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David Gilmour: Metallic Spheres (feat. The Orb)

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Columbia Records
Released: 2010.10.12
Time:
 48:53
Category: Electronica, Dub, Progressive Rock
Producer(s): Martin "Youth" Glover
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.davidgilmour.com
Appears with: Pink Floyd
Purchase date: 2012
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Metallic Side - 28:42
    1. Metallic Spheres (D.Gilmour/A.Paterson/Youth)
    2. Hymns to the Sun (D.Gilmour/A.Paterson/Youth/G.Nash)
    3. Black Graham (D.Gilmour/A.Paterson/Youth/M.Mello)
    4. Hiding in Plain View (D.Gilmour/A.Paterson/Youth/T.Bran)
    5. Classified (D.Gilmour/A.Paterson/Youth)
[2] Spheres Side - 20:12
    1. Es Vedra (D.Gilmour/A.Paterson/Youth)
    2. Hymns to the Sun [Reprise] (D.Gilmour/A.Paterson/Youth)
    3. Olympic (D.Gilmour/A.Paterson/Youth)
    4. Chicago Dub (D.Gilmour/A.Paterson/Youth)
    5. Bold Knife Trophy (D.Gilmour/A.Paterson/Youth)

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


David Gilmour - Guitars, Vocals
Dr. Alex Paterson - Sound Manipulation, Keyboards, Turntables
Martin "Youth" Glover - Bass, Keyboards, Programming, Producer, Mixing
Tim Bran - Keyboards, Programming, Engineer, Mixing
Marcia Mello - Acoustic Guitar on [1.3]
Dominique Le Vac - Backing Vocals

David Nock - Engineer, Mixing
Michael Rendall - Mixing
Andy Baldwin - Mastering
Elena Bello - Management
Mike Gillespie - Management
Paul Loasby - Management
Andy Murray - Management
Ben Ward - Management
Shin Yamada - Management
Simon Ghahary - Artwork, Package Design

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


2010 CD Columbia - 88697 79645 2

Recorded at The Dreaming Cave, South London, June 2009.
Mixed in The Study 2010. Mastered at Metropolis, London.
All artist royalties will be contributed to the support of Gary McKinnon.

Metallic Spheres is the tenth studio album released by ambient techno group The Orb in October 2010 and features Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour and Killing Joke bassist Youth. The album spent 3 weeks on the UK charts, peaking at number 12. The album was produced by Youth and recorded in June, 2009 at "The Dreaming Cave", in Wandsworth. Engineering was done by Tim Bran (of Dreadzone) and David Nock. Mixing was done by Youth, with mix engineering from Bran, Nock and Michael Rendall at "The Study" in 2010. Mastering was done by Andy Baldwin at Metropolis Studios in London. A headphone version was released as CD2 of the deluxe 2CD edition, with sound design by Mike Brady, recording by Mike Brady, David Nock and Michael Rendall, and mixing by Youth.



When we speak of The Orb perhaps we subconsciously think of a planet suspended in a void, with everyone on the surface staring out into space. It would be perhaps more fitting to see their world as a bubble where they exist on the inner surface and can only look inwards at their self-contained universe. Metallic Spheres, the electronic ambient outfit's latest studio album, suggests they have neither more nor fewer influences than when they started in 1989. So ostensibly this is another herbal cigarette-friendly selection of celestial synth washes, whacked-out aqueous FX, big slabs of booming dub bass and light dalliances with mid-tempo house and techno.

The one constant of the group, 'Dr' Alex Paterson is this time joined by auxiliary member Youth, who has been quite busy elsewhere over the last few years, collaborating with Paul McCartney on his Fireman project and rejoining seminal post-punk/industrial rock/goth pioneers Killing Joke, who have recently released their first album with him on bass, Absolute Dissent, since 1981. But without a doubt, the most interesting guest member on this project is David Gilmour of stadium prog titans Pink Floyd. Paterson and Gilmour were first brought together to work on a version of Graham Nash's Chicago project for charity. Such, they felt, was the fruitfulness of the partnership that they dragged in Youth to complete a remix and their work has basically effloresced to album length.

Ever since scoring early hits two decades ago with Little Fluffy Clouds and Blue Room, The Orb have been described incessantly as the rave generation’s Pink Floyd, so it was perhaps inevitable that these two institutions would eventually combine in some form or other. And of course it will surprise no one but the most uptight and partisan fans of either group to learn that Gilmour's honeyed, chiming and unchallenging guitar work is a sensual fit for The Orb's expansive, uplifting and soporific electronica.
 
