Last updated September 14, 1998
From Future Music Magazine, October 1994
The Slug is a room somewhere between a studio and craft shop. The exotic decor inspired Lee Harris and Paul Webb to produce the first Orang album. Dave Robinson crawls around the creative heart of the ex-Talk Talkers.
If nothing seems to be happening, just wait - everything will sort itself out in time. This simple and reassuring philosophy is implicit in Herd of Instinct, the first album by Orang. Core band members Lee Harris and Paul Webb, former drummer and bass player with Talk Talk respectively, have waited a long time to produce this collection of seven abrasive and intense songs. But we have to use 'songs' in the loosest sense, as Orang have disposed of conventional forms as far as possible. The music was created from lengthy improvisations in their studio-cum-shrine, The Slug, and pieced together in painstaking detail afterwards. Most of the instruments are acoustic; the technology assembling the jigsaw of material is practically state-of-the-art digital. The result is a free-flowing, dub-spiked, nebulous world music for the chill-out generation.
Talk Talk fans will know how the band evolved from the synth pop of The Parties Over (1982), through the superior song writing of It's My Life (1984) and The Colour of Spring (1986) to the starkness of Spirit of Eden (1989) and the stripping down of Laughing Stock (1992). Hearing Herd of Instinct for the first time, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Orang is just one more step in the Talk Talk psychosis. Lee and Paul refute this.
"We used to be in a reggae band when we were younger," says Paul. "The Talk Talk thing was always very westernised, and we were listening to other kinds of world music. We don't really compare ourselves with what we did with Talk Talk, because even though this is our first record, we've got our own history of recording and writing. With Talk Talk, the tracks were more or less conceived out of the studio, and even though it's quite a free-sounding thing, there was a start and beginning to each piece. Everything was planned in rehearsals, but we took that away with Orang - it was recorded before it was written."
"You'd go in there and just start playing and improvise," adds Lee.
Orang has no initial control, no limits, no boundaries. If nothing seems to be happening - just wait...
Numerous sparring partners appear on the album: among them, Talk Talk sessioneer Mark Feltham and his acerbic harmonica; and The The's Matt Johnson on organ and guitar. Both were chance encounters: "It all depends on who's about that day, and what track you're doing," explains Paul. "That's the beauty of it. When you've got no preconceptions of what the track is going to sound like, you can turn all the corners you like. Get in there, get the mics up and get going! You just go and jam until you end up where you feel most comfortable. The whole room is open-miked with the record button on - then you capture the performance. Instances just appear. You pick out, join together, make the form after." Everthing will sort itself out in time...
Back to Paul: "But when people come in, we definately don't tell them what key we're playing in - often we don't know the key ourselves - and sometimes we don't let them hear the rest of the track they're jamming along to."
Lee: "Experienced musicians feel under pressure to do something, but after 20 minutes, they get into the vibe and they free themselves of trying to impress." If nothing happens...
A lot of drumming was performed alone by Lee, the results of which could then be used to stimulate another instrumentalist, though the drums necessarily wouldn't get used on the same track. "Worry about it later," says Lee. Just wait...
For all this alleged lack of planning, there is evidence of structure in some places. The backing vocals in the strongest track Anaon, for instance. Paul owns up: "To be honest, when it came to some of those, they were worked out to fit afterwards, but the main vocal is improvised." Lee challenges his admission: "But at times it may have been recorded as a backing elsewhere - we thought, yeah, that can work there."
What may sound like electronic treatments on the album ain't necessarily so. "Take
the vocals at the beginning of Anaon," says Lee. "It's three people in
the control room with the mic and speakers on. I'm controlling it as it feeds back. That's
part of the performance too - there's no additional signal later. When you look at our
outboard gear, there's a couple of digital delay lines and that's about it." Orang
have a sampler, used mainly in one of two ways: for playing long, inconspicuous loops,
anything from 10 to 30 seconds; or for short sounds, like the vibe patch Paul plays on Loaded
Values.
"Even though this improvisation is failry pure," says Paul, "we're not
purists. We'll go to any lengths to get the sound right."
The guys love the Roland Jupiter 8 synthesizer - whacked through a distortion pedal, it produced the psuedo-guitar lines on much of It's My Life. "If you mike up the synth through an amp, you've got a whole different instrument," says Lee. Orang use them for single notes rather than pad sounds. "We used to play a lot of chords, but we just got sick of them. Now we play single notes and let the chords take care of themselves through what other people play. Things appear much more interesting that way."
Everything will sort itself out - even if Paul and Lee have to help it along a little. And putting the music together was the hardest part. Over many months, from endless hours of improvisation, aided by two pairs of headphones and a handful of mics (including a Tandy Stereo Mic - how budget concious is that?), Lee and Paul assembled Herd of Instinct. In the process, they ended up with half the material for the next album.
The Yamaha DMR8 tape-based eight track digital recorder/mixer was used for recording most of the material. Typically, Lee might record four tracks onto the DMR8. As other things go down, he'll mix those down onto two tracks on the DRU8 (a cut-down DMR8) slave, gradually building upand edited master. Through cutting and pasting between the two units, mixing down two tracks every so often with no loss in quality, adding the odd overdub, Herd of Intinct evolved.
"A huge job," says Lee. "You have to balance the levels in the recording when someone might be standing too close to the mic and what you actually want is a background performance. You have to match one special performance with someone else's special performance. They might not have played on that track, and if there's half a suggestion that things will work, you can start manipulating it all. In and outs were a problem with the DMR: recreating a particular amp sound for a DMR drop-in was very difficult."
Lee and Paul have known each other from an early age: they know what they are trying to achieve, so creating the album together was frictionless. Lee summarises their relationship: "If you've recorded a great bit, but it generally doesn't fit the track, you are able to leave it 'till later. The track is everything and people are nothing, the track developes a life of it's own."
Up on the Slug's control room wall, Lee has printed out the now familiar words - 'If nothing seems to be happening - everything will sort itself out in time'. Bizarrely enough, they come from the Yamaha DMR8 manual.
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Last updated September 14, 1998