In his 1995 book Ocean of Sound, David Toop talked to Dr. Alex Peterson about the music he would go onto make with the KLF’s Jimmy Cauty, the music that began chillout clubs and ambient house and eventually the Orb itself. “We’d build melodies up…we used to keep it very, very quiet,” Paterson said. “We never used to play any drums in there. It’d be just like…BBC sound effects, really.” By the next year, Bill Drummond and Cauty would release the beatless and blissed-out Chill Out while Paterson would venture off as the Orb, adding in some drums to “Little Fluffy Clouds,” the ambient house genre well afoot.
To hear Paterson spin it in advance of the Orb’s sixteenth album, “the idea was simply to make an ambient album.” But considering the KLF’s Chill Out (not to mention its iconic cover art of sheep lounging in the English countryside), there’s a telltale Orb cheekiness to naming this album Chill Out, World, or COW. Fittingly, both harken back to Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother and that cover’s cow. But twenty-five years after making the classic ambient house record with The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, why scrub off the “house” bit so as to render that kind of smooth ambient record now?
As the other half of the Orb, Thomas Fehlmann, puts it, “it seem[ed] like a good idea for people to sit back and chill the fuck out.” That said, it’s still a tad disarming to hear “The 10 Sultans Of Rudyard (Moo Moo Mix),” full of birdsong and Harold Budd-esque piano (courtesy of Roger Eno himself) with no Orb-y snickers or elbowed ribs thrown into the mix. Even more stunning are the seven minutes of “First, Consider The Lillys,” another track woven from field recording. There are crickets and water gurgles and a hazy bit of strings like sunrise breaking on the distant horizon and the duo are careful to mimic a landscape’s biorhythms, ever-so-slowly thickening the sounds into a stew of hand percussion and twinkling keys, before withdrawing back into an ambient haze of crickets and processed pedal steel guitar.
But after that early highlight, COW moves away from such overt pulses. “Siren 33 (Orphee Mirror)” nods to Jean Cocteau’s famous 1950 film and gets built from bowed cymbals, metallic drones and a looping Pop Ambient-style snatch of strings. Like that series, the track just pinwheels in space, content to not evolve. Lush pop-soul strings underpin “5th Dimensions,” but the Orb don’t do much with them aside from add and remove layers of crackle and noise. Smaller pieces like “Sex (Panoramic Sex Heal)” and “7 Oaks” are cut from similar cloth.
Trains roar in the distance, harps and bells sparkle, CB radio calls crackle and birds chirp on penultimate track “9 Elms Over River Eno (Channel 9),” in a way that feels like déjà vu. Considering the happenstance samples, the sounds of train travel, crickets and cows, the lush sounds of AM pop reconfigured and abstracted, and the travelogue order of the album (and yes, there apparently is an Eno River in North Carolina) it’s hard to not notice the parallels between this sound palette and the one that comprised Chill Out (which phased the sounds of passing trains and famously looped Elvis Presley’s “In the Ghetto” to hallucinatory effect).
Only as Reich-ian pulses and heavier drums kick in near the end of “River Eno” does one feel the tingle of fluffy clouds arising. Where once 43 minutes into an album meant at most three Orb songs, the album abruptly stops here. COW has some of the Orb’s most gentle moments to date, but in eschewing their own classic album and instead oddly reflecting on one from their peers, they fail to get beyond the Ultraworld and the world of Chill Out, at times mimicking little more than some BBC sound effects.
