William Orbit released a new album at the tail end of last week, a fifteen track compilation of previously unreleased music called WFO (William Fucking Orbit) that seems to take the entire cosmos as its canvas, with ambient sounds, stargazing sci fi, beats, guitars, synths, space age house music, cinematic soundtrack moments and everything/ anything else that was close to hand when he recorded it (at variously Guerrilla Studios in London, Rodondo in California, a studio in Venice and another in Jamaica).
There's a lot to get to grips with but it works as a full piece, from the opener G1550 to a closing pair of tracks that come in at a combined length of eighteen minutes. The penultimate track is Adapted From Symphony, eight and a half minutes of music that lands somewhere between dub, ambient house and the soundtrack to a trip to Mars. Strings, percussion, squally bursts of guitar and a second half that brings in a string section, echoing his late 90s version of Adagio For Strings.
Adapted From Strings is followed by the ten minute trip of Gleam Of The Deep. There are echoes and pieces from his earlier works littered throughout WFO, including the ambient sheen and slightly weird edge he brought to Madonna in the 90s (both Royal Flush and A Bigger Splash are built around elements from the Ray Of Light album). On Gleam Of The Deep an FXed guitar riff from Swim, the second song on Ray Of Light, forms the starting point for a long ambient soundscape that becomes a warm bath in cosmic rays- a track with a deep blue backdrop and repetitive but ever changing guitar riff that you'll wish could go on forever. WFO is at Bandcamp.
In 1997 Madonna sought out William Orbit as the man to push her sound forward again, the man to lift her out of a slight mid- 90s slump. Orbit was an inspired choice and on Ray Of Light they made one of the best singles of the 90s. On the 12"/ CD single the Liquid Mix allowed Orbit to stretch the pop song out into a late 90s ambient house/ synth pop tour de force, the burbling synth backdrop and funked up bassline providing Madonna with a blissed out, warm and sumptuous, expansive psychedelia.
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