Asha Bhosle

Legendary Indian singer Asha Bhosle died a few days ago aged 92. Her singing career,alongside acting and television presenting work, spanned eight decades and apparently she is the most recorded artist in history. She may be best known to British indie audiences from the title and lyrics of their 1997 single Brimful Of Asha.

Brimful Of Asha

What a great song- The Velvet Underground via Indian TV and film, the beauty of the 7" single as an art form, Asha's sister Lata Mangeshkar (also a singer of renown), Ferguson Mono, Jacques Dutronc, the Bolan boogie, Trojan Records... a lyrical stream of consciousness that makes perfect sense even if you don't get all the references. The single stalled on release but a Norman Cook remix smashed its way to the top of the charts and it sold millions. Asha herself said that the song was significant, the moment that two worlds, British indie rock and Bollywood, collided.

Asha Bhosle sang on this song, O Je Suis Seul,too by West India Company. West India Company were Neil Arthur and Stephen Luscombe (from Blancmange), Asha and tabla player Pandit Dinesh (when West India Company started in 1984 Vince Clarke was involved too but Erasure became a much bigger day job). 

In 1989 West India Company rubbed shoulders with Dr Alex Paterson of The Orb and his Battersea neighbour Andrew Weatherall (then at the start of his remix career) and the pair did two remixes of O Je Suis Seul, another Asha Bhosle cultural collision, this time, acid house/ ambient house and Bollywood spliced. Weatherall drops in the 'Yep, I know that feeling' sample, Nastassja Kinski in Paris, Texas, one he'd use again on Screamadelica a year later. Thrash, then of The Orb, engineered both remixes, the Bhagwan Boogie is Andrew and the Orient Express Mix is Andrew and Alex. 

O Je Suis Seul (Bhagwan Boogie)

O Je Suis Seul (Orient Express Mix)

Both are totally of their time, have a wonderful 1989 innocence about them and are completely fantastic, the Bhagwan Boogie especially. 

Asha also sang on Bow Down Mister, Boy George's late 80s/ early 90s acid house/ Hare Krishna outfit Jesus Loves You. George wrote the song on a trip to India- Asha said several times it was the song she was most pleased to have contributed to. Her vocal in the second half elevates the song. 

Bow Down Mister (A Small Portion 2 B Polite Mix)

Asha Bhosle also appears on this 2021 track by Bicep, a duo from Belfast. Asha's vocal is a strong presence in the track, set back from the tumbling and thumping drums and the skipping synths, the track on the verge of falling apart. The album Isles was released in early 2021, a point where any communal activities- dancing, clubbing, going to gigs, even meeting indoors- were out of the question. Asha's vocal seems to fully capture that in a way, partway between euphoria and melancholia. 

Sundial

Lastly, and I was completely unaware of this song until this week, is this- in 2002 Asha sang a duet with Michael Stipe, a song that appeared on an album by 1 Giant Leap (Faithless' Jamie Cato). The Way You Dream is pretty stunning- eight minutes long, building gradually with tabla and samples, Asha's divine voice, strings, Michael joining in just after two minutes, singing along with and around the vocal the 1 Giaat Leap pair had already recorded with Asha. 

Asha's funeral took place two days ago, huge crowds coming out to pay tribute to her as she made her way to be cremated where she was sent off with a gun salute. 

RIP Asha Bhosle. 

Fifty Minutes Of Music Inspired By Apollo 11

A couple of nights ago I watched Apollo 11, a 2019 film about the events of July 1969, fifty five years ago this summer, when astronauts Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were fired into space on a Saturn V rocket and Armstrong and Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon. The film is a documentary using only archive footage from NASA (including previously unseen 70 mm film) without narration- the only audio comes from the films themselves, voices from ground control and the three men, sound from the mission and ending with a speech by Kennedy at the start of the 1960s. This is a ten minute preview. 

There were several pieces of dialogue between the people in ground control and the three men in a tin can hundreds of thousands of miles away in space that are instantly recognisable, partly because they've been sampled on records. I thought it might be a good theme for a Sunday mix, a collection of tracks inspired by the Apollo missions, some with samples from ground control and the three astronauts, some from other film versions and some just from the wider topic of lunar exploration. It came together quite quickly. It's no surprise probably that The Orb feature.  

