Margaret Thatcher very similar to the flat tax proposed today also by the right wing of our house.
Playing live is a passion that will never abandon them (Orbital will be the first techno group to close the Glastonbury festival in 1994) and their music, unlike so much electronics that was heard then and is still heard today has a strong improvisational component. It’s no exaggeration to say that before Orbital electronic dance music was only seen as disco unz unz or muffled ambient chill-out music. They also brought in a certain punk rock attitude, politics and, of course, protest.
Orbital 2or if you prefer the “Brown album”, opens with the same sampling that opened their first album: a joke from the sci-fi TV series Star Trek: The next generation in which Lieutenant Worf says, “There’s this Möbius theory that warps the fabric of space where time becomes a loop.” And the phrase “Where time becomes a loop” is repeated, precisely in a loop, for more than a minute and a half using the technique of phasing, already used by composers such as Steve Reich, or the overlapping of two samples played at slightly different speeds. The same technique also returns at the end of the album, in Input out, in which the sentences “input translation” and “output rotation” are first superimposed and then sent at different speeds creating a chaotic tangle. This way the whole album, all the music delimited by the prologue ofTime becomes and from the epilogue of Input outcan be considered a loop, a stretch mark in space-time.
And it is precisely with time that Orbital play: they lengthen and shorten it like a rubber band, according to a technique of accumulation of rhythmic or harmonic elements whose dynamics are suddenly called into question with unpredictable and surprising developments. Monday, for example, begins with a very simple and repetitive keyboard sequence on which a series of elements are superimposed: first percussion and bass and then a synth arpeggio. After a normal progression, typical of so much dance music, Orbital reshuffle the cards and reassemble the same elements that are now familiar to us in a completely different way, so much so that the tone, and I would say the color, of the music clearly changes. Monday bright and joyful part to then take, around the fourth minute, a more dramatic and dark turn. Eventually the song concludes its circle and returns to the very simple embryo from which it sprang. Orbital’s is exciting electronica, full of nuances: it’s designed for raves, but it also involves headphones because it’s music where something unexpected always happens, cradling you for a moment and tugging you when you least expect it. The “repetitive beats” stigmatized by the text of the Criminal justice and public order act prove here to be anything but repetitive and escape any cataloging or control.
The best known piece on the album is Halcyonalready released in an ep called Radiccio (yes, without the h) and is presented here in a more melodic and catchy remix titled Halcyon and on and on. Halcion (with an ie, not a y) is the trade name for triazolam, the benzodiazepine that is the basis of many sleeping pills and tranquilizers available in pharmacies. The idea for the piece comes from the fact that the mother of the Hartnoll brothers had been suffering for years from a strong addiction to Halcion, a legal drug sold in pharmacies as opposed to those consumed at raves.
The song is built on two samples: one from a recent Opus III hit, It’s a fine dayand the other from Leave it, an eighties piece by Yes, standard bearers of the most visionary and ambitious progressive rock. The piece, dreamy and suspended, together with the productions of the Orb and those of the KLF is one of the cornerstones of the ambient house of those years. Opus III lead singer Kirsty Hawkshaw appears in the video as a dazed and dazed housewife who keeps having visions as she tries to do the housework. Finally, when she calms down, she dissociates and sees herself walk into the kitchen. Among the comments on the YouTube video, I was struck by that of a programmer who recalls that when, in the nineties, she had to work on a particularly complex line of code, he put Halcyon of the Orbitals in a loop, which allowed him to enter a state of absolute concentration.
Listening to it today on headphones, Orbital 2 it really is “a distortion in the fabric of space-time” and this music, now thirty years old, doesn’t seem to have aged a day. Indeed, it makes us reflect on how dance has evolved both from a technical point of view and, above all, from that of its cultural impact.
Orbital
Orbital
FFRR, 1993