1993 was the last hurrah of rave’s original explosion. In 1994 the Criminal Justice Act would serve as a symbolic clamping down on raving. If you wanted to be fanciful you might paint a picture of it as a boot coming down and smashing the scene’s unity into a million social and stylistic pieces, but in fact things were already fragmenting. Rave culture was still at fever pitch in 1993, but the centre couldn’t hold. All the various elements that had gone into it were pulling away in their own directions, as were new formulations. Certain sounds – jungle, goa trance, happy hardcore, garage, Artificial Intelligence electronica, “handbag” / glam house – were starting to become so distinct as to have their own infrastructure. By 94, they’d really be speciated into scenes, but in 1993, for all the tensions and furious creative diversification, it was still just – just – possible to talk about rave music and rave culture as such.
Of course some will question that, and plenty would at the time. But for all that there were protective purists for various sub-scenes there were also still enough people ping-ponging between styles and parties, and enough who still had Castlemorton in the rear view mirror, for the sense that there was some kind of centre – around which casuals, crusties, students, fashion people, jazzers and all the rest orbited – to make some kind of sense. And if you want proof of that, it’s right here in Orbital’s second album, which landed at the start of 1993.
Paul and Phil Hartnoll were fully immersed: their first track, ‘Chime’ dropped in 1989 as acid house was exploding into ever bigger fields and warehouses and becoming rave, and they were in the thick of things from there on in – broadly with Paul making the music and Phil as still-important vibesman. Their name, of course, refers to the never ending weekend convoys around the “London orbital” M25 motorway seeking out those raves. Making big tunes for big raves was their first musical venture, unlike most of their peers in arena dance like Leftfield (who had a background in jazz funk / hip hop), Underworld (funk / synth pop) and the Chemical Brothers (Balearic / indie-dance), and they were the most rooted in the simple but potent rhythms and tonalities of rave of the lot.
They also, unabashedly, made drug music. As soon as ‘Chime’ blew up, they had a baptism of fire and cut their teeth as a live act as part of The Shamen’s Synergy travelling circus alongside Ramjac, The Irresistible Force and Meat Beat Manifesto – the name a shameless reference to guzzling E and LSD at the same time. By the time this album was brewing they were regulars at Megadog (I first heard some of these tracks the summer before, on my 19th birthday, in a suitably whirly-eyed state, as the Megadog Midi Circus tour hit Brighton with Drum Club and Aphex Twin), and they were always Spiral Tribe adjacent (legend has it they met Kirsty Hawkshaw whose ‘It’s A Fine Day’ vocals they repurposed here on ‘Halcyon’ at a ST rave). This was a milieu of two purple oms and base speed just as starters before pills and K.
This album is constructed for the never ending narcotic session. The Steve Reich via Hawkwind out-of-phase looping of “time becomes a loop” in the intro got a bit tired from – lol – repetition at the time, but listened to afresh now has regained its function as an “OK, here we go!” ritual, as has the “crackly stuck vinyl record suddenly cutting into four dimensional techno” start of ‘Planet Of The Shapes’ that follows. That tune is probably the most Megadog track on here, with its sitar loops, snippets of flute and dubby chug – but it also remains resolutely a Proper Banger, with its intersecting riffs, its gung ho pitching up and down of chords (an orchestral string swoop?) on a sampler, and its one-note bassline, as rooted in the 90/91 birth of hardcore as they are in any kind of hippie-dippie mentality.
That sets the tone for everything thereafter. There’s usually some cosmic or skybound element, but there’s always a big riff off some kind yelling, ‘Let’s fuckin’ ‘ave it’ too. The piercing bleeps that cascade across ‘Lush’; the abstract tone of the main hook on the album’s centrepiece ‘Impact (The Earth Is Burning)’. The way ‘Walk Now’ builds from a didgeridoo – it’s 1993, there has to be a digeridoo – to a tribute to the classic R&S Records style Belgian aggro-techno of a couple of years before; the ‘Strings Of Life’-mode string vamp on ‘Monday’… For all of the brothers’ finesse and abnormal skill in coming up with memorable melodic hooks, this album doesn’t mess about, this is intended to make you “boil your head” (as the Megadog slogan went) and sweat your kidneys out.
It’s hard to pick a peak because it’s all peak experience, but the way the breakbeat for ‘Impact’ – supplied by Meat Beat Manifesto’s Jack Dangers, and cut up on the off-beat drawing a line from MBM’s own ‘Radio Babylon’ to nascent jungle – sneaks in to the end of the second part of ‘Lush’ is probably the purest bit of, ‘Nope, there will be no let-up in the raving’ energy. And obviously ‘Halcyon’ remains an ultimate sunrise song, with its sparkling piano, strings and collage of Hawkshaw’s voice still precision designed to set hearts fluttering before the bassline rises up through them and we’re off again. Its nine and half minutes has got all the bittersweetness of knowing the double edge of chemical bliss – ‘Halcyon’ is the name of the tranquiliser the Hartnolls’ mother was addicted to – but nevertheless trying to prolong it at all costs. It’s the perfect climax to an album which itself makes most sense now as a last gasp of the come-one-come-all, we’re-all-on-a-mission, hug-a-stranger, rave-as-movement moment of the previous couple of years. The centre couldn’t hold, things would fly apart into myriad shards across mainstream and underground, maybe it was all illusory in the first place – but somehow this record still serves as a remnant of the moments when it all felt very, very real.
