12”
The Fuller
Orb’s performance on stage at Top of the Pops,
Gallup shortened the official length of a single to
26 minutes. And, says Alex, The Orb were never
invited to perform on the show again.
Dance music as we know it first hit the UK
headlines in 1988, as the soundtrack to the youth
movement that the British public dubbed ‘acid
house’, after The Sun newspaper ran a headline
for a story about the rave scene in August of
that year citing ‘The Evils of Acid House Barons’.
And what helped make the acid house movement
sound so potent back then was that the music
behind the headlines was fuelled by a spirit of
rebellion that hadn’t been seen since the late1970s uprising of punk. One of the reasons acid
house flew in the face of popular chart music of
the time was that the tunes flipped a firm twofingers up at the traditional verse-chorus-verse
structure of your average three-to-four-minute
rock or pop tune.
“We started DJing in 1989, doing hour-long mixes
in ambient rooms in clubs and we were too lazy to
keep changing the record,” says Alex. “And when
we were making music, we realized that once
you took the drums away the track could go on
forever.”
Brian Eno
In a world flooded with three-minute radio edits and dance tunes that weigh
in at no more than eight or nine minutes tops, DJ Mag unearths 10-of-thebest longest ever tunes in electronic music…
03. Manuel Göttsching
‘E2-E4’
(Inteam, 1984) — 59.20 minutes
The ambient keys and noodly guitar (played by
Göttsching) set over synthesiser patterns and
percussion that make up ‘E2-E4’ were recorded in
one take, back in 1981, when the German musician
(formerly leader of krautrock band Ash Ra Tempel)
decided to distill his musical influences — inspired
by the likes of Steve Reich and Philip Glass — into a
tune that went on to become a proto-rave track and
one of Paradise Garage DJ Larry Levan’s favourite
tracks. When the hour-long continuous recording,
subdivided into nine tracks, finally came out in
1984 it filled the post-Eno ambient gap and landed
during the height of the UK’s synth-pop era — but
no-one seemed to get
it. Pop critics slammed
it as ‘elevator music’
but its pioneering
hypnotic, repetitive
groove — made using a
sequencer — wrote the
DNA for dance music as
we know it today.
Words: CLAIRE HUGHES
“W
01. Donna
Summer
‘Love To Love You Baby’
064 djmag.com.au
Dr Alex Paterson
02. Brian Eno
‘1/1’
(Virgin, 1978) — 16.30 minutes
This was the only track on Brian Eno’s ‘Ambient 1: Music For Airports’ album that other
producers had a hand in. Co-composed by Eno and former Soft Machine drummer and
vocalist Robert Wyatt and engineer Rhett Davis, the single piano melody in ‘1/1’ is set on
a loop. Eno described the then-revolutionary process of looping an electric piano piece
to make a tune to journalists, saying: “To make that piece of music, I cut that part out,
made a stereo loop on the 24-track, then I discovered I liked it best at half speed, so the
instruments sounded very soft, and the whole movement was very slow”.
Pic: NICHIKO NAKAO
(Oasis, 1975) — 16.50
minutes
When it came out on 7-inch
in 1975, it was so popular in
discos that it went on to be
one of the first disco hits to be
re-released in extended 12inch format. American singer
Donna Summer had been
living in Germany in the early
1970s, and that’s where her
fortuitous meeting with synthwhizz and co-producer of this
tune Giorgio Moroder first
happened. Inspired by Serge
Gainsbourg’s ‘Je T’Aime…
Moi Non Plus’, Moroder had
said he’d “wanted to do a
sex song” himself. Recorded
in Moroder’s Munich-based
studio, Summer’s softlysung, breathy vocal for this
swirling, winding disco opus
so convincingly simulates
an orgasm that, when it was
first released, Summer was
asked several times by music
journalists whether she’d
been masturbating when she
recorded the song. This only
served to make it work better
in the discos, and ‘Love To
Love You Baby’ went on to be
Summer’s first-ever US hit.
e wanted to
make a really
long dance
single, so we
called up the
Gallup chart and asked them what the
official longest length of a single could
be,” says The Orb’s Alex Paterson. “They
said 40 minutes, so we made a track that
was 39 minutes and 57 seconds long. That
ended up being ‘Blue Room’, we released
that in 1992.”
When that single came out (in two
parts, on Big Life Records), it quickly
reached No.8 in the UK charts. “Because
we’d made it into the Top 10, we were
invited to perform on Top of the Pops,”
remembers Alex.
“The thing is, they wanted us to mime a
performance, because none of the acts
played live on that show, even though it
was broadcast live. So we got there, set
up our equipment on stage and then,
when the camera started rolling and they
played a recording of ‘Blue Room’, we just
sat there on stage, whipped out a chess
set and started playing chess.”
The version of ‘Blue Room’, played on Top
of the Pops on BBC1 that Sunday night,
was only three-minutes (or so) long. It
was an edited version of the full-length
‘Blue Room’ that eventually appeared
on The Orb’s ‘U.F.Orb’ album. After The
Orbital
04. Klaus Schulze
06. The Orb
(Brain, 1986) — 24.40 minutes
As the standout track in German elect &