Helpfully split into two sides for all chillers of a certain vintage, both the Metallic and Spheres sides run to under 30 minutes each, which then break down into five separate tracks. Outside of their bubble, of course, there is a seething world of new genres such as dubstep, glo-fi and drag; but these are of no interest to the elder statesmen of rave chill-out, who just want you to switch on a lava lamp, plump up some cushions and drift along to their soothing grooves.

John Doran, 2010 - BBC Review



Early in their career, the Orb were accused (but never proven) of releasing a series of bootleg trance mixes of Pink Floyd albums, and the group had plenty of other Floydian references too -- most obviously, the Battersea Power Station appeared or was parodied on several of their releases. The connection only became direct, though, in 2009, when David Gilmour recorded a version of the Graham Nash single "Chicago" with help from producer Youth, an occasional member of the Orb going back to the early '90s. It was a charity single to aid accused hacker Gary McKinnon, but it became the springboard for further collaboration one year later, after Orb main man Dr. Alex Paterson, became involved. Metallic Spheres is the result, a 49-minute odyssey that is very intentionally split up into only two tracks. the Orb fans and Pink Floyd fans should have no trouble with this album. In fact, Orb fans will find more resemblance to their classic early-'90s sound than ever; that is, less dense soundworlds and more skeletal groove-riding over a lazy 4/4 beat. Meanwhile, Pink Floyd fans looking for the imprint of the master will find them everywhere: Gilmour's guitar or lap steel, and rarely, his vocals (sampled from "Chicago") feature all over this record, mostly reminiscent of either the countrified haze originally heard on Meddle or the, well, spacy haze on The Dark Side of the Moon. Boasting few landmarks, the record simply rolls along with all the sublime calm of The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld or the "Echoes" portion of Meddle; each artist sounds averse to taking any chances, which prevents anything truly exciting from occurring. The only hint of intrigue comes 40-odd minutes into the record, when Youth takes up his mighty bass for "Chicago Dub," which briefly changes the pace for the better.

John Bush - All Music Guide



When there’s no brain-massaging kick beat or snappy guitar delay to mark the time, The Orb and David Gilmour’s two-track collaboration Metallic Spheres gracefully drifts to its peak. This stands to reason, because both artists have a sense of timing that’s brilliantly suited to vast, lengthy formats. Between the 14- and 24-minute marks on “Metallic Side,” the ambient ravers and the Pink Floyd guitarist manage to recall the folkier moments of Ummagumma and Meddle, and even the playful expansiveness of U.F.Orb, amid backdrops that glitter and drones that warmly glance off each other. But as an Orb production, the greater parts of “Metallic Side” and “Sphere Side” feel slow and leaden, both reaching failed peaks with strangely halfhearted chants about justice and human rights. Gilmour’s electric passages sprinkle on the swoops, echoes, and other unmistakable trappings, without much of the keen melodic purpose that muscled through both halves of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and “Comfortably Numb.” Of course, this isn’t about grandiose solos, and Gilmour does weave his style into The Orb’s bigger picture almost perfectly during the first, minimally hooky few minutes of “Metallic.” After a while, though, it’s a bit like hiring a master painter to doodle a flock of birds into the background. Gilmour and The Orb meld enjoyably enough in their comfort zones. If only they’d focused more on pushing beyond.

Scott Gordon - Oct 12, 2010
The A.V. Club review



The Orb have never hidden their art-rock leanings. Their debut album, released in 1991, was a double-vinyl epic entitled, with a knowing nod to the bongs-and-blacklights crowd, Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld. Despite being marketed as house music, Ultraworld was really designed to flow like those spacey prog-song suites that so captivated stoned 70s kids who gorged on sci-fi novels. (The Orb just ditched the "songs" part of the suite equation.) And though the rhythms on the new Metallic Spheres occasionally recall techno and hip-hop and other more recent inventions, this albums sounds a hell of a lot like it could have been playing in a planetarium circa 1974.

Again, as much of that is due to the Orb as to special guest legend David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. The Orb's music got chillier, tighter, and altogether less shaggy as we moved away from rave's sloppy love-in and toward the precision-tooled club music of the 21st century. But over the past few years, Orb co-founder Alex Paterson has been gently nudging the group's sound back toward its techno-hippie roots. Collaborating with Gilmour feels in some ways like the Orb's coming home after a good many years spent wandering the post-rave wilderness. Their last few albums have sounded as if the band were wondering where exactly they could take their music next, while not quite sure if they truly wanted to revert to their old sound, and the master's presence feels like it gave the disciples license to go all-out retro.

