Orbital - Optical Delusion. 17th February.

[Alcofribas]

The guy

[ARPA]

[xxx]

Tissue song was better when it was their remix of "Behind the Mask" by YMO

[Pirtek]

Oh dear!

[beerwolf]

Dirty Rat tune is massive now at work. Loads of random geezers stomping round the yard, pointing at each other, head banging and shouting 

YOU DIRTY RAT!!!

Love the line ‘who doesn’t look like a friiiied animal’

Bad ass tune

Edited January 18, 2023 by beerwolf

[Pirtek]

 

[nature]

The new tracks on the anniversary collection reignited my interest in new Orbital tunes. I hope they are a precursor.

[Pirtek]

New single Are You Alive out next week:

https://orbitalband.lnk.to/AreYouAlive

 

[Pirtek]

17 hours ago, nature said:

The new tracks on the anniversary collection reignited my interest in new Orbital tunes. I hope they are a precursor.

I do really like Smiley and Acid Horse myself, but can't justify £80 for the vinyl!

[Pirtek]

I quite like this one. Nice squelchy acid near the end!

[sexagon hun]

been locked out of the dang forum for the last 9-10 months, guess the 101th time trying logging in was the charm!

been reading instead of posting in this topic - now I can add thoughts:

I ended up buying the Atmos/5.1 BluRay of this (https://superdeluxeedition.com/news/new-orbital-single-from-the-forthcoming-album-optical-delusion/) which I think is now sold out, anyway it'll be nice to hear it this way, this is the 1st time buying an album on bluray - has the bonus tracks and the instrumentals, nice. Also this might be my Fav album artwork from Orbital yet, would not mind having a nice print of this, I may have to message John Greenwood about this. 

Not gonna listen to Are You Alive? as I wanna have the rest a surprise, liked the Ringa track OK, and think Dirty Rat is pretty fun actually - was hoping for a lot more bonus tracks than 3, last time we got like 8 or something off Monsters..

[Pirtek]

There will be more on the Amazon exclusive as well I think.

[Pirtek]

4 hours ago, sexagon hun said:

was hoping for a lot more bonus tracks than 3, last time we got like 8 or something off Monsters..

As far as I can remember, the bonus tracks on the blu ray version are the exclusives on the Amazon cd and they haven't said what's on the other bonus cd (I think one of them will be a remix of Home).

[sexagon hun]

2 hours ago, Pirtek said:

 they haven't said what's on the other bonus cd (I think one of them will be a remix of Home).

yeah, and it's almost time for the release date so I was hoping by now all that would be out - just curious what all is coming other than those 3 bonus tracks other than a few remixes which I'm happy to have those as well but wouldn't mind a few more studio tracks. 1-2 more would be nice! Hoping my BluRay ships soon-ish so it lands on or around the actual release date but depends where it's coming from as I'm in the States..

[Pirtek]

1 hour ago, sexagon hun said:

wouldn't mind a few more studio tracks.

Me too!

1 hour ago, sexagon hun said:

Hoping my BluRay ships soon-ish so it lands on or around the actual release date but depends where it's coming from as I'm in the States..

Let's hope so! I've pre-ordered it too.

[Pirtek]

Paul Hartnoll wrote 7 tracks and Phil wrote the other 3, one being You are the Frequency, which has a very strong vibe from his Long Range project (Control Me EP to be precise).

[Pirtek]

[Extralife]

1 hour ago, Pirtek said:

Promising review. I’ve been purposely avoiding listening to any of these tracks save for one viewing of that Dirty Rat video. Trying to measure my expectations.

[Pirtek]

7 hours ago, Extralife said:

Trying to measure my expectations.

Well, I'm really enjoying Are You Alive?

[sexagon hun]

Are we pretty sure the 'bonus' tracks on that extra cd are gonna more more than just the 3 extra/bonus tracks? Album is a week or two out and just figured all this would be revealed - I wanna hold out to my 1st listen via the surround BluRay but know that might take a extra week or two to get to me from release date as I believe that company is based in the UK? Hopefully it's shipped on or day before the date..

