Wanna hear my Orb story? Thought not. It involves a dawn drive toward London, fanatical loopings of “Little Fluffy Clouds,” and a nervous system so twangingly overwound that an attempt to adjust the rear-view mirror resulted in my tearing the thing clean off . . . But that was all a long time ago. I’ve grown older, and so have the Orb. The baldness of Doctor Alex Paterson no longer has the planetary quality, the clean-domed gravitational pull, it had in the early ’90s. He’s now the right age to be bald. And the ecstasy monster Thrash, his nodding, chewing sidekick, was replaced 10 years ago by the more studious-looking Thomas Fehlmann.
The Orb’s show at Avalon a week ago Wednesday was shifted at the last minute to Axis next door, there being a deficit in interest or attendance or something. In the smaller, runtier venue, the performance quickly assumed the dimensions of a club night like any other — dull bass boom, a row of laptops, and a screen behind showing prisms, mandalas, throbbing bullseyes, and the like. Fehlmann’s warm-up DJ set may have been expertly tasteful, but only a truly hectic student of electronic micro-genres could have found it interesting: to my fat ear it sounded like straight 4/4 beats with the usual noises on top, the single element of surprise being provided by an apparently rogue computer that kept buggering up the mix, to Fehlmann’s obvious discomfiture.
Paterson wandered on in a shirt that read “Detroit,” bowed to his colleague, and then added his layer of whimsical Orb elements — the silly voices, orchestras, and shores-of-space ripples and waves that he trademarked a decade ago. The crowd shifted politely at the appearance of each new idea while the room adhered firmly to its moorings in reality. No liftoff.
Topics:
Live Reviews
, Thomas Fehlmann, Alex Paterson
