The Orb Collaborate With Living Legend Lee Scratch Perry To Release The Orbserver In The Star House

The Orb
Featuring Lee Scratch Perry, present
The Orbserver In The Star House
Out through Cooking Vinyl/Shock Records 7th September
‘The Orbserver In The Star House’ will be The Orb’s 13th studio album, with a full collaboration with Lee Scratch Perry, one of reggae’s greatest pioneers and personalities.

From the moment ‘The Orb’s’ multi-hued spacecraft careered off the launch-pad, this has been a collision begging to happen. Recorded in Berlin over the last few months, ‘The Orbserver In The Star House’ sparks with a rare magic as Dr. Alex Paterson and long-time ‘Orb’ member Thomas Fehlmann construct a panorama of perfect, stripped-down backdrops for the inimitable pronouncement, righteous declarations and sweet vocals.

‘The Orb’ have long been known for their assimilation of deepest dub into their stratospheric sonic innovations, as evidenced on U.F. ‘Orb’s Towers Of Dub’, itself something of a Lee Scratch Perry tribute with its sound effects and distinctive underlying eccentricity. Starting in the late 60s with ‘The Upsetters’, Perry wrote the book on Jamaican mixing desk trickery, then constantly ripped it up to create new aural blueprints for the music, via his Black Ark productions of the following decade. He has since then charted a waywardly idiosyncratic path, which has ensured legions of followers absorbing his every move.

As Lee Scratch Perry states on the album, he was an instigator of the punky reggae crossover, working with the likes of ‘The Clash’ and ‘The Slits’. With Alex’s punk roots, this was a union which could work just as well on the street as in the stars.

Thomas Fehlmann’s immaculate electronic knowledge and intuition now had two disparate lightning rods to bounce between; he recalls, “I met Lee for the first time during this session and it was pretty touching to see how an unexpected connection and inspirational exchange could so awaken our creative juices. Alex and I had never made so much new music on the spot before. It was soon pretty clear that we wouldn’t get far with the four backing tracks we pre-produced for the session. Lee was so overwhelmingly creative that it took an afternoon for those to be finished. From then on we were forced to come up with new beats on the spot, to keep him in the flow.”

The mouth-watering prospect of a true master working with long-time acolytes who tuned into his unique wavelength long ago, blossoms and explodes on ‘The Orbserver At The Starhouse’, which, in the best Lee scratch Perry and ‘The Orb’ tradition, often takes music to where it’s never been before.

Watch The Video For ‘Hold Me Upsetter’ here…

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