Last updated March 27, 1998
From The Wire, August, 1996
Orang's rural studio is a dream-lab for conjuring primeval visions and quantum leaps in sound. Story by Matt Ffytche
Elsenham: idyllic, commuter-belt England. From the train, it's a flick- book of clean washing, St George's Cross T-shirts and tumbling roses. A postcard of waving fields.
This is Orang's new habitat. Two years ago, after a decade playing drums and bass with Talk Talk, Lee Harris and Paul Webb sealed themselves in their Tottenham studio, The Slug, and produced the exotic and vertiginous 'Herd Of Instinct' album. Now they've abandoned The Slug, following cheaper studio sites and the climactic shift up the Tottenham Hale line to the Essex-Cambridgeshire border.
It seems like a major rupture, but Orang carry their jungle with them. It's there in the name. "In Asia there's no distinction between apes and man." explains Lee. "Everything's Orang-something. Apes are Orang-Utan. It means wild men of the woods."
With 'Herd', the duo evolved a musical process somewhere between cosmic freak-out and sound sculpture. While they jammed for weeks over different rhythms, friends - Matt Johnson, Boymerang's Graham Sutton on guitar, Mark Feltham with his searing harmonica - would drop by adding their own emotional pitch. "We would reel off the sound according to the emotion we had on the day," says Lee. "The tapes ran all the time." There then followed a period of alchemical distillation : "Out of a 20 minute jam, you'll get a minute that's exciting." The raw material was digitally sifted, working through lures of esoteric beats, pipes, scraped and plucked strings, until the track emerged like some primeval totem.
'Herd' had an expansive freeform feel. The duo's new release, 'Fields And Waves' is more solid, more designed. Partly they were forced into a more considered approach by technical nightmares; "The gear, which was new for the last album, all started packing up," explains Lee. "We were stopping and starting every six months - we actually lost the album twice." But there was a decision to exercise more control : "We'd done the free-spirited Orang thing," says Paul. So this time they held on to parts longer, and worked mostly on their own.
This approach has swung them marginally away from the realms of sonic freefall ; several tracks tilt towards the kind of congested angst familiar from Matt Johnson's The The recordings. But even here the sound still swarms unexpectedly. Suddenly the music flocks, twists its composure; the riffs are dissipated into a multitude of plucked reverberations. Orang's is an intense music, a swelling, sometimes subterranean sound, but one that's strangely involuted, floating between musical categories. I quiz them on various aesthetic vectors; free jazz, Miles Davis in the 70's, Krautrock, the Ambient scene. Jaki Liebezeit is Lee's great favourite, but otherwise, I might as well have been lobbing potatoes at them. "Don't know what scenes are out there" they chime. Paul professes not to know about rock music, and I have to remind him about the ten years with Talk Talk. "Oh yeah, that was rock," he laughs.
They're keen to stave off any manifestoes of New Music philosophies. The music is a private experience, an exercise in emotional resonance. "It's not a music where you can get it in the first hit. It takes time to unveil its secrets," explains Paul. "Our records are best played on your own, late at night. That's when it hits you deepest, that's its function." Compared with the abstract digital circuits of Ambient, their tactile, acoustic approach to music, producing all their own sounds, makes it more responsive to fleeting emotional impulses. To this end, they've gathered an adventure playground of resonant materials: clapped out guitars played with beaters, a zither-like zin, sitars, Thai harps and moth flutes, a Bali-phone, an old Italian accordion. Paul's converted barn is lined with harmoniums. In a severe earthquake scenario, the house could start to resonate its own recordings, while the world of electronica would be snapped into a Zen-like silence.
The battery of ethnic instruments can suggest they've headed for the hills in tribalist survivalistic mode. The Slug was kitted out like a primitive shrine, complete with day-glo Aztec murals. However, they balk at the idea of being global headz: their anthropological trails are more likely to lead to Oxfam in Wood Green. "We buy instruments but no one ever shows us how to to play them," says Paul. "We're like kids with new toys."
'Fields And Waves' refers to quantum physics and the discovery that particles can be waves; "There's fields of these particles moving in waves through other things," says Lee excitedly. In his hand, a photo of a bulbous BT mast - steel cactus with satellite blooms. "These things are going up all over the place. You're being bombarded all the time by waves." The picture belongs to a project involving 13 points all over South East Anglia, a kind of psychogeographic clock. Each point is recorded by the global positioning system, giving co-ordinates for longitude, latitude and altitude. The artist Tom Phillips is a precursor here, taking photographs of the same location over a number of years, charting the flux. Other shots show the beach at Dunwich, an electric substation, a radio mast silhouetted like a stupa from Borabadur. In ten years time, some of them will be under the sea. "People don't realize that hills move."
Orang's strongest card is their strange dialectic of grating against themselves, keeping elements of rock's unitary energy, but also wanting its opposite - an open-ended abrasiveness, an emotional diffusion, hills that move. And at their best they achieve a scarred and textured beauty that steers clear of fixed forms.
There's a lot of material left over from the album, but the next one will be a fresh start. At some point they'd like to do EPs of dub and drum music. At the moment they are speaking to Luke Vibert about a remix of 'Fields'. "It's good to change all the time," says Paul. In his hand, a sepia photograph shows Wells Cathedral melting into a gothic web of vines and creepers. "That's got a very 'Fields And Waves' feel to it," adds Lee.