#8. The Orb -- The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld.
As far as 110 minute debut albums go, this is about the best you can hope to find. In North America, it was edited down to 70 minutes, in other words, short enough to fit onto one CD or cassette. Ordinarily, a true fan's response to the truncation process would be several sustained cries of "Sacriledge", but ironically, the editors got many things right. They chose brisk, dancefloor-friendly versions of "Perpetual Dawn" and "Star 6 & 7 8 9". In particular, the latter is a ultra-E-friendly, sunny chiming number that readily invokes the twinkling qualities implied by its title. On the double CD, "Perpetual Dawn" open the second disk with a thud in following up the pristine bliss of "Spanish Castles in Space", the first disc's closer. As with the 2CD's version of "Star", its grumbling dub loops endlessly meander, displaying some of the directionlessness that made the benign "Orbus Terrarum" such a disappointment.
In fact, the entire second CD comes off as dull compared to its companion. The first CD is marvelous because it doesn't try too hard to be ambient. "Little Fluffy Clouds" is a delicious slice of offbeat humour that is every bit as refreshing then as it was back then, "Gaia" is just downright spooky, "Supernova" gets starkly funky (just listen for all the wonderful dead space in the mix -- the track is a blueprint on how find bliss while shaking rump without cluttering up the mix). The second disc screams "chill out ... downtempo grooves ... NOW". "Outlands" isn't half the dub-hop floor-filler that it thinks it is, and "Into the Fourth Dimension" isn't one-quarter the space travel ravers come-down that IT thinks it is. Finally, they made a huge blunder by choosing the "live in-studio" version of "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Centre of the Ultraworld", which is the worst of the 5824 versions of that song (the 21 minute version from their first Peel Session is the best I've heard -- and having been recorded during in December 1989, makes it the last classic track of the 1980's, IMO). Burn CD1 from a friend and save your time and money for tracking down all their Peel Sessions for the one of finest collections of crust-free, dub-free ambient stasis you'll ever hear.
