It's been more than ten years since brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll released their onomatopoeic first single, "Chime."| After dubbing themselves Orbital in homage to the round highway that English kids use to travel to raves, the brothers from Kent, England, went on to release five albums and numerous singles of glossy electronic music. They also developed a formidable reputation as a live act, despite taking stages as only two blokes and their sequencers. Their latest album, The Middle of Nowhere, weaves frenetic breakbeats, synthy peals of liquid sound and big, gorgeous melodies into a dramatic sonic tapestry that makes as much sense in headphones as it does on the dance floor. Older brother Phil spoke to us via telephone from the U.K.
Several songs on The Middle of Nowhere feel like exuberant party music, almost disco. Do you write for the dance floor?
Not at all, actually. We don't sit back and think, "Will that work on the dance floor?" A lot of our music doesn't, in actual fact. It's too fiddly sometimes, there's too much going on. A lot of dance music is a lot more basic. I'm not undermining it, it's just a lot more simplistic than what we do. We just do what we want to do and we do it for ourselves. It's a bit selfish really, but it's all we can do. If we do make people dance, great, but that's not our purpose.
Who's buying your records? Is it club kids who wanna dance?
It varies, actually. Judging by the audience at live gigs, there are a lot of people who've stuck with us. Obviously, we've been going for ten years and there are a lot of faithful fans out there. The age group varies up to about fifty. We don't get masses of fifty-year-olds, but we get a good cross-section.
In a way, your music is more like classical music, where the audience shows up to hear compositions.
What we're doing is instrumental music. It's not dance music -- it's electronic, which is a bit misleading, because there's tons of electronics used in rock nowadays anyway, people just don't know it. We end up composing and arranging music, and the arrangements can be varied and twisted and go through all different moods. I suppose there is the comparison with classical music and with jazz -- not with the music itself, but with the approach of constructing a song.
How do you perform live? Do you improvise?
We use sequencers. The sequencers are just running 'round in eight- and sixteen-bar loops. Every element has individual buttons, so we can introduce bass drum, snare drum, any part of the song, whenever we want. By bringing things in and taking them out, if we sense the audience aren't liking it, we can cut it short, make a track last a minute, do anything we like. In that present moment, that's how we respond to the audience. The audience take a large part in how we perform. Plus we can manipulate the sound with EQs and effects -- God knows the ways a mixing desk can be used.
So the audience aren't responding to my fancy finger work on my guitar or the way I'm strutting around, because I'm twiddling knobs and pushing buttons and looking at tiny little screens. The link is the music, really. I suppose we're like the conductor with our little orchestra in front of us. We just have to point to them and they start playing and point to them again and they stop.
Do people usually dance?
We played a lot of new tracks on this tour, before the album was out. We were playing tracks that people didn't know, and you can really tell. They're standing there and you think, "Oh, my god, they hate us!" But really they're listening. In perfect venues, where you have a balcony with seats upstairs, people can choose to just sit there and chill out or jump around in the front. That's a perfect venue for us and our audience. After the album is released, you can really tell. As soon as they recognize the songs, they get into it.
Are writing and recording separate processes for you guys, or does it all happen at once?
They're the same thing. It's all electronic, so we don't have to worry about recording things acoustically, except for drums. We have a friend who's a really good drummer, Steve Sidelnyk. We go to a recording studio and set down a load of drums. Then we take 'em back to our studio, cut 'em up, sample 'em and make our breakbeats. It's great fun, do a bit of this, run some loops. You get lost within it.
Obviously, drugs play a big role in the audience's relationship to electronic music. Do you ever use drugs to write?
No, not at all. I haven't done that sort of thing for years. I could never get it together on stage.
What's up with the title of your new record?
We have a problem sometimes coming up with titles for albums. One of my kids came up with a little picture of a tiny little house on a great big page, and I said, "What's that?" He said, "Oh it's the middle of nowhere." That just rang a bell, like, "Bing! That sounds good." Some people say it's kind of negative. I don't know about you, but sometimes I like to go to the middle of nowhere, away from everything. Like you're off in a cloud somewhere, that's the middle of nowhere I mean.
RODD McLEOD(June 4, 1999)