Review: The Orb / System 7, SWX

“They are always different, they are always the same,” said John Peel. He was talking about The Fall, but he could just as easily have been talking about The Orb, who are in Bristol tonight as part of their 30th anniversary tour.

Collaborators have come and gone, with everyone from David Gilmour to Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry popping in for a cup of strong tea, but The Orb remain defined by Dr Alex Paterson’s personal obsessions – house, dub reggae, progressive rock, science fiction – and a sense of humour that’s pure Goon.

Among his key influences are Miquette Giraudy and Steve Hillage, who cut their teeth in psych-prog outlaws Gong before working together on groundbreaking fare like Rainbow Dome Musick. The Orb often included the couple’s music in their DJ sets at Heaven, before sampling them on early classics like The Blue Room. As a result, Hillage and Giraudy were inspired to form System 7, going on to produce a weighty catalogue of experimental techno that wears its prog roots proudly on its sleeve.

System 7’s arrival tonight is heralded by an almighty bass throb, before giving way to the first of the duo’s chunky acid grooves. Giraudy plays synth and is responsible for most of the electronic heavy lifting. Hillage layers heavily processed guitar on top, alternately vamping away, Floyding it up, and engaging in outright astral projection via his trademark glissando slide technique. The missing link between the ‘70s free festival scene and the club-bound experiments of later decades, System 7 are welcomed as family by the crowd of semi-retired ravers. Everyone looks a bit older, but close your eyes and open your ears and you could be feeding your head at Megadog in ’94.

With regular collaborator Thomas Fehlmann currently out of the picture, tonight’s Orb are a duo of Dr Alex Paterson and mix engineer Michael Rendall. While Fehlmann’s influence has brought a streamlined, technoid aesthetic to The Orb’s best of work of recent years, the current version seems tethered solely to Paterson’s wayward muse. 2018 album No Sounds Are Out of Bounds is The Orb’s most varied to date, and tonight we get a raw and rambling live show which veers from clanking soundsystem dub to ecstatic house via synthpop, disco and Dilla-style hip-hop.

The set leans heavily on The Orb’s peerless first two albums while incorporating large chunks of their latest. The Blue Room morphs into No Sounds’ epic closer Soul Planet, while a righteous Towers of Dub bridges the meditative Roger Eno collaboration Easy on the Onions and a heavily reworked Perpetual Dawn.

Backside of the Moon gets an airing, as does the magnificent Outlands, while the set concludes with Little Fluffy Clouds, still one of the strangest records ever to crack the UK Top Ten. Less obvious but making an uncanny sort of sense at this advanced stage of Orblivion is the song’s juxtaposition with Chic’s disco monolith I Want Your Love. The set is enjoyably bumpy, the one truly jarring moment being Rush Hill Road, whose pop directness comes as a shock amid the general mood of psychedelic disarray.

The undoubted highlight is A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from The Centre of the Ultraworld, the mighty cosmic jam that launched The Orb as a project and ambient house as a genre. Created by the pioneering duo of Paterson and KLF mainman Jimmy Cauty, its rapturous ascending synth arpeggio and immaculate Chicago/NYC style groove are as fresh as ever, and they instantly switch the crowd’s dance setting from shuffle to stomp. If The Orb had retired after this staggering debut they’d have earned their place in music history, but the three decades of intermittent greatness that followed are a hell of a bonus.