Fifty Minutes Of Music Inspired By Apollo 11

• Brian Eno: Always Returning
• Brian Eno: An Ending (Ascent)
• Tranquility Bass: They Came In Peace
• Sedibus: Toi 1338b
• Ian Brown: My Star
• Meatraffle: Meatraffle On The Moon
• Meatraffle: Meatraffle On The Moon (Andrew Weatherall remix)
• The Orb: Supernova At The End Of The Universe (Earth Orbit Three)

Brian Eno's music for the 1983 album Apollo: Atmospheres And Soundtracks is rightly a legendary piece of ambient music, the soundtrack to a film called For All Mankind, an Al Reinhart documentary about the Apollo missions which didn't see the light of day until 1989. Eno, his brother Roger and Daniel Lanois created an album of heavenly, stargazing sounds, synths, piano and pedal steel. Always returning and An Ending (Ascent) bookend the film's soundtrack- both a gorgeous.  

They Came In Peace is a 1991 single by Tranquility Bass, an American duo of Michael Kandel (who I've just noticed I share a birthday with, and who sadly died in 2015) and Tom Chasteen. It's one of 1991's best 12" singles, opening with crickets and the gentle hiss of percussion. The vocal sample, 'they came in peace, for all mankind', is Neil Armstrong on the moon, reading from the plaque left on the moon that reads in full, 'Here men from the planet earth first set foot upon the moon July 1969, AD. We came in peace for all mankind'. The bass loop is one that I could happily listen to for hours, crickets chirruping away around it. Andrew Weatherall later sampled the bass loop for his Squire Black Dove remix of One Dove's Breakdown. Fun fact; I was given Andrew's copy of this 12" last year by Sherman at AW60, blue vinyl with a sticker on the plain black sleeve noting the BPMs of the four tracks in Andrew's handwriting. 

Sedibus is the recent project of Alex Paterson and Andy Falconer, an Orb offshoot (Andy was a collaborator back on the early Orb albums). Space exploration, the cosmos and the moon programmes are all over The Orb and Sedibus. This year's second Sedibus album is about the search for extra- terrestrial life, SETI. The first album, The Heavens, came out in 2021 and this track has a vocal sample intoning the word Sputnik, the USSR's satellite that preceded the US moon programme. Toi 1338b is a planet int eh Pictor constellation, discovered in 2019 by a seventeen year old student on an internship at Goddard Space Flight Centre. Toi 1338b is eleven times the size of earth 1301 light years away from us.

My Star was Ian Brown's return to music after the breakup of The Stone Roses and for me remains his best solo single. NASA samples are an integral part of the song, along with a throbbing bassline and twinkling guitar line and Ian's lyrics about space exploration, nuclear stations, military missions and astronauts being the new conquistadors. The vocal sample 'You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue, we're breathing again, thank the lord', is in Apollo 11, ground control shitting bricks as the command module re- enters earth's atmosphere and drops into the ocean. My Star came out in January 1998 ahead of the album Unfinished Monkey Business.

Meatraffle's Meatraffle On The Moon came out in 2019, a fantastic dub- inflected song imagining un- unionised workers stuck in dead end jobs on the moon, with the weekly meatraffle and karaoke sessions in the lunar base social area their only joy. 'They are so sick of this they just wanna be by the sea', they sing and sound utterly defeated by it. The song is on Meatraffle's second album, the highly recommended Bastard Music. Andrew Weatherall's remix is a nine minute bass- led dub monster that spins the poor moon workers woes out into the cosmos. 

The Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld is an ambient house touchstone, their 1991 debut album and tour de force. NASA samples appear all over it, not least in the back to back twenty five minutes of tracks Supernova At The End Of The Universe (Earth Orbit Three) and Back Side Of The Moon (Lunar Orbit Four). I picked the former, which has samples of Saturn V blasting off, various flight control to lunar module communications, and one from Dr Strangelove Or How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love The Bomb. 

