The rooster crowed. The crowd screamed. The rooster crowed again. The crowd screamed louder. Working as an aural tease for the Orb’s best-known track, the crowing elicited roars of approval whenever Orb mastermind Dr. Alex Patterson dropped the sample into the mix. After several hints, he finally delivered “Little Fluffy Clouds,” 90 minutes into a two-hour Avalon set a week ago Thursday. A pastoral slice of soft-focus techno peppered with Rickie Lee Jones’s wistful reminiscing about the big skies of her Arizona childhood, “Little Fluffy Clouds” is a near-perfect example of the Orb’s “ambient house for the E generation”: dubbed-out electronic music with a predilection for cosmic grandeur and goofy juxtapositions.

Active since 1989, the Orb are one of the few remaining acts from London’s ambient-house or chill-out movement. And though their newest album, Cydonia (MCA), is burdened with disappointing forays into lightweight electro-pop, at Avalon the group proved they have a few more years left in them. Flanked by two video projection screens and a giant glowing orb, Patterson and a rotating cast of sidemen used turntables, bass guitar, samplers, effects, and racks of computer gear to construct and deconstruct tracks from the group’s 12-year career. Familiar material like “Little Fluffy Clouds” and “Perpetual Dawn” didn’t much resemble the recorded originals — working much like dub producers, the Orb used the rhythmic grids of each track as a blank canvas, slathering on new samples, superimposing alternate melodies, and tweaking the original sounds. The psychedelic mess twisted dancers in two directions: the back-and-forth stereo panning, swirling phasers, and ping-ponging echo disoriented, making heads spin and ears swim; meanwhile the deep bass and solid groove kept bodies rooted to the dance floor.

In the ever more compartmentalized world of electronic music, it was a pleasure to hear the Orb draw from so many different genres: dub, trip-hop, house, trance, and jungle all figured into their set. And unlike many DJs, the group were willing to let the beat drop for long Pink Floyd–ish ambient segues or absurd Monty Python–esque moments. Thus, after two hours of cosmic groove music, the Orb exited to the saccharine sounds of the Chordettes’ “Mister Sandman.”