[Pirtek]

2 hours ago, sexagon hun said:

Are we pretty sure the 'bonus' tracks on that extra cd are gonna more more than just the 3 extra/bonus tracks?

Actually thinking about it, maybe not because the reason there were so many bonus tracks on Monsters Exist was because they were originally going to be used for Paul's next 8:58 album that was scrapped (Hoo Hoo Ha Ha was also going to be an 8:58 track). Then again, I think they were announced quite near to release date.

[Pirtek]

“A human being experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest [of humanity] – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison…”

 

You many have seen this quote attributed to Albert Einstein on social media, the archetypal Smartest Guy Ever apparently having an out-of-character religious epiphany. It certainly leapt out at Paul Hartnoll of Orbital who spotted it in Michael Pollan’s 2018 book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence.

 

“As soon as I saw ‘optical delusion’ I thought Oh hey, that’s the album title,” says Paul. “It just seemed to say so much about how people construct their own realities, how we see patterns that aren’t there, how we see what we want to see.

 

“But it’s actually a misquote. He never quite said that. In the German original what he’s really saying is that human experience is as relative as physics. Wouldn’t it be good if we could accept that, and find a kind of universal theory of everything for the human race? Then you look at everything from history to art to your Twitter feed and you think yeah, that’s what we’re all trying to do all of the time…”

 

Hence ‘Optical Delusion’, the tenth original Orbital album and the latest in a burst of renewed post-pandemic creativity for two brothers who’ve stayed at the top of their game longer than anyone from the post-1988 Class of Acid House.

 

Now with ‘Optical Delusion’ the Hartnolls dig deeper into the unquiet psyche of our increasingly surreal and disordered world. Sketched out partly during lockdown but fully recorded in the uncertain After Times, the album summons up conflicting emotions and sometimes beguiling images from years when the science fiction doomsdays that the Hartnolls watched on TV as kids finally came true. There are mesmeric tracks with names like ‘The New Abnormal’ and ‘Requiem For The Pre-Apocalypse’ and ‘Day One’. But there are also straight-up bangers and ethereal cosmic dreams, abstract sound wars and deeply human songs of separation and loss.

 

And it all starts with a bang. Lead single ‘Dirty Rat’, an outright Fall-meets-Front-242 class rant with vocals by Sleaford Mods mob orator Jason Williamson, harks right back to the Hartnolls’ days of politicised anarcho-squatpunk. It began as a remix swap (Orbital did the Sleafords’ ‘I Don’t Rate You’) and morphed into a comic, brutal, bass-driven harangue not so much against our rulers but at the petty, mean-spirited, frightened, Mail-reading voters who put them there: the people who are “blaming everyone in hospital/blaming everyone at the bottom of the English Channel/blaming everyone who doesn’t look like a fried animal.”

 

Also key to the album is opening track ‘Ringa Ringa (The Old Pandemic Folk Song)’ which returns to an Orbital truism, that time always becomes a loop. This chugging, cyclical Orbital groove gives way to an unnerving past-meets-present timeslip fit for ‘Sapphire And Steel’ as goth maenads The Mediaeval Baebes materialise to sing ‘Ring O’Roses’ – the innocent nursery rhyme whose roots are in the Black Death.

 

“I’ve always liked folk music and mediaeval sounds,” says Paul, himself an occasional Morris dancer. “I had the basis of that track and I wanted to spin it off somehow.” Trawling his archives he stumbled on The Mediaeval Baebes’ version of ‘Ring O’Roses’ “and my hackles just went up. I was like, my God, this is the original pandemic folk song.”

