SPILL FEATURE: ON ORBITAL’S LEGACY, ‘THE GREEN ALBUM’ REISSUE, AND A 1990s ELECTRONIC MUSIC PRIMER

ON ORBITAL’S LEGACY, ‘THE GREEN ALBUM’ REISSUE, AND A 1990s ELECTRONIC MUSIC PRIMER

The Beatles had The Beatles (The White Album). Metallica had Metallica (Black Album). Amongst albums nicknamed according to the chroma of their album cover—Orbital’s The Green Album left a cultural aftershock not entirely dissimilar to those celebrated releases. For certain music fans that statement isn’t even hyperbole, and that might surprise you. If it does, you probably weren’t around in the early 1990s (acceptable) or you dismissed electronic music as a cacophonous fad (unacceptable). If you belong in the latter, a re-issue of Orbital’s seminal debut record will likely not change your mind, but it will still offer an interesting case study of ground zero for 1990s electronic music.

First, a note before we steer this lightcycle back to the Clinton era. I will not refer to any of this music as EDM. We just didn’t use the term. If anything, we called it “House” or “Techno” or “Electronica,” depending on the audience. We prided ourselves on an indentured servitude to the microgenre. And let’s get one thing perfectly clear—you couldn’t dance to a lot of our favorite electronic music. But—I mean—if you want to dance to Boards of Canada, you be my guest.

For example, here’s a potential conversation from 1999:

Arb: Hey, man, what’s in your Discman lately?

Me: I’ve been spinning a lot of Acid Jazz, but I love this new record from BT.

Arb: That’s Breakbeat, right?

Me: Actually, some might think that, but this BT is really more of a combination of Trance and Nu Skool Breaks.

Contrary to the prognostications from many critics and post-hoc naysayers, “Techno” never really perished in a recursive purgatory of its on derivation. It morphed and evolved at an incredible rate, experiencing the equivalent of multiple distinct eras within a single decade before becoming assimilated by other genres. Once pop artists like Madonna and U2 smuggled the fringe genre onto Top 40 Radio, electronic music became even more niche and thrived in dark corners of the Internet.

The pioneering and most popular crossover electronic producers of the early 1990s like Orbital, The Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Underworld, and Aphex Twin radically redirected the course of popular music, even if they only individually tasted fleeting mainstream success. The genre exploded like a super nova, its traditional sonic markers evolved from inception to omnipresence within a decade, assigned to a relative moment in time. As the genre waned, the most prolific electronic artists found second and third careers scoring for movies, TV shows and video games.

Therefore, this is not a eulogy; this is a celebration. As electronic music ever was.

Listening to The Green Album in its entirety for the first time in more than a decade only reinforces the idea that Orbital and its pioneering brethren, all of whom picked up a torch transferred by electronic acts like Kraftwerk and Cabaret Voltaire, didn’t operate with a radically futuristic idea of what music could be. The Green Album, for all its simplicity, taps into a style of music that samples bombastic beats from Disco and dirty little downtempo garage rock. It could be considered a style of “found” music—the component parts were already sitting around waiting to be used again, made new, repurposed.

Like their forefathers, Orbital wanted to release full LPs of electronic music. Some critics didn’t want to hear it. They also didn’t want to see two blokes on stage trying to play their binary compositions live. Record labels didn’t see a path forward. Still, every great success starts somewhere. Orbital, together with other artists of the moment, unearthed the commercial market for instrumental electronic music that had been tied explicitly to the individual underground rave scenes. They proved them all wrong.

That said, the movement began long before Orbital. You can go back to the 1960s for the first popular commercial examples. Building on Daphne Oram’s pioneering work with electronic music for the BBC, Wendy Carlos produced 1968’s Switched-On Bach after doing battle with monophonic synthesizers for approximately 1000 hours. In interviews she mentioned hitting the machines with hammers to keep them in tune. The album reached number 10 on the Billboard 200. Around this same time, Robert Moog invented his eponymous synthesizer that catapulted electronic music into mainstream production studios. Kraftwerk then laid down the foundation of the genre in 1974 with Autobahn.

