Released this past Tuesday and currently in heavy rotation here in my apartment: Hello Waveforms, a mostly instrumental solo record from the British producer and synth genius William Orbit. It’s his first disc of fresh solo material since 1995, when he put out four separate albums, two under his own name and two with collaborators. (Pieces in a Modern Style, his last solo disc, was originally released in the U.K. in 1995 but was withdrawn immediately for legal reasons; it was re-released in slightly different form in 2000.) Last year I wrote a longish post about my love for Orbit’s music. He’s most famous for his writing and production work on Madonna’s Ray of Light—a disc that’s filled with his signature sounds and production style—but from the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s he put out about a dozen discs of his own music, some under his own name and some with groups like Bassomatic and Torch Song. He’s been coasting a bit in the years since Ray of Light, occasionally doing production work for groups like U2 and Blur.

Hello Waveforms is a minor entry in the Orbit catalog. It doesn’t break any new musical ground, and in fact most of the tracks wouldn’t have sounded out of place on one of his 1995 discs. But it contains lots of tasty analog-synth goodness. It’s a laid-back, atmospheric record; apparently Orbit’s going to release another disc in the spring or summer of this year, and that one will be much more upbeat.

On this page, you can listen to some tracks from Hello Waveforms and watch a recent interview with Orbit. And Orbit’s official website has tons of cool stuff.

The great Los Angeles-based radio artist Joe Frank has been struggling with health problems over the last few months.

If you’ve never heard of him, Joe is a completely original American storyteller whose shows have pioneered new forms of radio narrative over the last two decades. I’m most obsessed with his monologues, which are usually accompanied by eerie looped music, but his shows often incorporate other formats, including taped phone conversations, found sound, and improvised radio plays that Joe records with actors and then imposes a structure on in the editing room.

Joe’s work might best be described as a cross between Kafka, Nietzsche, Raymond Chandler, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, and David Sedaris. He’s a short-story writer, a philosopher, a comedian, a raconteur, and one of the greatest-ever purveyors of the postmodern-noir sensibility. He’s spent his career grappling with all the grand topics: sex, love, morality, lust, greed, sin, fear, hatred, the search for meaning. Much of his best work is both utterly profound and completely hilarious. He often blurs the lines between real life and fiction, and his shows are sometimes explicitly about the creative process. At his core, he’s a tortured man who attempts to make sense of the world by telling stories about it. There is simply no one else like him. Can you tell that I’m completely obsessed?

And I have yet to even mention his voice, which is incredibly rich and expressive and spellbinding.

Much more about Joe after the jump, including details about his health, links to some of his work, and other info.

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One evening in 1994, my friend Nina sat me down and played me “Water From a Vine Leaf,” an ecstatic seven-minute epic by the British producer and synth wizard William Orbit, whose redesigned website went online yesterday. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that hearing “Water From a Vine Leaf” changed my life. I had been playing guitar for ten years at that point, and under Orbit’s spell I slowly moved away from rock guitar riffing and became an electronics-obsessed knob twirler (though I never stopped playing guitar). By the late ’90s, when it had become possible to cram an entire recording studio inside an off-the-shelf computer, I was spending endless hours at my Mac creating Orbit-influenced electronic tracks and then layering guitars over the top of them. Orbit is also responsible for my discovery of the glories of the resonant analog filter, for which I will be eternally grateful to him.

A couple of years after I discovered Orbit, Madonna enlisted him to be her main collaborator for the album that would become Ray of Light. He is now a very rich man. These days he has a very comfortable and lucrative career producing tracks for artists ranging from U2 and Blur to Pink and All Saints. He’s also known for having more or less discovered Beth Orton, who does a spoken-word thing toward the end of “Water From a Vine Leaf.” In 1993, the same year “Water From a Vine Leaf” was released, Orbit and Orton recorded an album together called SuperPinkyMandy. It was only released in Japan, and it’s now a collector’s item. I have a bootleg of it; it’s very hit or miss.

Orbit’s redesigned site has a lot of rare stuff on it, including dozens of snippets of the music he’s been working on for his next solo record. He hasn’t recorded an album of his own material since the mid-’90s, so the sound samples are especially cool to hear. (Pieces in a Modern Style, his collection of electronic versions of classic works by Bach, Satie, and other composers, was recorded in the mid-’90s but wasn’t given wide release until 2000.) The site’s video section includes the original “Water From a Vine Leaf” video, which I had never seen before. It’s a misguided New Age mess. Beth Orton appears in it, whirling like a dervish.

[Continue reading "William Orbit, King of the Knob Twirlers"...]