As promised, here is the Melody Maker article on the Orb (June 25th 1994):

                              The Pomme Pomme Club
                              --------------------

THE ORB's new 'little album', 'Pomme Fritz', is the usual beautiful amalgum of
dub beats and ambient effects.  But that doesn't mean they're New Age airheads. 
DAVID STUBBS finds Orbster ALEX PATERSON in defiantly bitchy mood and discovers
the dance duo are more punk than S*M*A*S*H

                     --------------------------------------

POMMES

"I JUST GOT OFFERED TO REMIX KYLIE MINOGUE."  Alex Paterson lolls back in his
chair with his customary air of mildly peevish bewilderment as my mind rocks
like a jelly in a high wind of revelation.  A vision shimmies before my eyes
like a UFO of an ever-pulsating tape loop reiterating "lucky, lucky, lucky" over
and over and over into dub infinity.  Alex, however, declined the offer.  he's
had to turn down a lot of work recently, even old muckers Primal Scream, and
currently finds himself up to his neck in commitments.  He's just come straight
back from Nimes, whe he DJed with Juan Atkins and is looking slightly stressed
and lagged.

We're in the chill-out room of Alex's studio in Clapham.  Thrash is absent,
which might be just as well as, apparently, he has difficulty keeping a straight
face in interviews.  The derelict Battersea power station is nearby, looming
large.  Given a sympathetic bowler, Brian Lara could probably hit it from here
with a six.  ("It wasn't the Pink Floyd thing that made me use it on the
'Ultraworld' cover.  It's cos I grew up around here, looking at it from my
window.")  Jon Hassell exudes at low volume from the speakers like incense; a
sitar and carpets hang from the walls.  Alex is sporting a topknot.  The
atmosphere is very much that of a yurt, except for an unnecessary two-bar heater
on full blast in the corner.  Alex, too, is feeling far from chilled out.

From what colleagues had said about The Orb, I was expecting the ambient
interview, all lengthy, smoke-filled pauses and non-committal remarks.  I was
wrong.  Pressure of work and a build up of grievances, not least with his
previous label Big Life, lend an abrasive edge to his steady stream of chat. 
He's even bitchy!

On Bjork:  "They seem to have done a good job on here, the new Dance Queen. 
Everyone seems to have forgotten she was once a gothic punk."

On The Aphex Twin: "One thing that amuses me about him.  If he claims to write
music in his sleep, how can he claim at the same time that he never sleeps?"


CHIPS

THE Orb certainly haven't been sleeping.  They've been busy.

First fruits of their labours, during the hiatus brought on by their dispute
with their previous label and their transfer to Island (the live album, "Bro
Evil 93", not withstanding) is the current "Pomme Fritz".  At around the
40-minute mark, it's being marketed as an album, though the various tracks tend
to be weird spin-offs and sonic detritus from the mothership track, "Meat N'
Veg".  Said track, after a messy birth of anguished synth groans and
contortions, evolves into a beautiful, pastoral expanse, with dubs and drones
buzzing about like wasps and insects at a picnic.  After this sunny opening,
however, the fluffy clouds turn to stormclouds.  With a recurring sample of a
Fifties public information broadcast voice fading in and out about the joys of
electro-shock therapy - "All those traumas wiped away, along with most of your
personality" - the harsh blocks of noise, nuclear underground test dub and
angular enmershment of serrated sound that comprise the rest of "Pomme Fritz"
(with the exception of the floating dub excursion of "Alles Ist Schoen",
featuring new Orb man Thomas Fehlmann) point to a more sardonic, snarling,
nightmarish, nastier Orb.  The album exits to the bleak, facetious chimes of
some sort of seaside pier Wurlitzer.

As with "Bro Evil 39", it's like they're trying to push things really hard, push
us really hard.  After the benign, floatation-tank beauty of such early outings
as "Back Side Of The Moon", their subsequent work, such as their brilliant
remixes for Front 242, the alien has revealed itself to be a demon.  Or a bunch
of demons.

"A lot of these remixes were done while we were with Big Life and that's
reflected in the music.  The same's true of some of 'Pomme Fritz', parts that
are just unmusical, full of noises.  And I'm hoping doing that, because it shows
another aspect to us than the little fluffy one."

