News like this will often derail my plans. I postponed a new mix to share this very sad news that popped up in my feeds last Friday the 7th.
https://postpunkmonk.com/2026/08/12/william-orbit-1956-2026/
William Orbit: 1956-2026
I saw the news last Friday when it was announced, but seeing as he was deceased for a fortnight prior to that day, I went with the planned reviews of the last few days. But I couldn’t keep from giving tribute to the inventive musical mind of William Orbit [Née Wainwright] indefinitely! But for me the beginning of his story was the high point, even as he mined gold with Madonna on her “Ray Of Light” album that probably kept him in a degree of comfort for the rest of his life. At least I hope it did!
But “the best Madonna album” meant nothing to me. The records I treasured by William Orbit were first encountered in 1984. I was watching the monthly I.R.S. The Cutting Edge on MTV; one of their finer moments, even if it was a shill for the plucky l’il US New Wave label. They slotted in a Techno-Psychedelic video for a long dance track by a band called Torch Song that was fantastico! “Don’t Look Now” was actually electrifying and I began a year-long search for the album by this band. It was a tough one to find in a store. But when I got the promo LP a year later, it was amazing.
As stimulating as the single had been, the tracks on the album were that much more amazing. Never more so than on “Telepathy,” which on good headphones actually sounded like it was being beamed directly into your skull from afar! The band at that point were Orbit, vocalist Laurie Mayer, and sax player Grant Gilbert. The combination of psychedelic electronics plus touches of a guitar gone berserk coupled with the femininity of singer Mayer gave Torch Song a unique sonic footprint in the generally dismal mid-80s! This band quickly assumed “new toy” status with my ears. The single “Prepare To Energize” was some serious Proto-Techno that turned a lot of heads thought it was more of a dance track then a song, per se, with minimal vocals. As of 2026, it is one of exactly two Torch Song tracks one can actually buy [easily] on CD.
I didn’t see much more than a few US promo 12″ singles that I assumed were the same mixes as on the LP I had of the first album. So I didn’t buy them… then! At the time I was reading my friend’s copies of Smash Hits, the UK Pop magazine, and in it I saw press ads for a UK single release of Torch Song’s amazing cover of “Ode To Billy Joe” so I knew that it was a single, but the actual records on import never came down to the sleepy hamlet of Orlando back in 1984-1985! I could see that the B-side on the twelve inch version was something called “Mothdoom Ecstasy!” I had to know what that track sounded like. As for the A-side it was a rare example of a weird fusion of Country-Folk with electronics. Something that Orbit would return to in a few years.
Torch Song seemed to come and go in a flash, leaving few traces on the earth. In 1986 I was watching to see on MTV’s “International Hour” where they played music from other countries to expand my horizons. One of the best artists I’d discover there was Etienne Daho; a French Technopop guy making fantastic songs in the mid-80s. His track “Tombé Pour La France” had me going to my friend Ron Kane who was able to import French goods on CD and when I got the exceptional “Pop Satori” disc, I was thrilled to see that Laurie Mayer and William Orbit played on several of the songs for a near-Torch Song [albeit poppier] quality of experience. This was the first I’d heard of them doing anything since the first Torch Song album, though Orbit was getting his hands wet by remixing various singles and tracks for I.R.S. artists. As for Monsieur Daho himself, I’ve got a plethora of silver discs in my Record Cell as he is my favorite French artist.
It was in 1987 when I finally saw a “new” Torch Song album and single when at Murmur Records. It was called “Exhibit A” and featured a reissued “Don’t Look Now” single adjacent to it. These were the first and only Torch Song records that I bought new on release. Starved for Torch Song, I bought the 12″ for a dance mix of “Can’t Find My Way Home,” a new-to-me Blind Faith cover, with the cut “Mothdoom Ecstasy” on the B-side. “Exhibit A” was a bizarre compilation of tracks and mixes. I wondered how a band with a single album would have a compilation, but that’s as far as I knew about things! The track list was a blend of five songs from “Wish Thing” [in new mixes from the 1984 LP versions] and four newer songs I didn’t recognize.
