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 (Pieces in a Modern Style, his last solo disc, was originally released in the U.K. in 1995 but was withdrawn immediately for legal reasons; it was re-released in slightly different form in 2000.)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.

I began playing guitar in 1984, and I’ve gone through long periods where I’ve played hours and hours every week. I’ve hardly played at all in the last six months or a year; I’ve been busy with other things. But for several years beginning in mid-1998, I spent much of my free time writing and recording music in my apartment. Thanks to the inexpensive digital-recording technologies (audio sequencers, software synthesizers, drum-loop editors) that were just then becoming available, I started working with electronic textures and elaborate song structures. Most of my music from this period involves electric and acoustic guitars combined with looped beats, atmospheric synths, and historical voice samples from people like Robert Oppenheimer, Bertrand Russell, and J. Edgar Hoover. (I don’t sing, so the samples were partly a way to add human voices to my recordings.) I was listening a lot to this guy and these guys at the time, and their influence on some of those tunes is pretty evident.

I finished about an album’s worth of tracks during that phase. Here are a couple of them (they’ve now been added to the other tracks on my music page):

“Zero Sum,” from 1999, is one of the more elaborate tracks from that period. I used this and this to create the swooping octave shifts in the first solo, about halfway through the track; I used this (again) and this for the growly, synthlike solo in the progtastic final section.

“Trained Assassin,” from 2001, is sort of a futuristic spy theme. My then-girlfriend lent her voice for the whispered sample at the beginning. Once again, the solo is this combined with this.

In late 2001, I got my hands on one of these awesome gadgets and a couple of these awesome gadgets. Before long, I moved away from doing intricate, highly composed studio recordings and began doing extemporaneous live looping routed through analog filters and other effects. A few tracks from that period can be found on my music page.

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.

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