Monday's Long Song

Back to work today after a week off. Last week turned out to be a big week. The Sounds From The Flightpath Estate album which me, Baz, Dan, Martin and Mark have been pulling together since the germ of an idea occurred to us last summer, went live on Wednesday and on sale for pre- orders on Thursday. The album is a ten track compilation featuring a previously largely unreleased Two Lone Swordsmen track and nine of brand new recordings from Justin Robertson, Tim Fairplay, Hardway Bros, Sons Of Slough, 10:40, Rude Audio, Richard Sen, a well known and highly regarded producer/ DJ from Belfast under the name The Light Brigade plus Andy Bell's cover of Smokebelch. Every track is gold. 

The link to buy  the album, double vinyl, 500 copies, went live at 10am on Thursday morning. By the end of the day it had sold out, 420 copies gone. Watching this happen during the day via our screens was incredibly exciting and there was a genuine buzz about the record. The remaining 80s copies have been kept for some physical, face to face sales over the weeks following release. 

Matt Hum's twenty two minute mix of the ten tracks at Mixcloud is there to whet the appetite and has been streamed more than 800 times to date. On Friday night Mark Cooper, a friend of the group, the man behind Bedford Falls Players and a superb DJ played tracks from the album at his The 365 Social with our very own Baz providing some interview segments scattered throughout the show. You can hear it here. Word has it BBC Radio 6 might be onto it and some of the tracks might get played there next week. It's all very exciting. Dr Rob, the man behind the Ban Ban Ton Ton blog reviewed Sounds From The Flightpath Estate at Ban Ban Ton Ton on Friday, a review that perfectly captures the album and the spirit of it. You can read that here. 

I've been writing guest reviews for Ban Ban Ton Ton intermittently for the last couple of years. Last week I wrote a review of the forthcoming Sedibus album SETI. I posted an advance track last November, SETI Part 3 (the third part of a three piece suite which makes up the second side of the album on vinyl). SETI is a wonderful album made by The Orb's Alex Paterson and ex- Orber Andy Falconer, a record that takes the ambient house sound of those early Orb records, adds some acoustic instrumentation (piano, xylophone, horns) and a lot of space samples about the search for extra- terrestrial intelligence and creates something warm, organic and genuinely awe inspiring. My full review for Ban Ban Ton Ton and Rob's companion piece are here. SETI comes out on Friday. 

Sedibus' first album came out in 2021, a four track source of electronic fun and wonder. This track is Toi 1338b, twelve minutes of space age, spaced out Sedibus ambient house. 

Toi 1338b 

Toi 1338b is a planet roughly between Neptune and Saturn in size. Toi 1338b is in the Pictor constellation, 1320 light years away from us. It was discovered in the summer of 2019  by a 17 year old New York student named Wolf Cukier, while on an internship at the Goddard Space Centre, and announced in January 2020. I don't know what you did in the your 17th summer- I spent the summer of  1987 working in the record and tape department of WHSmiths and indulging in underage drinking in pubs. Wolf discovered a new planet. 

Monday's Long Song

Back in May 2021 The Orb's Alex Paterson and old friend and colleague Andy Falconer released an album as Sedibus called The Heavens. It was a single disc, eight track album that arrived in amongst a slew of Orb related albums, Orb albums, Or remix albums, OSS albums and more besides but one that really struck a chord with me, there was something about the samples, the ambient dub house and lightness of touch that really worked. Alex and Andy have got a second Sedibus album ready to go, this one titled SETI (Search For Extra- Terrestrial Intelligence), out next February, just five tracks and three of them part of a three piece suite. This track, Purgatory, came out last Thursday, a nine minute space flight with BBC announcers and mission control samples, piano, a gentle chug and that widescreen cosmic ambience that Alex does so well. And has done for over three decades. 

This is Papillons from The Heavens, a track that starts with a voice asking big questions about space exploration, neolithic people, the stars and what people saw and wondered when they looked up, and follows it with ten minutes of ambient music. 