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Now, let’s fast forward to Otford, England, circa 1989. Brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll recorded “Chime” under the stairs on their father’s four-track tape deck. The song became a rave anthem in 1990, peaking at 17 on the UK charts and earning them an appearance on Top of the Pops. After the release of a couple more singles, the duo, now dubbed Orbital, turned their attention to the production of their self-titled full-length debut EP, aka The Green Album.

Before we dive into the record itself, some broad context. This was a cutting-edge concept record for the moment—but the tracks, taken out of context, feel disjointed and dissimilar. The songs often run too long, and as a result, the simplistic beats start to offer a sense of déjà vu. Like any debut, there’s seeds of the spectacular if you see Orbital’s first effort for what it is—not so much starting block but a launching pad.

The album’s opener, “The Moebius,” begins with a Star Trek sample before layering steadily rising quirk and minimalism until the beat drops just on the far side of the minute mark. For better and worse, it’s immediately recognizable as early 1990s electronica. The track demonstrates Orbital’s more playful side, returning to the Star Trek sample, and adding in new eccentricities (like a piece of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World” that only appears at the 4:11 mark) to justify the seven-minute duration. It’s arguably the best track on the record—even though it was never released as a proper single.

The only singles released from The Green Album (“Chime” and “Midnight”) had already appeared on prior EPs. The UK release included live versions of these tracks; the U.S. got trimmed originals. The various editions just speak to Orbital making their way in an industry that hadn’t yet fully formed. In the liner notes for this 2024 reissue, Paul Hartnoll makes note of the album’s origins, “The Green Album was a time before we had success, before we started taking it all seriously.”

“Fahrenheit 303” stands out for similar reasons. The rolling background synth recalls Harold Faltermeyer’s “Axel F” – just with loftier, self-aware ambitions. It’s more than a character-building theme and a catchy melody. If you’re not paying much attention, you’ll miss the point where the band kitchen-sinks a faux-jazz fusion piano riff and the song dares to become something else entirely.

This sense that Orbital is going with a “fuck-around-and-find-out” methodology probably overstates the level of experimentation on The Green Album. Throughout the record there’s a very clear throughline to styles of music already popular in the raves. One could even cite direct reflection on contemporaries in the Detroit and Chicago house music scenes. Orbital had to prove their commercial viability. Reinvention simply wouldn’t have been the smart career choice. That would come later.

By the time the brothers released the second self-titled LP, they’d taken what they did well on The Green Album and tested their own limits, working with a unique and complex layering of textures and samples. The Green Album isn’t their best work, but it allowed them to innovate after laying down a baseline (bass line?). It provides a fascinating reference for fans looking back at the discography with an open and willing mind. If all you know of Orbital is the career-making “Halcyon And On And On” (found on that second LP, Orbital 2) there’s a rich and rewarding library awaiting your discovery: the global textures and big beats on Diversions; a return to quirky minimalism on Snivilisation; the effervescent movie-like scoring on In Sides. Each “next” added to their impressive repertoire, cementing Orbital as one of electronic music’s most essential and longest-tenured masters of their craft.

A Note On The Mastering Of The 2024 Reissue

I rarely purchase electronic music on vinyl because the compression process rarely recreates my nostalgic memories of listening to these records on headphones and losing myself in the headspace. The remastering process done on this latest reissue, however, offers a broader dynamic range and as a result, the experience of listening to the record on my highly capable turntable setup matches not only my foggy memories—but exceeds them. I’m noticing details that weren’t nearly as clear on my original CDs, especially on the low end of the audio spectrum.

London Records released a 4-CD box set featuring 42 tracks—the original album plus extended and alternate versions—and a 2-LP colored vinyl that retains the original UK track list. Fans of the band should consider this a must-own reissue and a benchmark for the deluxe treatment of early electronic music.

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