Orbital - Middle of Nowhere

Having outgrown the happy house of the green and brown albums and exploited narrative too complex for merely ambient techno, the Hartnoll brothers--Phil the elder and Paul the younger--really do find themselves in some vaguely Far Eastern adventure in The Middle of Nowhere. Thus they prove again that they are the most reliable innovators in danceable electronic composition. The inchoate political rage of 1994's Snivilisation is here, but it has found purely instrumental claws that are unafraid to dig for new melodies. "Know Where to Run" gathers itself from some beastly buzzing weather to become a dance-floor creature lurching through the village at night like some urban nightmare and "I Don't Know You People" turns the dance floor into an escapist fantasyland once more with its grousing refrain, "nothing changes--goddamn you!" The highly evolved vocal softness of "Autumn" and the weirdly Tangerine Dream-gone-hip-hop "Style" keep a trip-hop story line seamlessly borne out on jungle and electro beats. Nowhere comprises a portrait of boom-boom techno that carjacks beats once lost in space to whole new worlds where breakthrough songwriting is an aesthetic ideal. The U.K. act who forced the sales charts fully into the postrock '90s is now realizing the participatory promise of rock & roll liberation in the dance clubs, where music lives now. --Dean Kuipers Amazon.com

Intelligent Dance Music

3 1/2


Electronic house pioneers Orbital successfully meshed their dance-influenced, raver-roots with more experimental, melodically intricate fare to cultivate their most accessible but still interesting work to date. Though lacking the focus of previous masterwork In Sides, Middle of Nowhere balances out Orbital's signature keyboard driven sound with a club-friendly playfulness that takes some of their past hypno-fests and elaborates- subtly with the many more blips and bleeps that accompany these bouncy numbers or loudly with brief but passionate exemplary keyboard work. October 3, 2007

Classical Music for the New Mellinium

If Beethoven or Mozart were alive today, their music might sound something like this.... Excellent CD! May 25, 2007

The album that let me "get it"

I had the Diversions EP for a long time, as well as having the debut album from Orbital (far from their best works), seeing some glimmers of what made Orbital worthwhile but never really figuring out what was so great about them that everybody raved about them. Their productions seemed really thin and trebly to the point of being annoying; they didn't even sound like they were moving out of the early '90s Roland-909 kind of drum set; etc. ... I picked up this album for $5 and dutifully listened through it, noting that "Way Out" was vaguely interesting and that "Spare Parts Express" was chock-full of weirdness but nothing too coherent.

And then I hit the middle of "Know Where to Run". All of a sudden, everything that made Orbital great clicked, and that pretty much led me to get all the rest of the pre-Middle of Nowhere catalog and enjoy it too.

The trick with Orbital is essentially that they created their own song structure and form and let the rest of the world catch up to it. Some (even most) of it is so inaccessible at first that a new listener can't figure it out. But get "Know Where to Run" and you'll understand. Two rhythms, one fairly skittering, the other straight electro-funk, merging together before one of them drops out and propels almost an entirely different song. You've spent 4:30 wondering where this is going and then the MASSIVE distorted crosspanned synth drops, followed by the reintroduction of rhythm 1 and some other odd bits from the first half. Then the rhythm and the synth combine to go on their own trip out into who knows where for awhile (the synth on this is one of my favorite bits to play loud of ANY song). Eventually, some squelchy bass underlies the whole thing and provides some even stranger chordal interplay with the synth that's already been awesome for awhile. In essence, you've gotten about two whole songs that have all its decisions about where things go in and out seemingly arbitrary to the non-Orbital mind, but perfectly in place once it's done.

That may seem long and winding, but the point is this: Orbital writes its own rules like NOBODY in the electronica world does. (Aphex Twin rivals them in this, but it's hard to tell if those are actually rules ol' Richard is using.) I dare say that Orbital's core is impossible to understand until you listen to the full "Know Where to Run." This album, as a whole, is at the peak of their being them and being accessible while going about it. It's not the quintessential Orbital album, but it best summarizes what they do on the other albums for the unintroduced listener. November 9, 2006

Fantastic CD

Orbital has created a musical journey that you will listen to time and again. Other reviews on here for this CD are quite detailed, so I'll get to the point. If you are a fan of Orbital, you probably already own this CD (buy it if you don't). If you've never heard of Orbital, but enjoy rich electronic music, I would suggest you try to hear at least this CD and "The Box" (also by Orbital). September 4, 2005

I Must Be Missing Something

I must be missing something because I don't like the two Orbital albums that I own. I was snaked into buying Orbital because I have some compilation albums each with a good track of Orbital thrown in. I thought I was going to get more of that kind of sound, like Halcyon. But I was denied. Nothing on this or Snivilisation stands out to me as being good. August 6, 2005

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