Papillons

Chocolate Hills

Alex Paterson's Orb side project Chocolate Hills announced a new song and album recently, the song called Cracking Kraken and the album Yarns From The Chocolate Triangle (out in June). Sometimes I think Orb world is being spread a bit a thin, release after release by multiple incarnations and offshoots but the quality remains high and Cracking Kraken seems to promise a lot- piano, deep sea submersion, ambient sound, distant drums, synths with a rupture towards the end and sampled voices and noises. No doubt it will all make more complete sense in the context of the full album. 

Chocolate Hills is Paul Conboy with Alex. Paul swears off computers using only analogue kit and pre- digital age gear. The ten track album is a musical expedition, an imaginary voyage by sea to the Bermuda Triangle and back. Back in 2019 Chocolate Hills released an album called A Pail Of Air, a deeply ambient and atmospheric seven track exploration of synths, sounds and samples which is one of the highlights of the recent Orb related releases. 

Reclaim

Monday's Long Song

Dr Alex Paterson has been making music at a rate of knots in recent years and has more to come (an album as OSS is due in November). They all- The Orb, OSS, Sedibus OSS- have plenty in common sonically and quite a bit of overlap in terms of sounds and samples but each has its own identity too, a sense of distinctness. His album with Paul Conboy as Chocolate Hills (A Pail Of Air from 2019) resurfaced recently and soundtracked a commute or two last week. Opening track Rehip is nine minutes of ambient sounds, slide guitar, bubbling noises and some very English voices. It becomes less gentle and more unsettling in the second half, noise and vague menace taking over for a while before the warmer synths recur for the last two minutes. 

Rehip

Monday Mix

This is an hour's worth of songs and sounds I put together a week ago, got distracted from and went back to yesterday. I'm not sure it's quite right but I'm not unpicking the whole thing now so it's here for what looks like a wet and rainy Monday in August. Find it at Mixcloud. 

I did think about dropping found sounds from the BBC sound archive all the way though it- a future project perhaps. I'm not sure the Scritti Politti song works where it is either but there's some nice ambient sounds from Sebidus (The Orb's Alex Paterson and Andy Falconer), some Balearic loveliness from Coyote, solo Strummer, Will Sergeant and Les Pattinson as Poltergeist, Dean and Britta doing Kraftwerk, Sonic Boom droning out Sinner DC, some spaced out sounds from Oregon's Lore City, William Orbit at chill level 10 and Mono Life's stunner of a remix of Pearl's Cab Ride from a few years ago. 

• BBC Sound Archive: Market Sounds
• BBC Sound Archive: Clock
• Sedibus: Afterlife Aftershave (edit)
• Coyote: Café Con Leche
• Joe Strummer: Mango Street
• Poltergeist: The Book Of Pleasures
• Dean and Britta: Neon Lights (Baxter Street Bounce Mix)
• Sinner DC: The Horizon (Sonic Boom No Drums Version)
• Lore City: And Tomorrow
• Scritti Politti: Dr Abernathy
• William Orbit: The Story Of Light
• Pearl’s Cab Ride: Sunrise (Mono Life Extended Trip)

Whippersnapper

The sheer quantity of new material coming from The Orb stable could be a bit overwhelming; alongside the Royal Familia album and the remixes version, the recent further adventures of The Orb remixes of other artists, the outstanding Sebidus album from Alex Paterson and Andy Falconer, not to mention the Chocolate Hills album from 2019, there's now another new album in the pipeline- Enter The Kettle from OSS. OSS is Orb Sound System (or On Sum Shit), a collaboration between Alex and Fil, friends from both being Killing Joke roadies way back and with Orb history dating back through various albums and gigs. The first taster for Enter The Kettle is Whippersnapper, a track that sounds like it started out in the same space as the Sebidus album, space travel and widescreen ambience, but on OSS Fil brings a tougher edge to the sound, a metallic, industrial ambient groove. 

The album isn't out until November and it seems a bit depressing to be looking and pre- ordering an album that far ahead, when summer will be long gone and winter in front of us, but I'm guessing that this is in large part due to the problems in getting vinyl pressed by the limited number of pressing plants available and the major labels block booking plants for their own releases.

The quantity of releases Alex has been putting out across the Orb board, to go back to the start of this post, would be too much of the quality wasn't high but the entire Orb operation is at the top of its game at the moment and OSS looks like being another genuine contender. 

