The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld

The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld is the debut studio album by English electronic music group the Orb, released as a double album on 2 April 1991 by Big Life. It is a segued, progressive and psychedelic trip which draws from various genres (including ambient, house, dub reggae, and hip hop) and incorporates a huge number of samples and sound effects. Much of the album was recorded after founding member Jimmy Cauty left the group, leaving Alex Paterson as the central member, with additional contributions by Kris Weston, Andy Falconer and several others.
The album was preceded by the charting (No. 78) 1989 single "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld," which closes the album, (No. 87) 1990 single "Little Fluffy Clouds," which opens the album, and (No. 61) 1991 single "Perpetual Dawn," which opens the second half of the album. The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld was well received in Europe and reached number 29 on the UK Albums Chart. It has since been credited with popularizing the UK's nascent ambient house movement.
Alex Paterson began his music career in the 1980s as a roadie for the post-punk band Killing Joke before eventually leaving in 1986 to pursue his own musical interests. Influenced by the growing popularity of Chicago house music in Britain during the decade, shortly thereafter he began working with another ambient house pioneer, Jimmy Cauty, who had been involved in the Killing Joke side-project Brilliant with Paterson's childhood friend Youth. Paterson, Cauty, and Youth also performed chill-out DJ sets in Paul Oakenfold's "Land of Oz" night at the club Heaven. Paterson said of these events:
Following success in the singles market with their releases as the Orb, including 1988's "Tripping on Sunshine" and the Kiss EP and "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld", both released in 1989, Paterson and Cauty started work on the first Orb album but split in April 1990 due to disagreements about releasing the Orb's work on Cauty and Bill Drummond's record label KLF Communications. While Cauty released his portions of the planned album as Space and continued with his other group The KLF, Paterson moved on to his next collaboration, "Little Fluffy Clouds", in autumn 1990 with Youth. The track was recorded by an 18-year-old studio engineer and future Orb collaborator, Kris "Thrash" Weston.
Slant Magazine critic Sal Cinquemani called The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld a blend of "loping house beats and shades of reggae-dub with atmospheric sampledelia (film dialogue, wildlife, radio broadcasts, strings and choirs)" which defined the ambient house movement of the early 1990s. Matt Anniss of International DJ noted the album's "then unique blend of head-nodding grooves (often recycled from old hip hop and dub reggae records), horizontal ambience, and all manner of tongue-in-cheek spoken word samples."
In April 1991, the Orb released The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld for an audience familiar with their groundbreaking singles and several John Peel radio sessions. The album was received in the United Kingdom and Europe with critical acclaim and reached number 29 on the UK Albums Chart.
By mid-1991, the Orb had signed a deal to release the album in the United States but were forced to edit the double-disc 109:41-minute UK release down to one 70:41-minute disc. This version replaced "Perpetual Dawn" with a remix by Youth and "Star 6 & 7 8 9" with its "Phase II" version, both available on the "Perpetual Dawn" single; and removed "Back Side of the Moon" and "Spanish Castles in Space" entirely. The full double-disc version and cassette were later released in the US by Island Records.
The cover for The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld was designed by graphic design collective The Designers Republic, who are credited for "orbsonic love deep space & sampling image" in the liner notes. The album booklet features an image of the Battersea Power Station, as photographed by Richard Cheadle and "treated by dr/chromagene", as well as an image of cumulonimbus clouds over the Congo Basin, taken from the Space Shuttle Challenger on 1 April 1983. The Battersea Power Station image was utilized as cover art for the US release of the album.
In a contemporary review, NME critic Sherman called The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld "an album sounding like Pink Floyd without all the self-indulgent solos", concluding, "Reality is inside a pair of headphones overflowing with the Orb. Life will never be the same again. The flotation tank beckons." Select's Russell Brown wrote that "long and strange as it is, Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld is without doubt a good trip." The Washington Post considered it "eight slices of meandering electro-throb, decorated with whooshes and chatter and various found noises". The Province labeled the album "a lengthy sound montage that endeavors to take ambient house music off of the dance floor and place it square into the third eye of those who like to bliss out with headphones". At the end of 1991, Melody Maker ranked it as the year's 22nd best album and commented that it "boasted some of the most unique sounds of the year."
In the years following its release, The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld has received continued critical acclaim. It was voted the 45th greatest album of all time in a 1993 poll of NME staff members. In 1999, it was included at number 82 in Spin's list of the best albums of the 1990s, with critic Richard Gehr opining that "Ultraworld is art at its most functional: It works equally well as both acid-peak booster rocket and as Prozac-ian relief from an ecstatic all-nighter." In 2002, Muzik named it the seventh best dance music album of all time, while Slant Magazine listed it as the fourth greatest electronic music album of the 20th century. The following year, Pitchfork ranked it as the 100th best album of the 1990s, with Alex Linhardt's accompanying write-up noting that it "managed to make ambient house a perpetual 'next big thing' for the rest of the decade." John Bush of AllMusic deemed The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld "the album that defined the ambient house movement."
Credits for The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld adapted from liner notes.