The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @tomewing for the Best Album of 1991 tournament. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you follow the link to vote in the tournament. Thanks!

The Orb had a reputation - you’ll find this hard to believe, I’m sure - as stoner music. I remember queueing up for a midnight signing at Tower Records when their second LP, U.F.Orb, came out. The group - ‘Dr’ Alex Paterson and Thrash - had themselves got so heroically high they could barely hold their pens, and insisted on chatting to every fan, to the increasing irritation of the staff. I got my copy sometime after 5 in the morning.

That record went straight in at No. 1, which shows how big a deal The Orb had become, mostly on the back of Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld, their vast and extraordinary debut. The spliffhead nature of the band (and plenty of fans) was significant, part of the mutation of late 80s rave culture away from its Ecstasy-fuelled beginnings, and its mingling with other, older scenes - hippies, crusties, festival-goers, all welcome at The Orb’s parties.

In the strait-laced environment of British indie - my own home turf - these were strange fellow travellers. The first I heard of The Orb was an NME article talking about “ambient house” - dance music you chilled to, not danced to - and framed in highly sceptical terms: are these guys taking the piss? How could you release a 20-ish minute, almost beatless single called “A Huge Ever-Growing Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld” and have it not be a joke?

Easy. You couldn’t, not quite. “Loving You” (that track’s shorter name, after the Minnie Riperton sample which drifts through it) isn’t a comedy record, or cynical - but it is light-hearted in a way that most ambient music before hadn’t been (to say the least!). And honestly a lot of it wouldn’t be again. “Loving You”, and the rest of Ultraworld, isn’t whimsical in the annoying, bogus-fairytale fashion of British psychedelia, but there’s a sense of giggly joy to it nonetheless. It’s a feeling of loose, liberated jamming, musicians letting samples flow in and out of one another because the patterns they make feel right, the track held together by phased chanting and a looping, rippling keyboard riff. Pink Floyd are a touchpoint, but a studio engineer’s version of Floyd where all the songs are cut away and only the heartbeats and alarm clocks and found sounds remain.

By the time that NME article appeared, “Loving You” was already a collectors’ item, well out of reach to the curious. My first exposure to the actual sounds The Orb made was “Little Fluffy Clouds”, their most famous track, which has a lot of the things that make them special in unusually focused, catchy form - twinkling sequencer lines, found snatches of sound, and vocal samples looped and cut up to create a kind of stream of consciousness effect, thoughts too vaporous to ever quite finish. (I have to point out that Rickie Lee Jones, whose uncredited vocals make the track what it is, hated it.)

I had never heard anything like “Clouds” before. It was, and is, magical to me, one of the purest attempts to capture bliss on record, and a deceptively simple track I can still hear new sounds in. With hindsight - and more expertise - I can hear it as a marriage between the ‘DJ house’ hits of a few years prior - MARRS’ “Pump Up The Volume” et. al. - and a tradition of ambient, minimal and proto-electronic music like Eno, Manuel Göttsching, and Steve Reich. But all of that came later - in 1990, what I heard was a well of joy.

“Clouds” also has a beat - sampled from Nilsson - as does almost everything on Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld, which is what makes it Ambient House, not just Ambient (well, that and being a lot more fun than Ambient). One obvious inspiration for the way of working The Orb were developing was dub reggae, where producers would mix and experiment over the beat from an existing song. The Orb dropped the “existing song” part, but kept the idea of long, looping grooves, rivers of beats bobbing with sampled flotsam. Listening to Ultraworld repeatedly, getting to know it, the vocal samples - which initially seemed the point of the tracks - become just markers, reminders of where on the voyage you are.

So how do you actually listen to this two hour record? The album is structured loosely as a journey - you start gazing up at the skies of Earth, you end up ‘at the centre of the ultraworld’, passing stars and moons and alien dawns as you go. But in practice it’s two parallel journeys, one on each of the two 60 minute CDs.

The first moves from the Orb at their most structured - “Little Fluffy Clouds” - to the band at their most diffuse and tranquil, the 15-minute “Spanish Castles In Space”, a nebula of stray notes and slowly plucked guitars, music evaporating into the void. In between are tracks where the group’s dub influence is at its starkest. “Earth (Gaia)” gives you the first of the heavy, rolling basslines which would become an Orb trademark; “Supernova At The End Of The Universe” is a pared-down, echo-drenched lope; “Back Side Of The Moon” maintains the echo-exploration but festoons it in billows of cloudy new age keyboard.

The second half of the record starts with the album’s other pop highlight, “Perpetual Dawn”, maybe the most quintessentially Orb-ish of all Orb tracks. (Avoid at all costs the later single version which grafts an R&B singer on it!). “Dawn” is bubblegum dub, an addictively goofy skank built around a burbling vocal sample and flute flourishes, as if the blind idiot gods who dance at the centre of creation turned out to be well into Ace of Base.

At the other end of that CD is “A Huge Ever Growing Brain”, a lucky dip sack of sounds - and once again between these bookends are more Orb explorations. “Into The Fourth Dimension” begins with cosmic Gregorian chant and violin, but also features that most un-ambient of things, a bona fide drop (into thrilling house piano). “Outlands” is more sampladelic dub - the least striking track on the album, but still a lot of fun. And “Star 6 & 789” is another tip-off as to the Orb’s inspirations - an unexpectedly delicate bit of krautrock keyboard jazz. This time the voyage isn’t from structured to diffuse, it’s from the relatively earthbound and danceable to the gloriously far out.

It’s an album for bedroom listening, for long journeys, for balmy afternoons in a field - though the one time I actually saw Paterson DJ at Glastonbury his mid-afternoon set was paint-stripping metallic techno. It has a vibe of playfulness and possibility very little in electronic music matches. There are ambient records more cosmic, more beautiful, more hypnotic than Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld, but I’ve never heard one as joyful..

-- @tomewing