“White Night” I did know, since I had the single by Adult Net on 12″ already. What I didn’t know at the time was that it had been an early New Wave song from the pen of Rico Conning back with his first band, The Lines, in 1978! It was just a coincidence that in 1987, both The Adult Net and Torch Song covered it. Rico seemed to have joined the band while Grant Gilbert was nowhere to be seen. The version of “Can’t Find My Way Home” was beyond stunning. It was the sound of a primitive god manifesting in your room as the primal rhythms with the sub bass swells that accompanied the song’s intro quickly rose to fill your entire space. It was a hypnotic arrangement that never fails to instill awe in the base of my primate skull. The 12″ version was a svelte 5:40. What I would not have given for a ten minute mix of that track. It had the potential to be alpha and omega to anyone listening.
There were two William Orbit events that also happened in 1987. The first was a solo album in 1987. Simply called “Orbit,” it was eleven songs with a different female vocalist this time; Peta Nikolich. Rico Conning was on board and even Laurie Mayer showed up to sing one of the songs. It was not as interesting as the Torch Song material; more mainstream and less extreme. Taken at face value it was enjoyable. Had I not known about “Wish Thing” it might have rated even higher. The one killer track was right up there with Torch Song’s acme. On “Cluny Ann” Orbit himself took the mic to sing [and play banjo!] on the spiritual sequel to “Ode To Billy Joe;” a Folk song with synthesizers about a mute country girl to melt the coldest heart.
That was the same year that Orbit also initiated his “Strange Cargo” series of instrumental “soundtrack” albums for I.R.S.’s “No Speak” instrumental Rock series. There had been brief instrumental on the “Wish Thing” album. Maybe these were as good? So I bought it and was unimpressed. The cuts just failed to connect with me. I preferred pop songs, to be honest. Though Billy Currie’s album for the series was my favorite album for 1987 so there’s also that! I kept it for a few years but when I thinned out the CDs in the mid-90s, that one went.
A real eye-opener was the “My Dying Machine” remix appended to the US version of the first CD Gary Numan recorded for I.R.S. Records in 1989. Called “New Anger” in America and “Metal Rhythm” in the UK, this amazing remix of a 1984 track from “Berserker” that had never been released in America before was phenomenal. It made me aware that Orbit was a name I needed to watch on the remix front. All of the considerable chops that he brought to the Torch Song releases, could now manifest more widely. In 1988 he released an OMD 10” remix for “Dreaming” that I’ve yet to buy for my rather large OMD collection owing to the prohibitive cost of this record.
By the late 80s I was buying many of my CDs through import catalogs that would arrive by mail every two to three months. I think the Portland company eventually became Sound City 2000. They offered UK, German, and Japanese goods that were pricey but very desirable. This was when a Japanese CD was easily a $30-40 expense. For a few years I got everything I ordered from this vendor. Rare German CDs of titles missing from the silver disc in America were especially gratifying. The first albums by Chris Isaak and Marti Jones were two that come to mind. It was maybe 1991 when I saw the “Exhibit A” Japanese CD so I ordered it. And before I received my copy, I did something stupid; I traded in my LP of that title as I usually did back then since I didn’t think I needed two copies of a title on two different formats in my pre-collector days.
Then the order was cancelled some months later and I never got that $36.00 CD. The Federal Trade Commission soon begin putting heat on Sound City 2000 and they went away. Worse, my LP of “Exhibit A” was now gone and it was hard to find another copy. So my Torch Song collection was pretty small at the dawn of the 90s. But I’d soon find out that things were even worse than I suspected. It was when I finally bought a copy of the Trouser Press Record Guide around 1993, that I could see that there had been a second Torch Song album in 1986 completely off of my radar called “Ecstasy” but it was not on I.R.S. Records. Instead it had been released on the UK indie YII label and it was impossibly scarce.
I would spend the next 15 years trying to buy a copy of this.
When I saw one it was not inexpensive. After many tries, I managed to have a winning bid at less than $50 on eBay for a copy. This was in the dawn of the 21st century. By that time I began to buy any and every Torch Song single I either saw or could mail order.
What I’d picked up on the internet, particularly on Discogs, was that there was no shortage of unique mixes of any and every single out there in both the US and the UK. My go-to stance was to simply buy everything that I could with the intent to make fully loaded CD-Rs of the three albums as personal REVO discs. Eventually, I realized that I may be on my deathbed before getting everything, so I made “straight” CDs of the “Wish Thing” and “Ecstasy” albums since it seemed like hell would freeze over before any Torch Song would hit CD format. But there were cracks in the firewall. A compilation called “I.R.S. Greatest Hips Vol 4 – The Remixes” gave us “Prepare To Energize.” And ironically, I had seen that there was a 1984 Torch Song flexi-disc for a song called “Hark” [as in the herald angels sing and all that] that the band issued for xmas of 1984. This was the second track to hit CD, with no doubt 20 times the fidelity of the flexidisc version, on a CD called “Just In Time For Christmas.”
