Orbital in Melbourne

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  • Orbital may have a lengthy and impeccable recording history, but the albums and singles hardly compare to seeing them in the flesh. The duo's 1994 performance at Glastonbury was named one of the Top 50 Live Performances of All Time by Q Magazine. And, after a return to touring in 2009 and the release of Orbital 20, they seem as dynamic as ever. Neither age nor an enormous world tour have wearied their energy. That seemed to be the case, at least, at their recent stop at Billboard's in Melbourne. The venue played a magnificent host, its gentle pavilion made the stage prominent from any vantage point. And the sound system? Well, there was nothing gentle about that. The bass made as vicious an assault on the body as the flashing strobes streaming in your face. Photo credit: Scott Sanders Phil Hartnoll graced the stage without shoes but he looked most like a mad scientist behind his beaming eyes of light—eccentric dancing notwithstanding. A more reserved Paul Hartnoll cued synthesizers and sequencers from a sound desk that had been propped up vertically in the audience's plain view. They were technicians at the helm of a power plant and watching Orbital's live performance was more like overseeing the measured production of sounds, sequences and songs, only for them to be rewired in the paths of new ones. It was a show of old hits, but new to Australian audiences nonetheless. (This was the group's first Oz appearance since 1992.) The cheeky spoken sample that begins "Satan" and the sounds that followed were nostalgic enough to take you back to a bygone era of electronic music and full of a hard and upward energy that didn't stop, except to let you float back down under the soothing vocals samples of "Halcyon." Orbital bid farewell to the crowd amidst Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven is a Place on Earth," but after witnessing something so sensual, it didn't seem at all presumptuous or arrogant. We'd all just seen (and felt) the light.
RA