 

?his being Orbital, there are collaborations galore on the album, the roles once played by Alison Goldfrapp, Lady Leshurr or David Gray now filled by new talents. London singer-songwriter Anna B Savage contributes a compellingly fragile, Anohni-like vocal to ‘Home’, in which nature reclaims the scorched and vacant mega-cities. ‘Day One’ is a pulsing techno track featuring the singer Dina Ipavic. Paul got in touch with her after working on a score for a sculpture show of giant robotic installations by his friend Giles Walker during the pandemic. First Paul cut up his own score and Ipavic’s vocals on the track The Crane, which appears on the deluxe version of the album. Then he thought, Why not work with her for real? The result is school of ‘Belfast’, a bassy dreamscape with vocalised clouds billowing above.

 

The pensive ‘Are You ?live?’ adds to the Orbital product range of existential questions (‘Are We Here?’, ‘Where Is It Going?’) in collaboration Bella Union signings Penelope Isles, AKA brother and sister act Lily and Jack Wolter. “They’re our studio mates, they work upstairs!” says Paul happily. “And they’ve both got amazing voices.”

 

But Orbital are Orbital and never far from the dancefloor. “Eventually the more abrasive bits came back into the fold…” ‘You Are The Frequency’, first of two tracks to feature mysterious vocalist The Little Pest, surrounds the listener with warped voices ordering you to the dancefloor (Phil: “we wanted the idea that the music is kind of absorbing you”). And the second, the sinister ‘What A Surprise’, traps you in a paranoid electronic hall of mirrors.

 

In another nod to Orbital’s resurgent past the cover artwork once again comes from fine art painter John Greenwood, creator of fantastical grotesques for the covers of ‘Snivilisation’, ‘In Sides’ and Orbital’s most recent album, 2018’s ‘Monsters Exist’. Orbital had just had a slick Mark Farrow cover for ‘30 Something’ – this is a return to the overripe and bulbous techno-organic constructions that somehow express Orbital’s own uncontrollably fertile sound.

 

There are gaps in the future that Orbital are desperate to fill too; there will be tours and festivals and rooms and fields full of people. Those long paralysed months when we had little to look forward to but a Zoom DJ set made Paul and Phil appreciate the things that make life worth living.

[sexagon hun]

Looks like the bonus CD is:

1. Dirty Rat (Instrumental)
2. Ringa Ringa (Instrumental)
3. Ringa Ringa (Breakage Remix)
4. Are You Alive (French Version Extended)

 

[toaoaoad]

15 hours ago, Pirtek said:

“A human being experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest [of humanity] – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison…”

 

You many have seen this quote attributed to Albert Einstein on social media, the archetypal Smartest Guy Ever apparently having an out-of-character religious epiphany. It certainly leapt out at Paul Hartnoll of Orbital who spotted it in Michael Pollan’s 2018 book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence.

 

“As soon as I saw ‘optical delusion’ I thought Oh hey, that’s the album title,” says Paul. “It just seemed to say so much about how people construct their own realities, how we see patterns that aren’t there, how we see what we want to see.

 

“But it’s actually a misquote. He never quite said that. In the German original what he’s really saying is that human experience is as relative as physics. Wouldn’t it be good if we could accept that, and find a kind of universal theory of everything for the human race? Then you look at everything from history to art to your Twitter feed and you think yeah, that’s what we’re all trying to do all of the time…”

 

Hence ‘Optical Delusion’, the tenth original Orbital album and the latest in a burst of renewed post-pandemic creativity for two brothers who’ve stayed at the top of their game longer than anyone from the post-1988 Class of Acid House.

 

Now with ‘Optical Delusion’ the Hartnolls dig deeper into the unquiet psyche of our increasingly surreal and disordered world. Sketched out partly during lockdown but fully recorded in the uncertain After Times, the album summons up conflicting emotions and sometimes beguiling images from years when the science fiction doomsdays that the Hartnolls watched on TV as kids finally came true. There are mesmeric tracks with names like ‘The New Abnormal’ and ‘Requiem For The Pre-Apocalypse’ and ‘Day One’. But there are also straight-up bangers and ethereal cosmic dreams, abstract sound wars and deeply human songs of separation and loss.

