On Cloud 9

Falling under the spell of Orbital at Avalon

by Charles Taylor

If nothing else, the Orbital show at Avalon last Wednesday night (November 20) was the most sartorially splendid rock evening this year. There was a generous and varied selection of what you'd expect at a techno show -- layered T's and baggy jeans, striped pullovers, nylon sports jerseys, polyester print shirts. But there were also some real standouts. Among the vinyl trousers parading around the room, I particularly admired one leopard-print pair, and another in shimmering powder blue. One guy in a snakeskin jumpsuit wound his way through the crowd with translucent green pixie lights entwined in his fingers. A girl with the most perfect Louise Brooks haircut I've ever seen outside of Louise Brooks perched coolly by the bar in a silver sheath dress. My functional show gear -- jeans, flannel, motorcycle jacket -- wasn't the only thing that kept reminding me I was a good 10 years older than the average audience member.

Lest it seem I was playing anthropologist, let me hasten to add that I was there for the music. Orbital's fourth album, In Sides (ffrr), is the one I've enjoyed most since I started listening to techno earlier in the year, something I would've sworn could never happen. But late this past spring, except for a handful of CDs (Sleater-Kinney, the Spinanes, Magnapop, Come), the indie rock dominating what I was listening to started to sound so insular that, to borrow a line from Yellow Submarine (the film), it was in danger of disappearing up its own existence. What sounded alive and expressive -- and were happily abundant -- were compilations of house and acid jazz and trip-hop and dub. From there it was a short step to D.J. Krush, Underworld, the Chemical Brothers, Orbital. The music could be energizing or hypnotic, subtly inventive or quickly tedious. But for the most part, it seemed to spring from the pleasure principle that's the main reason I listen to anything.

The Orbital show was my first experience seeing any of this stuff live. As brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll played, augmented by a light show and projections on the three screens behind them, the friend with me whispered, "I feel like I'm at a Yes concert." I laughed, but I had to wonder how all this was different from the prog-rock poop I grew up despising and had never stopped despising. The answer, for me, is that Orbital's reliance on technology never shortchanges the human connection. You don't take the stage to John Barry's lush score to You Only Live Twice (the best Bond film) if you're chilly and detached. Even the Hartnolls' appearance melds the technical with the human. Wearing jeans and white T-shirts, the brothers strapped around their shaved heads bands that had one tiny headlight on either side. Hunkered behind the bank of synths and tape and drum machines, they looked like a pair of aliens with glowing eyes, here on a mission to rock the room. Phil acknowledged applause by waving at the crowd like a kid lifting a Halloween mask to say to his pals, "See, it's really me under here."

It's not hard to hear how that interplay of the familiar and the foreign extends to the music. Against the rhythms and polyrhythms, the Hartnolls layered musical threads that were alternately lyrical (you might almost say pastoral), ominous, seductive, and very hard-rocking. You could hear just about all of those strains during "The Girl with the Sun in Her Head." The relentlessness of the rhythm is the key. Once the beat has taken up lodging in your head (and because of the devastating volume of the bass, which you felt in your bones), the slightest variation can seem revelatory or teasing, beckoning you deeper into the beat. Sure, it can get monotonous -- but it can also carry the promise of transcendence that techno enthusiasts speak of, the potential to be lifted out of yourself. The movement on the dance floor, which was bathed in a blue light, looked simultaneously furious and tranquil.

The Hartnolls try to delineate the line between that transcendence and facelessness. The highlight, for me, was "The Box," which sums up Orbital's ambivalent embrace of technology. A lovely four-note riff makes its way through a background that simply will not slow down to notice its beauty. (If speeding traffic had a musical sound, it would be the backbeat of this number.) That riff keeps attempting to build, to break free from the industrial rush of the background. That it never succeeds is the point. Its ability to sustain itself takes on the feel of a conditional triumph. "The Box" is Orbital's declaration that Ludditism (musical or otherwise) won't get us very far. The Hartnolls seem to be telling us that they've seen the future -- and that whether it looks anything like us is in our hands.