William Orbit: I Love Classical Music

MARK PRENDERGAST catches up with ace remixer/musician William Orbit to learn of his newfound passion for classical music.

My very first formal encounter with musicians in England occurred way back in 1984, when I met Will Orbit and his group Torch Song in a plush studio in Little Venice, London. Orbit had made some money working on oil rigs and had jumped into the music business with gusto. I had just moved to London from Ireland and a friend had advised me that Orbit had a way with sound which was unique. The rhythmic flair and mix of acoustic and electric sounds on 'Wish Thing' (Torch Song's debut) was enough for me to approach the NME with a story. But there was little interest in electronic music back then, in the year that U2 struck gold with 'Unforgettable Fire'.

Ever since, I've kept a dutiful eye on Orbit's progress. His wonderful Strange Cargo series of instrumental albums, which began in 1987, is now on its fourth instalment: Hinterland. Everybody knows he's got an incredible talent with low frequencies and timbre. Having embraced the dance scene with two amusing Bass‑O‑Matic albums and been the remixer of choice for the likes of Prince, Peter Gabriel, Madonna and the ever reclusive Kraftwerk, Orbit's newfound fascination is with the classics. Earlier this year he conceived an album of reconstructions of various pieces by Satie, Ravel, Part, Gorecki and Barber. The album The Electric Chamber: Pieces In A Modern Style (N‑Gram) is a tour‑de‑force; a virtual blend of electronica with the compositional force inherent in those great 20th Century composers. Just before it was due to come out, the publishers of Arvo Part and Henryk Gorecki blocked its release. Even a special Royal Festival Hall concert had to be rearranged at the eleventh hour due to legal problems. With the album still to come out, an exhausted William Orbit spoke to me in his North London home before taking a well‑earned break in California.

Profound Melodies

With his track record in electronic‑based music, my first enquiry related to why Orbit had taken an interest in classical acoustic music at all?

"It's not so opposite. If you think about not being constrained by a vocal or the need to have a song or a lyric, it makes sense. I can only go so far with MIDI soundscapes and the thing about music designed for instant impact is that it isn't necessarily sustained after several listenings. I believe the only way to sustain depth is to use profound melodies."

Orbit admits to having been introduced to the new simplicity of Arvo Part by the chairman of Warner Brothers, Rob Dickens. "Yes, he's helping me with N‑Gram recordings [a subsidiary label for Orbit's creations]. You see on Strange Cargo 3 (Virgin) I did a version of 'Harry Flowers' (from the Mick Jagger film Performance) which is spoof muzak. I played around with it for three days and stuck it on the album. I thought I'd dig up more stuff for my next album — by Nino Rota, Bernard Herrmann, Lalo Shifrin, Henry Mancini — and call it 'Elevator Music'. I was half‑way through recording it, in a little beach house in LA, when I realised it was too schlocky. I came back to England a little bit down and Rob Dickens sent me a tape of 'Cantus', by Arvo Part, and some of Gorecki's music. It just blew me away."

Two years ago Orbit used to spend some of his limited spare time playing records on the West Coast KCRW radio station. One track he loved to play was Samuel Barber's 'Adagio', which has nearly been turned into a cliche by association with Oliver Stone's film Platoon. In the context of the experimental dance music he was playing on the radio, Orbit thought he'd cause an outrage. "Every time I played it, I got phone call after phone call. I thought I'd get howls of protest for re‑contextualising a national institution, but that simply wasn't the case. Listeners were actually moved by it."

Pieces In A Modern Style is incredibly faithful to the original music yet the textures are electronically generated with hints of house music, Tangerine Dream and Pete Namlook popping up along the way.

"A guy called Damian le Gassick helped me with all the notation. He can read music but I cannot. Some things are more tinkered with than others. The Barber piece is very untinkered with, apart from a little bit of textural change — an octave down with the low cellos, stuff like that. Every single piece of notation was redone; Damian just entered all the notes in the computer. You know, there's a terrible precedent for this kind of music. I was warned I was treading on heavily polluted ground. People mentioned Deep Purple's 'Concerto For Group & Orchestra', so I had to be careful."

In Concert?

Orbit admits to being fed up with records and remixes. He now wants to go the live route. Recently he debuted Pieces In A Modern Style at the South Bank, London. "It was my big moment. Bass‑O‑Matic being in the charts, working with Ralf Hutter didn't mean as much to me as this. The concert was sold out 12 days before the actual performance. Yet on the night we couldn't perform the Part and Gorecki pieces, because their publishers objected.

"So we had to put together a makeshift repertoire at the last minute. Philip Glass allowed me to do something of his instead.