Why is "Pomme Fritz" being marketed as a "little album", rather than an extended
single, a la "The Blue Room"?

"The problem with 'The Blue Room' was that, being a single, after a few weeks it
wasn't available.  So we did this rather than being marketed as a band who just
did singles - we had a record company do that to us before, and put stuff out
behind our backs.  We felt we were getting too commercial for our own good -
although we don't set out to be commercial.  We're happy with the attention,
we're happy with the press but there comes a point where it becomes too much. 
Do we have to do this?  We've 40,000 people on our mailing list alone.  We could
just pay off our advance to Island selling to those people."

Alex genuinely doesn't want The Orb to expand any further.  He talks not about
being big in Japan but just about the right size - "We'd fill two-,
three-thousand capacity venues, maybe tour two or three big cities."  Beyond
that, he just doesn't need the hassle.  For instance, Alex is still fond of
recalling with a shake of his head being asked to cut all the tracks on
"Ultraworld" to five minutes for the purposes of international release - a bit
like asking Billy Bragg to cut out the political stuff.  The whole point of The
Orb is that they are too much...


GRAVY

THE Orb are paradoxical - on the one hand, they're as gloriously inflated as a
plastic flying pig, on the other hand, they don't allow their listeners to
relapse into any feelings of mystical solemnity.  What could be more deflating
than naming your tracks "Meat N' Veg", or "More Gills, Less Fishcakes"?  Dark
ambient it might be, but with a hefty dollop of flippancy like brown gravy.

"It's a reaction against all that bullshit you get at the moment.  I see it as
what Eno had to go through with his Obscure label and that was fine, it
fulfilled people - but when it becomes New Age, in the late Seventies, early
Eighties..."  Alex makes a noise like the wind expiring from an empty hot water
bottle (orally, not anally), a regular punctuation of his conversation.  "Did
you know, Texas has its own ambient radio station?  I was talking to Dave at Fat
Cat and he was telling me he gets about 30, 40 new ambient records a week and he
has to listen to them, it's getting unbearable... clearly record labels are
saying, listen, we've got to get an ambient band."

As a kid, Alex Paterson listened to Gary Glitter rather than the Tull or Floyd.
Like a great many of the people working in the ambient/funk/dub/fusion arena
(Loop Guru, for instance), he went through the punk era, roadied for Killing
Joke.  His body language and manner of speech put me in mind of Frank from
"EastEnders", all suggestive of restlessness with anything that remotely whiffs
of "pretentiousness".  You'd have thought he'd be the last person in the world
to make music that The Orb do.  You'd imagine they might represent everything he
despises.

"Yeah, I see that.  If I was a punter, I'd probably hate us.  But... bangers and
chips, chips, pomme frites, that's the whole idea which we're going to extend on
the next album of naming these tracks after very solid things, rather than all
that New Age nonsense.  That was the whole concept of getting The Orb off the
ground in the beginning.  We were taking the piss out of ourselves a long time
before anybody else did.  We pre-empted it.  We don't like being put on
pedestals, we tend to jump off them, as a reaction.  If you started to take
yourself too seriously, you'd have a really sad life.  I used to have to roadie
for bands like that."


MIXED GRILL

THE Orb are still vilified for "self-indulgence" by the sort of morally
indignant rock critics who are suspicious of any music that doesn't reflect the
underlying dourness and misery of human existence and monitor rock for exceeding
its ration of texture over text, like so many WWII food inspectors checking that
housewives weren't exceeding their weekly allowance of 2oz butter per week.

The point is, however, that The Orb would probably consider themselves to be as
true to the spirit of punk as S*M*A*S*H in their own way.  They're not musical
virtuosos - Alex works with the nlikes of Thomas Fehlmann and Steve Hillage
"because we need real musicians to give us a structure for us to follow".  And
as far as he's concerned, he's most proud of the fact that he's broken through,
as a DJ, but done it on his own terms.  Tres punk.

For his model of integrity, however, he chooses Led Zeppelin, the band who, like
Hendrix before them, raised the volume and temperature of rock for ever.