Monday's Long Song

The new album from Orb boss Alex Paterson and old Orb partner Andy Falconer- released under the name Sedibus- is turning out to be one of early summer's real treats. Recent Orb albums have been a bit hit and miss and 2020's Abolition Of The Royal Familia had some very good, long tracks towards the end and some lovely remixes too but some misfires too. The Heavens is beautiful, immersive ambient house from start to finish, only four tracks but each one a journey- littered with samples, some familiar ones, space and NASA samples recurring, the thumping kick drum and dub bass present and the trademark Paterson sense of humour evident too. Dr Alex and Andy Falconer last worked together thirty years ago on Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld and in some ways this album seems to have picked up where that one left off. All four tracks are superb, weightless, organic and absorbing stuff. Unknowable, all eighteen minutes of it, is a trip. 

In The Locker

A postcard from 1996 today, System 7 and Alex Paterson from The Orb, and a gently pulsing, psychedelic bubblebath with a nod in its title to the seabed- aptly so- this track sounds like it has surfaced from the bottom of a deep blue sea and into the sun. A funky guitar part strumming away for eleven minutes, a dubbed out bassline, warm atmospherics and a faint male voice choir humming along. 

Davy Jones' Locker (The Orb Mix)

Desir

System 7, formed in the early 90s by Steve Hillage and his partner Miquette Giraudy, were one of the obvious links between the late 60s/ early 70s hippy movement and acid house. Hillage and Giraudy were both members of Gong, purveyors of space rock/ jazz psychedelia, and in the late 70s Hillage had more or less invented The Orb's sound with his album Rainbow Dome Musick. In fact, it was hearing that album played by Alex Paterson at Heaven with a house kick drum underpinning it that led to Hillage meeting Paterson and Hillage forming System 7. The intention was for Paterson and Hillage to record ambient house with Hillage's guitar high in the mix. Paterson and fellow Orb man Kris 'Thrash' Weston both feature on System 7's self titled debut and the follow up 777 album, as well as Tony Thorpe of the Moody Boys and KLF, Youth and Derrick May. On 777 Paterson's credit is noted as 'ambience, navigation'. 

Steve Hillage was one of the people who was derided during punk, the Year Zero approach of 1976/77 designed to slam the door shut in his face and the generation gap swallow them whole. Finding favour a decade later with two ex- punks, Youth and Paterson, very much involved must have been very satisfying.  

Desir (Butterfly Remix)

Steve Hillage was instrumental in establishing the Dance Tent at Glastonbury (another hippy- acid house link) and went on to produce The Charlatans 1994 album Up To Our Hips, a dense, swirling, post- Madchester, pre- Britpop record that is much undervalued, some of which echoes the late 60s space rock of Gong and Hawkwind. Feel Flows wouldn't be out of place in Ladbroke Grove in 1968. Jesus Hairdo is more focussed but just as much a hippy 90s as anything.

Feel Flows

Jesus Hairdo

Reboot

Following on from yesterday's ambient Steve Hillage post comes a recent track from the continuing adventures of Dr Alex Paterson, this time collaborating with Paul Conboy as Chocolate Hills. Released last year but missed by me until recently Chocolate Hills put out an album called A Pail Of Air, a gentle, dreamy, laid back and very early 90s affair. Bubbling synths, warm bass, ambient noise and found sound, and occasional voices dropped in discussing science, technology or strange happenings, often those plummy very English voices that pepper the early Orb records. As pleasant a way to spend some time as sitting on a gently sloping hillside in the sun in the summer with nothing much to do except enjoy the surroundings.

Reboot

The Visitor

Dr Alex Paterson of The Orb has been doing a short dj tour recently, playing small venues, promising a smattering of Orb tunes in his set. I went to Night And Day last Thursday night to see him. There can't have been more than 40 or 50 people there, several of them middle aged men on their own (like me). It was good fun, Alex playing Perpetual Dawn (Ultrabass II),  Little Fluffy Clouds and A Huge Evergrowing Brain...., dropping in all sorts of stuff and mixing parts of the songs in and out. Little Fluffy Clouds breaking down briefly into God Only Knows, that sort of thing. The dancefloor got busy fairly quickly and stayed that way until the end (an early curfew of 10.45). Good fun.