In 1992 I went to Canada and bought a LOT of CDs. One of these was “Strange Cargo II” since Laurie Mayer was involved but it was more of the subdued library music that Orbit had more interest in that I did! Far better were the mixes he was making for bands like Erasure and… Kraftwerk. In 1991 Kraftwerk resurfaced with “The Mix” an album of re-recorded tacks from their “imperial period” that was seen as a stopgap measure but at the time we were so starved for Kraftwerk, that we took the bait. Two cuts managed to best the originals! One was the impressive re-work of “Radioactivity.” I initially bought the German CD-5 and it had a William Orbit remix that accentuated the pneumatic allure of the re-recording. Many hands would attempt to remix Kraftwerk but the path was strewn with peril. Not so for Orbit. It was so good that a year later I bought the US 12″ for the second Orbit “Hardcode Mix” of the track. He managed to inject even more Torch Song techno DNA into the already superb track to really take it places.
In 1995 a new Torch Song album, “Towards The Unknown Region” appeared. The credits showed Mayer and Conning on board, but I was not convinced. I had been burned by two Strange Cargo albums, and this reeked of the same to me. I waiting until I could get the CD in trade from the great LaLa.com nine years later and my suspicions were confirmed. More library music from Orbit and company. And if she’s not singing, why is Laurie Mayer on the credits for these albums?
As the late 90s closed out Madonna made the phone call and William Orbit would go from a small cult concern of record geeks like myself to a bankable name. I naively thought that with Orbit being so well-known that maybe Torch Song would finally get some CD reissues? I could only surmise that Orbit himself didn’t want it to happen. I was agog after the internet happened and found that an “Exhibit A” Japanese CD was a reliable $300-500 if you wanted it bad enough. I’ve heard that the fact that the music had been recorded on to cassette [a Portastudio?] as being cause not to digitize for CD due to the lower sound quality. If that was so then why did I.R.S. issue the LP promos [like I own, I never saw a commercial copy] on audiophile QuiexII virgin vinyl? Rubellan Remasters had tried to reissue “Exhibit A” on CD when they were a going concern but Orbit apparently wasn’t too interested in the attempt to issue the 80s Torch Song canon. And then there was the usual label push back, so that never happened.
I did see that Mayer and Conning worked together on her solo recordings which I really need to try beyond the solo 12” I have of “Dust In The Wind.” Which I didn’t care for when Kansas were playing it, so it’s not a shock that I still didn’t care for it with her singing. Meanwhile, Orbit did a lot of work with singer Beth Orton which I’ve yet to sample. I suspect that my yen for the earliest Torch Song is where the story started and finished for me. And there’s nothing wrong when that when the results were so accomplished and hyperstimulating. It wa sobvious to me at the time that Orbit was like a Phil Spector of the Post-Punk era. Perhaps even more than Trevor Horn, who always had both feet planted in Pop. Miles Copeland considered him I.R.S. Records “secret weapon” for a few years with that abandoned, first Sting solo album made with Orbit before Mr. Sumner clamped a lid on the results and binned them before heading to Jazzland instead for his nascent solo career. Maybe it’s for the best that this didn’t reach completion since I’d probably have cognitive dissonance over great sounding records that were still by Sting!
The music of William Orbit was much better suited to small, hip dance clubs. Those first two Torch Song albums along with a superb array of remixed singles is how I am remembering him this evening. They alone are enough to keep the torch in my heart for this amazing music burning for many years to come. We send condolences to his friends, family and bandmates.
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A Sense of Doubt blog post #2505 - William Orbit - Musical Monday for 2112.27
I want to share about an artist that I adore. But first, a friend asked me to create a musical lineup with bands or musicians using the first letter of my name, like this:
Strange Cargo III had come out before he produced either of these women. So, I bought it at some point followed by Strange Cargo and later as they came out Pieces in a Modern Style I and II, Hello Waveforms, and My Oracle Lives Uptown.