"Led Zeppelin were thought of as a metal band, although they were far from it,
they were coming out with things way beyond what had ever been done before.  For
a start, they created the first drum machine, John Bonham.  And when he died,
they split the band up rather than get another drummer, which a lot of other
bands would have done.  And I've got the utmost respect for them for that.  So,
we draw our lines and ideas by looking at Zeppelin, the albums they put out, the
diversity of their textures.  It can happen.  I could lose sleep worrying about
if we're doing the right thing and sure, it'll get up a lot of peoples' noses
but it'll also do very well.  It'll annoy rock journalists, with their
particular criteria."

The mention of rock journalists sets Alex down a particular avenue of grievance.
He rails against all those people for whom it's still got to be a guitar, still
got to be a band, particularly a Dutch journalist who interrogated them with all
the right to perform because their music was generated by machines.

"We've had a battle all the way down the line from rock promoters - the idea of
a band playing purely dance music."

Particularly bad in this respect were their experiences at the miners' benefit
gig they did at the Sheffield Arena.

"That was the biggest nightmare I've ever done.  You had plain clothes drugs
squad squad people beating up kids, strip-searching the kids.  Also, the
Yorkshire police said we couldn't sell tickets on the day of the concert, even
though loads of people were coming up to see them on the day, because of some
by-law about selling tickets on the same day as raves.  Still, it was worth it,
we got 35,000 UK Pounds for the miners."

What did you think of the Primal Scream album?

"I have mixed feelings, really, especially having been so involved with
'Screamadelica', on 'Higher Than The Sun'.  It was Andrew, wasn't it,
'Screamadelica'?"

I didn't much like the new stuff but they're nobody's puppets.  They can play.

"Oh, sure, I have the greatest admiration for them, they know how to go out on
the road and go about it.  I mean, you don't go out on the road to sleep, do
you?"


FISHCAKES

ON the other side of the cultural coin, do you get grief from the Dance
Fascists?

"We're lucky in that respect.  I do keep in touch, but I don't sit on my arse at
weekends, I go out and DJ, catch up with what's happening - never hear an Orb
track, you very rarely do, that's always been the case.  I don't play Orb tracks
when I'm DJing.  I always intended The Orb as something you'd take home.

"I did an interview with an American journalist who was trying to convince me
just how many people go to sleep listening to The Orb.  Which is great, it's a
time when you're at your most receptive, in a way..."

An yes, sniggerers, she meant it as a compliment.


HULL

"THE days aren't long enough at the moment...help!"  Alex mock-whinnies but with
genuine plaintiveness.  The Orb are on the point of visiting a deluge on us, via
their own Inter Modo label.  Upcoming collaborations with Robert Fripp and Kris
Needs.  First, though is "Luciana", done in cahoots with Juno Reactor.  It's 61
glorious minutes of what sounds like some fantasy soundtrack to a theory of how
the dinosaurs become extinct involving collapsing ecosystems and visting aliens.
Or whatever you make of it.

"We're just throwing things out, so that people can decide for themselves," says
Alex with typical self-effacement.  There's no marketing strategy.  We've got
far too much stuff coming out - three things this year."

He's disheartened, to say the least, at Big Life having re-released "Little
Fluffy Clouds" and "Perpetual Dawn", because as far as he's concerned, they give
a "false picture of what we're about.  You do meet a lot of people who are just
out to make money," and he launches into a scathing attack on Big Life, telling
a financial horror story of their handling of Durga McBroom, formerly of Blue
Pearl, now back where she started, what you do with it that's important.  We
haven't decided to become massive drug addicts..."


AN EVER-PULSATING EXPANDING ENIGMA

THE Orb leave me bamboozled.  So relentlessly, impenetrably avant-garde in many
ways, with no regards for editing, self-promotion or the commercial aspects of
the games, yet persistently popular.  How does a fuck-off dub techno outing like
"Assassin" reach the top 20?  How does Alex Paterson do it?  And why does he do
it?  Maybe it's something to do with staring out of his window at Battersea
Powere station too long as a kid, I dunno, but... you listen to The Orb then you
look and listen to him and, frankly, he doesn't seem the type.  Then again,
maybe that's the point.  Maybe that's why The Orb work and Sven Vath doesn't. 
As for The Orb - inflated, deflated, sublime, ridiculous - they float on.  And
on and on and on....


'Pomme Fritz' is out now on Island