 

And it all starts with a bang. Lead single ‘Dirty Rat’, an outright Fall-meets-Front-242 class rant with vocals by Sleaford Mods mob orator Jason Williamson, harks right back to the Hartnolls’ days of politicised anarcho-squatpunk. It began as a remix swap (Orbital did the Sleafords’ ‘I Don’t Rate You’) and morphed into a comic, brutal, bass-driven harangue not so much against our rulers but at the petty, mean-spirited, frightened, Mail-reading voters who put them there: the people who are “blaming everyone in hospital/blaming everyone at the bottom of the English Channel/blaming everyone who doesn’t look like a fried animal.”

 

Also key to the album is opening track ‘Ringa Ringa (The Old Pandemic Folk Song)’ which returns to an Orbital truism, that time always becomes a loop. This chugging, cyclical Orbital groove gives way to an unnerving past-meets-present timeslip fit for ‘Sapphire And Steel’ as goth maenads The Mediaeval Baebes materialise to sing ‘Ring O’Roses’ – the innocent nursery rhyme whose roots are in the Black Death.

 

“I’ve always liked folk music and mediaeval sounds,” says Paul, himself an occasional Morris dancer. “I had the basis of that track and I wanted to spin it off somehow.” Trawling his archives he stumbled on The Mediaeval Baebes’ version of ‘Ring O’Roses’ “and my hackles just went up. I was like, my God, this is the original pandemic folk song.”

 

?his being Orbital, there are collaborations galore on the album, the roles once played by Alison Goldfrapp, Lady Leshurr or David Gray now filled by new talents. London singer-songwriter Anna B Savage contributes a compellingly fragile, Anohni-like vocal to ‘Home’, in which nature reclaims the scorched and vacant mega-cities. ‘Day One’ is a pulsing techno track featuring the singer Dina Ipavic. Paul got in touch with her after working on a score for a sculpture show of giant robotic installations by his friend Giles Walker during the pandemic. First Paul cut up his own score and Ipavic’s vocals on the track The Crane, which appears on the deluxe version of the album. Then he thought, Why not work with her for real? The result is school of ‘Belfast’, a bassy dreamscape with vocalised clouds billowing above.

 

The pensive ‘Are You ?live?’ adds to the Orbital product range of existential questions (‘Are We Here?’, ‘Where Is It Going?’) in collaboration Bella Union signings Penelope Isles, AKA brother and sister act Lily and Jack Wolter. “They’re our studio mates, they work upstairs!” says Paul happily. “And they’ve both got amazing voices.”

 

But Orbital are Orbital and never far from the dancefloor. “Eventually the more abrasive bits came back into the fold…” ‘You Are The Frequency’, first of two tracks to feature mysterious vocalist The Little Pest, surrounds the listener with warped voices ordering you to the dancefloor (Phil: “we wanted the idea that the music is kind of absorbing you”). And the second, the sinister ‘What A Surprise’, traps you in a paranoid electronic hall of mirrors.

 

In another nod to Orbital’s resurgent past the cover artwork once again comes from fine art painter John Greenwood, creator of fantastical grotesques for the covers of ‘Snivilisation’, ‘In Sides’ and Orbital’s most recent album, 2018’s ‘Monsters Exist’. Orbital had just had a slick Mark Farrow cover for ‘30 Something’ – this is a return to the overripe and bulbous techno-organic constructions that somehow express Orbital’s own uncontrollably fertile sound.

 

There are gaps in the future that Orbital are desperate to fill too; there will be tours and festivals and rooms and fields full of people. Those long paralysed months when we had little to look forward to but a Zoom DJ set made Paul and Phil appreciate the things that make life worth living.

 

Lol, so a misquote and a misattribution. Well done

[Pirtek]

 

5 hours ago, sexagon hun said:

Looks like the bonus CD is:

1. Dirty Rat (Instrumental)
2. Ringa Ringa (Instrumental)
3. Ringa Ringa (Breakage Remix)
4. Are You Alive (French Version Extended)

 

Oh right! How did you find that out?

 I know that on the blu ray you get all of the main album instrumental.

We still need to find out what's on the Amazon exclusive.

Edited February 7, 2023 by Pirtek