When the Orb appeared in New York in 1995, they attracted a fairly uniform audience of young ravers with a few New Age types mixed in. Just two years later, with electronic music snaking into the mainstream, the group attracted a diverse crowd of fashion designers, Web-page producers, newlyweds from Queens and even a drag queen or two.
\\But if the Orb has gotten bigger, they certainly haven't become stars. Though founder Alex Paterson and partner in crime Andy Hughes are revered by many ambient musicians and are probably among the most recognizable electronica artists because of it, they preferred to act as behind-the-scenes mixmasters, bopping their heads as they orchestrated effects and sounds from behind banks of machines.
\\With a level of sensory overload that evoked Pink Floyd, a constant stream of psychedelic images was projected onto the screens about the stage, including morphing faces, ubiquitous alien references, Bela Lugosi, panda bears and a red chair flying through a futuristic cityscape. Musically, the beat-driven soundscapes were interlaced with a frenetic procession of quirky musical details and punctuated by ambient pauses, as though to pace the level of absorption. At one point, mellow dub hooks transformed into watery splishes; seconds later, the room was filled with chattering electronic birds.
\\Paterson and Hughes also dropped in various snippets of speech, from bits of conversation, to weather reports, to a hilarious poem by a man with an English accent about his regret at not being Italian. Also mixed in throughout were what sounded like McCarthy-era speeches declaiming the sanctity of God and country. Layered amid music without a fixed narrative and offered up to an audience to whom that time is ancient history, it amounted to an odd nostalgia for a fixed world order, as well as a cool acknowledgment that such order is now impossible.
\\While the sensory onslaught of an Orb performance practically forces a fairly passive relationship to onstage events, the opening DJ duo, We, gave concert-goers the sonic space to interpret sounds for themselves. With a sweet but gritty sound that seemed to get into people's bones, We's music was at once primal and futuristic, embryonic and worldly. Although the group, which consists of DJ Olive and DJ Loop, usually performs in smaller venues, they managed to retain the