"It was divided into chained segments. I could have gone on stage and chained up my sequencers, loaded up my samples, and done the whole thing with keyboards, but that's just a cop‑out. I had two excellent drummers, a string sextet, a wind section, and lots of unusual sound sources like garden implements — a strimmer and plastic tubes sawn up, great big bass drums on stands, some keyboards and five vocalists. There were about 21 musicians on stage. Also a film was running overhead, all sync'd up using SMPTE. I also had this live rack built for the stage; this huge great thing which took up a lot of space. It consisted of a series of flight‑cased suspension mounted steel housings all linked by military spec connectors. All very ambitious."

Remixing

Orbit is famous for spending a lot of time on timbre, whether it be his or other people's. "Remixing is a terrible road to go down," he admits. "You're mixing your bollocks off and running out of ideas all the time. The last thing I did was by this French guy called Hector Zazou, a track called 'Adventures In The Scandinavian Skin Trade'. Remixing is just re‑telling the story with different characters.

"I usually draw the sounds off the multitrack tape into my system. Every remixer has their own system and you can incorporate whatever you want into that. Most people have data collated on some sort of computer system, whether it be Cubase, C‑Lab, or some sort of Mac‑based system. I still use Cubase on an Atari Mega 2, though I've now also got a couple of Macs. Everybody's got their preferred sound sampling and sound creating equipment. I've got an Akai S3200, and these days I load everything into that and run the whole mix through the stereo outputs and into a couple of valve compressors. I compress it heavily and use everything onboard the S3200. It runs very well and maintains the phase coherence, improving the impact of the sound. I still use my old Trident 80B desk. I love it!"

Carrying A Torch?

Torch Song — Toward The Unknown Region and Strange Cargo — Hinterland are just two of Orbit's N‑Gram recordings released this year. Torch Song glides along in an ambient house sort of way with Laurie Mayer's vocals providing the icing atop a multi‑layered cake. Strange Cargo is more compact and instrumental, with a greater emphasis on rhythm and dub with plenty of Orbit's trademark acoustic guitar chords.

I put it to William that over the last decade he appears to have been trying to perfect the same album. "Yes, maybe. Torch Song was done over 10 years ago. They were all songs to start with and then I wittled them down. And we just kept taking things away all the time, until there was just a hint of the original song left. Laurie is really good at that. She comes in and says 'take that away', 'take this away'. It's a process of reduction, really.

"Strange Cargo is my little indulgence really. It's just me going on my little journeys. Still I've got some criticisms of that album. There are points I'd do differently or do again if I was going into the studio tomorrow."

Military Spec

Orbit is really enthusiastic about his new portable studio. He says he's "had it" with being stuck in a room and may well record on the move in future.

"My customised rack houses all my Macs and is stuck in storage at the moment. What's really new are the military spec connectors on there. They cost me enough money. It's the same spec as the guys use in the Navy for soldering up radar connections to ships. And military spec costs three times as much as the same component sold in standard spec. Now I can go down to Glastonbury and a guy with a huge multicore can say 'plug it in there, mate' and immediately you are coming up on his desk. There's no farting around with stage boxes. It means I can have a dialogue with these hardened stage guys, because they know you are serious."

New Directions

Orbit is a bit disgruntled by his lack of fame. When Strange Cargo 3 came out in 1993, he was shocked that it got little push from his then record company, Virgin. Yet it sold 100,000 copies worldwide. Orbit sees no difference between a large record company and a small one. His passion is still for the music, not the hype. New live presentations and "unexpected happenings" are predicted for the future.

"I admire Part and Gorecki for going back to the old traditions and also for so successfully spurning Serialism and the traditional harmonic structure. That's the key to their success and why Gorecki has sold over 250,000 copies of his 5th Symphony. I love the geometric design of Part's music and even though I may not be allowed to release it, it was an experience just to do it."

"Really, I've been working towards leaving aside the technicalities for a number of years. Getting more and more simple. Creating mixes with less and less inputs on the desk. The next thing I want to do is to write something which builds up line melodies, like Philip Glass did with Glassworks, using triplets. I don't want to sound like Philip Glass but want to experiment with melodic structures rather than sound structures. Sounds are easy, I've got warehouses full of sounds. I use my own little techniques with common‑or‑garden equipment which you can buy off the shelf. Anyone could do it, but I'm not going to divulge how I get most of my sounds. It's my little secret."

"Remixing is just re‑telling the story with different characters.""I use my own little techniques with common‑or‑garden equipment which you can buy off the shelf. Anyone could do it..."