I Was There – Making the classic Orb debut Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld

by Juno Daily on 06.12.2024 at 17:59pm. Last edited: 06.12.2024 at 17:59pm.

The sessions that rewrote the electronic music rulebook

“Just two old blokes doing tunes,” is how Andy Falconer (pictured above, left) describes his relationship with The Orb’s mainman Dr Alex Paterson (right), which saw the pair drop their second album SETI as Sedibus in February of this year.

When the good Dr Paterson founded the band’s new Orbscure label, he prioritised hooking up and collaborating with some of his favourite people from their history – and Falconer was naturally high on the list. The pair go back to almost the very earliest days of The Orb, working together closely after the departure of Paterson’s original sparring partner Jimmy Cauty, with Alex ‘Kris’ Weston, Thomas Fehlmann and System 7 man Steve Hillage being called in in various capacities shortly afterwards.

Here, Falconer recalls his time with The Orb and the recording of their much celebrated debut double album The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld in 1990, a record that would go on to shape much of the deacde’s boom in electronic music, as well as establishing the genre as a serious album and live prospect well beyond the confines of dancefloor/DJ culture.

“How I actually first met Alex was that I was engineering the Art of Noise ambient album (The Ambient Collection) at Berwick Street studios in Soho, and Alex (who did the album’s DJ mix) had arranged to come down and lay down a few ambient passages as a bridge between the tracks. So he turned up with his decks, I had my S-50 (Roland synth) there and a sampler. I was always into Eno, Fripp and experimental audio… We just hit it off immediately and had a great time together whenever we were in the studio.

“Shortly after that he actually got his deal to make the first Orb album, got the green light and the budget. So he phoned me up and asked whether I’d be up for taking the technical driving seat. Because he was bringing in this cast of thousands of people and Alex at that point in time didn’t really have that many studio skills. At that point it was still very old skool, with tape, so who did?! My job was to try to translate the vision he had in his head, and with all the people he was bringing in, into reality.

“I would say that with The Art of Noise’s Ambient Collection it was more like two guys in a studio having fun of an afternoon. The Ultraworld album was the first time we properly got together. It was recorded in Berwick Street Studios, or at least the majority of it, about 90%. A few other bits were done here and there but the lion’s share was done there, and mixed there as well.

“In fact, we did a few bits at Marcus Studios (in Kensington, West London) and we were doing the track ‘Back Side of the Moon’, which is the track with Steve Hillage and Miquette Guady (from System 7) on it.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KanekI2PKRo%3Ffeature%3Doembed

“Miquette had brought in joss sticks – not just a few, we’re talking piles of them. She got a jar and put them in it, lit them and put them in front of one of the monitors. So we got this huge amount of smoke like something out of ‘Apocalypse Now’. And of course, the smoke alarm goes off. We suddenly got this awful electronic bleeping.

“Bryan Ferry was working in one of the other studios and when we set the fire alarms off his assistant came down and told us: ‘Bryan says can you stop fucking around please!’

“That first album, when we did it, was a free and easy thing with a melting pot of ideas and everybody doing pretty much anything they liked. But my involvement ended after we did the John Peel session, which would have been the second with Alex. It was really down to, shall we say, friction between me and Kris Weston.https://web.archive.org/web/20241207101152if_/https://www.juno.co.uk/player-embed/SF666408-01-01-01.mp3/?pl=true&ed=24-12-06

“By the time we arrived at the Peel Session I think the success was all going to Kris’ head a bit and he was starting to be rather dictatorial and ‘nothing gets on tape unless I say it’s OK’. Being a successful commercial engineer with a lot of other stuff going on, The Orb wasn’t my only thing. So I had a chat with Alex and said ‘I’m going to sit the next one (UFOrb) out. So I sat that one out and then shortly after I moved out to Germany and even though Alex and I stayed in touch, I didn’t return to the fold and got on with my own stuff. I was doing stuff out in Germany for people out there, you know. So that really was the parting of the ways.

“It was very amicable, in the sense that there really was never any problem with me and Alex. It was more me deciding that I just couldn’t put up with Kris’ very childish attitude. I had a chat with Alex a while after he parted company with Kris and he told me he’d spent the following few years hoping that Kris would grow up – but he never did.

“As I say, we’d always stayed in touch over the years, and it was – I think it was 2018 – I was playing Space Mountain, which is Youth’s festival in Spain, and Alex was there as well, and that was the first time we’d seen each other in years. We bumped into each other during the day, which of course wasn’t difficult to do because it’s a small venue, and said hello. It was later on in the evening and I was outside on one of the balconies chatting to somebody and Alex just appeared from nowhere and said ‘do you want to have a chat?!’

“We went off to the bar and restaurant area, which was alwats very busy, but mirculously there was a table for two right in the middle, so we sat down there and he told me all about his plans and how he wanted to launch Orbscure Records, how he was finally in control of what he was doing instead of doing it for other labels.

“He said, ‘how do you fancy getting back together and making a record, which will be the debut release on the label?’ I said ‘let me think about it’ – I mean, I’ve always got on with Alex, I love the guy, but I had other projects that were coming to fruition and I didn’t want them to be overshadowed by coming back into the Orb fold, so to speak. But I went back to Germany and within about four days of him asking I’d said yes.”