Saturday, Sept. 11, 2010 | 13:33
The Orb - Outlands (live glastonbury 26.6.93)
I made a two-disc mix of songs that have made me who I am. Over the next few weeks (months) I will attempt to explain each of these songs. I am quite sure I haven't covered every song that matters to me, but I have wedged most of them onto these two CDs.
As with many other songs on these mixes, I discovered this in college. A friend played it for me, as he played Aphex Twin, Ministry, SPK, and Eindsturzende Neubaten. He was from some town in Ohio, but he had access to a wide-ranging scene far removed from my mainstream upbringing. Just hanging out, a group of us, in his dorm room while he played stuff in the background. I was so naive that most of it blew my mind. Some, like this, stuck with me.
I knew nothing about The Orb freshman year in college (Fall 1995). I was getting into music, but I was stuck with mainstream radio and MTV. The latter had a profound effect on the formation of my musical tastes, but college opened my world to sounds I never before thought possible. The Orb was one of those.
Specifically, he played Live 93. Because their early sound is built largely on samples, the live versions can sound dramatically different from the album. They have a basic framework in place, but the samples come out differently, get tweaked, augmented, and supplemented. Thus, hearing the songs live doesn't prepare you for the album experience, and vice versa.
I suppose by this point I had 'Chill Out'. I'm sure I listened to that in high school. Still, what the KLF did was insular and self-referential. It chronicled a journey around the Gulf coast. I felt of a place, if not of a time. The Orb, however, were lost in the stars. The were otheworldly. They were something else.
Since first hearing this I have included versions of this song on various mixes for people. It remains a diverse track, one I enjoy playing for people. Each of the Orb's early songs is merely a framework on which they can hang a variety of spaced-out sounds. It's like sonic collage, but always in some form of song structure.
I can't say "Outlands" is the definitive Orb track--that's probably "Blue Room"--but it's one that blew my mind when I first heard it and continues to enthrall me today.