Mostly wordless, full of spaced-out sound effects, and making no concessions to good ol' verse-chorus-verse structures, Spheres is a trip, to use a term once unabashedly uttered by Floyd devotees and revived by Orb aficionados with more of a knowing wink. A headphones record, in other words. Light show and chemical refreshment totally optional. Over two long tracks subdivided into shorter movements, Paterson and fellow Orb-er Youth thread together a post-rave library's worth of slow-rolli ng chillout-room rhythms, referencing everything from dub to krautrock along the way, as Gilmour sweeps in and out on guitar, dropping little shiver-inducing melodic runs like it's no big deal. Though his playing here meanders by design, Gilmour sounds neither lazy nor indulgent, more like a virtuoso who doesn't want to actually seem like he's sleepwalking through his performance. The Orb, on the other hand, are showing off in the best way possible, again crafting the lush, cosmic rhythms they were once so good at, hoping to impress a long-time hero. In the process, they also manage to impress listeners who've stuck with the band through some pretty ropey recent material.

Records like Spheres usually get filed as "ambient" these days, but that's not quite right here. Sure, it's gorgeous and hypnotic and more about beats than songs and all the things you'd probably expect from this pairing. It's also immersive in an old-school way, a long-player of a very pre-digital vintage, a record for people with enough free time (or a long enough commute) to lose themselves in a 50ish-minute composition. With its dramatically orchestrated peaks and valleys, it's an album designed to be listened to, to Take You Somewhere as you lay on your bedroom floor, to conjure futuristic images in the mind's eye of folks who were once teenage fans. In that sense, it's still not quite as successful as the Orb's classic material, and a little too subdued, lacking both the goofy sampleadelic grandeur and the ear-grabbing pop pulse of the Ultraworld era. But it's still the most focused and listenable Orb album in years. And hey, if you want to treat it as background music, that'll work just fine, too.

Jess Harvell - October 4, 2010
© 2014 Pitchfork Media Inc.



The coupling of mischievous electronic outfit the Orb with the classic guitar-rock soaring of Pink Floyd's David Gilmour is not that strange a fit: the Orb's Dr. Alex Paterson previously collaborated with prog guitar hero Steve Hillage, while Floyd fully inhabited a similar stoner headspace in the early '70s. Across two epic, messy tracks, the pair go around the world: classic ambient house, dated trip-hop, thundering drum loops, weird dub, even down-home picking, yet stay nowhere long enough for anything to really take hold.

SPIN Staff - © 2014 SPIN.com



When you think about it long enough, a collaboration between the Orb and David Gilmour seems natural. If Pink Floyd was the band that found a hidden door that sucked hippies in on one side and spit astronauts out the other, then Alex Paterson has been out on regular space walks since 1991. Their objectives in music lie on a similar plane, though they approach them from different angles. Armed with a lap steel or a Fender Strat and buoyed by the keys of the late Richard Wright, Gilmour rolled his sounds around in outer space again and again until he stumbled upon a sweet spot. Paterson and a rotating cast of colleagues have made a career as dub garbage pickers, constructing and dismantling sound collages made of samples, beats, and just about any miscellaneous random noise they could grab. The best of both the Floyd and Orb worlds offers up music that doesn’t sound earthbound, and a combination of the two could be a great double wormhole just waiting to hypnotize listeners. Unfortunately, the Orb and Gilmour collaboration Metallic Spheres spends more time searching for an anchor than it does breaking through into transcendence.

The album plots its course over two tracks in 49 minutes, leaving lots of room for the slow-changing ebb and flow that the Orb like to use. The issue of time use wouldn’t be a big deal if a majority of it wasn’t spent fishing. Gilmour’s lines, especially the ones from the lap steel, just sort of sprawl all over the scale hoping to find an idea that will stick. The elements thrown down by Paterson and producer Martin “Youth” Glover, though lacking ambition and variance, are a customarily welcome presence. The shifts in movement (five to a side) are as subtle as Orb tradition dictates, completely blurring the end of track one and the start of track two. But when a world famous guest guitarist sounds like another superimposed sample that was bloodlessly grafted into the big picture, it gives you a case of the what-could-have-beens.

The ending of Metallic Spheres is far more glorious than the vamping that precedes it. Track one, “Metallic Side”, is the longer of the two, but it’s the second one, “Spheres Side”, that comes closest to discovering trance magic. The closing half of the track comes into a full bloom that can’t really be accurately described as clubby or trance or space-rock. This is a part of the album that doesn’t concern itself with dance elements, and Metallic Spheres is all the better for it. It’s simply a synthesizer as big as all outdoors, if you can believe that—as big as the English countryside, as grand as Terrence Malick cinematography. These realizations belong more to the Orb than Gilmour, reducing the mighty guitarist behind the solos of “Time” and “Money” to just being a provider of nifty little afterthoughts.