The Orb are blessed/cursed with an array of bootlegs, demos and alternative versions and mixes. This track, dreamy ambient dub starting out at NASA mission control, came on The Best Of Volume- Wasted and is also on a bootleg album called The Visitor.

Reefer Spin In The Galaxy

A Trip In A Flying Saucer

Just after Christmas I posted a half hour mix by Martin 'Youth' Glover, Joy Division versus Basement 5 combined in a mix for the longest night,  intense and full of dread. This one, A Trip In A Flying Saucer (Maya Jane Coles v Killing Joke In Dub) is a 30 minute mix more suited to Sunday mornings. A hypnotic, rolling groove, plenty of dub production and the vocals of Maya Jane Coles woven in and out. Given the laid back nature of this and some of the sounds within it, it is no surprise to find out that Alex Paterson was involved in the record selection in the studio.

Janis Joplin's Mum

                                            Above, left to right- Seth, Janis and Dorothy Joplin.

An obscure oddity for Wednesday from the combined talents of Alex Paterson and Nina Walsh, united as Rootmasters. It came out as part of an Orb compilation called The Orb Presents Tundra And Snowflakes (for a Russian label and bar, Ketama), a double album containing all sorts of oddities, rarities, cast offs and wastrels. The track came out originally on a Rootmasters e.p. from 2007 called Push Once.

What's it like? It's a beguiling piece of spooky, downtempo music, full of echo, crackle and hiss, built around a descending chord pattern. A sampled voice instructing us to open our eyes. Doors creak open and shut, accompanied by eastern instruments. Occasionally Nina's voice surfaces singing 'only the good die young'. Then it fades out again. More crackle.

Janis Joplin's Mum

Higher

Last weekend BBC4 showed the Screamadelica classic album programme, an hour long celebration of 1991's best album with contributions from many of those involved. One of the discussion points was whether Higher Than The Sun should be on the album in its edited or 12" form, shorter or longer. Andrew Innes went for the shorter one for the sake of the flow of the record and everyone agreed this was right, with the proviso that the 12" was the one for full tripped out enjoyment. Alex Paterson, who produced it as The Orb, reckons along with Little Fluffy Clouds it is the best thing he's done. But there's also another version of Higher Than The Sun, which goes further, a little bit longer, a little but higher, a little bit further out...

Higher Than The Sun (Higher Than The Kite)

O Je Suis Seul

Here's another 'I was looking for that but then I found this' post. I was looking for an mp3 of West Bam's Alarm Clock and couldn't find it so did a search for 'West' and this came up- West India Company's O Je Suis Seul (remixed in 1989 by Andrew Weatherall and on the flipside by Weatherall with Alex Paterson). I wasn't intending to do another Weatherall related post so soon after the previous one but it's a go-with-the-flow time of year right now.

West India Company were an interesting mix of people, including Vince Clarke (from Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure, above left), Neil Arthur and Stephen Luscombe (from Blancmange, above centre and right respectively) and the legendary Indian singer Asha Bhosle, and they set about making synth pop with Indian rhythms and instruments in the mid 80s. By '89 they were heading housewards. Weatherall and Paterson lived in neighbouring flats in Battersea and presumably they crossed paths somewhere. The Bhagwan Boogie Mix is a chuggy ambient house tune, peppered with Indian percussion and has an appearance of that 'Yep, I know that feeling' sample which Weatherall would re-use on Screamadelica. The Orient Express Mix is a bit more abstract and disembodied, more Orb-like in fact.

O Je Suis Seul (Baghwan Boogie Mix)

O Je Suis Seul (Orient Express Mix)

Blue Danube

The KLF were self evidently one of the best things about the late 80s/early 90s. The fact that their stadium house was as brilliant as their philosophy, pranks, activities and statements is a massive bonus. On this mix of 3 a.m. Eternal The Orb, old muckers of Jimmy Cauty- in fact Cauty had started The Orb with Alex Paterson- turn stadium house back into ambient house.

3 a.m. Eternal (Blue Danube Orb Mix)