As is the case with many big league collaborations, it doesn’t feel like either party brought their best game to the project. As an Orb album, Metallic Spheres is satisfactory. For Floyd and Gilmour fans, it’s a rainy day curiosity. With age, ambition certainly has a tendency to fade. If Alex Paterson and David Gilmour have made some of the most successful celestial music around, this new collaboration is steeped more like Celestial Seasonings Herbal Tea: it’s palatable, but it won’t make you want to run into the street to stop traffic. Well, maybe the final ten minutes of it.

John Garratt - 13 October 2010
PopMatters Associate Music Editor



Eine Ode an Ambient, House und sphärischen Rock wollen The Orb im Schlepptau mit David Gilmour abliefern und entwerfen auf „Metallic Spheres“ ihren Genremix ohne Rücksicht auf Verluste. „Metallic Spheres“ ist ein Opus in zwei exorbitant langen Instrumentalsongs, die jeweils für sich betrachtet in fünf Parts zu unterteilen sind und – böse Zungen werden dies behaupten – kaum Unterschiede voneinander aufweisen. Positiv betrachtet nennt man so etwas wohl Homogenität, denn während Gilmours Gitarre wie ein Klangteppich im Hintergrund vor sich hin wabert, steuert The Orb-Soundtüftler Alex Paterson die vordergründigen Beats hinzu. Freilich meist im seichten House-Genre angesiedelt, präsentieren sich die zwei Marathontracks oftmals nur als Flächen und verlieren sich im Mittelteil in der eigenen Bedeutsamkeit. Es muss schwierig für Produzent Youth gewesen sein, die Dynamik der Sessions zu steuern, vielleicht gar zu kritisieren, denn immerhin setzt sich dieses Projekt aus einem der wichtigsten Gitarristen der Populärmusik und auf der anderen Seite aus The Orb zusammen, die Anfang der Neunziger mit radikalen Ansätzen der elektronischen Musik neue Seiten abgewinnen konnten. Leider laufen sie seit mehr als zehn Jahren den Trends hinterher. Daher ist „Metallic Spheres“ interessant zu hören, mehr als Fahrstuhlmusik, aber klangtechnisch hoffungslos veraltet. Ein Ricardo Villalobos ist mit seinem 2006 veröffentlichten Endlostrack „Fizheuer Zieheuer“ weit mehr am Puls der elektronischen Zeit, als diese Allstar-Formation es zu sein glaubt. Immerhin, die Mischung stimmt. Weder The Orb noch David Gilmour drücken „Metallic Spheres“ unnötig übertrieben ihren Stempel auf – was beide Parteien jedoch nicht so recht einsehen wollen: Manchmal ist es besser, wenn der Schuster bei seinen Leisten bleibt, als auf Teufel komm raus vorne mitspielen zu müssen. Koste es, was es wolle.

motor.de



David Gilmour, Gitarrero von Pink Floyd, und die Elektro-Veteranen The Orb machens gemeinsam. In der Rezeption der jeweiligen Szenen dürften beide Parteien auch so wahrgenommen werden: als stilprägende Epigonen mit Dino-Abzeichen am Revers. So ganz unlogisch scheint die Zusammenarbeit am Ende nicht, denn was Gilmour an Klanglandschaften im Rock-Bereich erschuf, findet seine Entsprechung bei Alex Patersons Elektro-Flaggschiff. "Metallic Spheres" nennt sich nun das Ergebnis des gemeinsamen Musizierens. Beim Hören des 45-minütigen Opus fällt die lockere, an eine Jam-Session erinnernde Atmosphäre auf. Die in zwei Tracks unterteile Scheibe erscheint nicht unbedingt durchstrukturiert. Das gereicht ihr auf der einen Seite zum Vorteil, dringt doch aus der Kollaboration eine Wärme zum Hörer hin, die so gar nicht nach einer metallenen Sphäre erinnert. Andererseits vermisst man ab und an eine konsequente Fortführung von klanglichen Ideen.

Ungeschickt ist die Unterteilung in zwei Parts, denn entgegen der Trackliste die insgesamt zehn Titel aufführt, ist die CD lediglich in zwei anspielbare Tracks unterteilt. Man weiß also nicht, welcher Song denn nun gerade läuft: Atmosphärische Zusammenhänge zwischen Titel und Musik lassen sich nicht wirklich herstellen. Das Problem von "Metallic Spheres" bleibt der Hang zum Muzak, der sich an manchen Stellen breit macht. Etwa wenn sich die flirrenden Soundscapes mit Gilmours charakteristischem Gitarrespiel vereinen. Ein bisschen zu viel Düdeldü ohne Stringenz lässt das Album zuweilen etwas abdriften. Die Scheibe läuft so ohne Probleme im Hintergrund, da Gilmour und Orb den Hörer nicht wirklich fordern. Bei aller musikalischer Qualität plätschert der Wohlklang aber ein wenig am Ohr vorbei.

Alexander Cordas - Laut.de
 

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