I do really love all this work. Strange Cargo III was a favorite until Hello Waveforms came out and then it became one of my favorite albums of all time. Though it did not make my top twenty, it was on the alternate list for the "top tier" as explained in T-shirt #97 Kraftwerk.
I strongly recommend all this music, especially Hello Waveforms.
https://www.williamorbit.com/
https://www.instagram.com/williamorbit/
And now, I see Orbit has released a new EP!!
EP TRACKLIST
01 - Starbeam
02 - Wordsworth
03 - Diso
04 - Águilas (feat. Lido Pimientia)
05 - Starbeam (Extended Mix by Shocklee)
06 - Águilas (Instrumental Mix)
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2112.27 - 10:10
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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A Sense of Doubt blog post #4025 - THE PAINTER - William Orbit's first album in Eight Years - Music Monday for 2602.23
Thanks for tuning in.
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/william-orbit-the-painter/
It all sounds very nice, and it is—potentially too much so for The Painter’s overall good. What is, on paper, a tantalizing group of guest singers—including Colombian-Canadian Lido Pimienta and late Tanzanian musician Hukwe Zawose—succumbs to a honeyed stream of premium chill-out moods and expensive sunset feels. “Nuestra Situación,” featuring Pimienta, may be the most telling example: The reggaeton-lite beat nods to genuine musical progress in Orbit’s world, but sees its resistance washed away in identikit synth and piano vibes. Zawose’s sampled vocal on “Heshima kwa Hukwe” endures a similar fate, its edges drowned in Orbit’s ornate blurs.
This is an affliction that hits The Painter time and again, as singers as distinct as knitted-brow electro artist Polly Scattergood and house crooner Ali Love are lost to a Dido-ized soft focus. Orbit claims to focus on “melody, feeling, sonics and narrative” in his work, but it feels like he has gotten caught up in the scene-setting opening paragraphs of an idyllic travelog, rather than developing a story of dramatic depth. The exception to this is the dubbed-out “Epic” mix of “I Paint What I Can See,” a sprawling excursion into astral ambience that closes the album in a grandiloquent wave of distorted guitars and maternal low end, whose electrifying ebb-and-flow brings grit and drama to The Painter’s golden shores. Sadly, this obvious album highlight is only available on the vinyl edition of The Painter, a bizarre decision that only serves to bury Orbit’s best work.
“Epic” aside, The Painter serves up a pastel buffet of friction-free music that proves entirely pleasant in small doses. Over the length of an album, though, it feels like the day-lit nightmare of an interminable sunset, an infinity pool that literally never ends. It’s great that William Orbit is back after some difficult years, but you suspect The Painter may ultimately have been more rewarding to create than it is to listen to. It comes off as a therapeutic act from an artist who, assuming he’s managed his royalties, never really needs to work again, rather than an album that simply had to be made.
https://www.treblezine.com/william-orbit-the-painter-review/
William Orbit : The Painter
It is hard to wash the stench of schmaltz off. William Orbit’s The Painter has its moments, certainly, little curlicues or tricks of sound design and production that perk up the ear, but the melodic and compositional sensibility lean unfortunately too close to a hybrid of bad Massive Attack pastiche combined with the uncanny sensibilities of mainstream pop electronica. This isn’t to say that mainstream electronic work can’t be great; Sylvan Esso, for instance, have been consistently strong, having delivered their strongest and most experimentally delightful record this year. But this particular blend finds a hard time being deeply satisfying, seeming gunshy toward committing either to the artfully deep or the readymade functionality of pure club music. There is an identity crisis at play on The Painter, feeling at times like Orbit isn’t sure whether he wants to explore the abstract and jazzlike limits of the melodic ideas present here, to create a dense and consuming groove or to be a purely melodic vocal-driven project. This seeming lack of a conceptual throughline leads to weaknesses large and small, eroding the record both from the outer edges of it as a complete work as well as microfractures within the songs, choices of production and juxtaposition that wind up confusing rather than widening the lens.
This is so keenly frustrating in part because almost every song has a performance or sonic idea that is compelling and worth saving. Beth Orton, for instance, appears in several places across this record and each time, her sensitivity to the material brings a keen human edge to otherwise deeply synthetic music. But her utilization feels uncapitalized by the production, which neither expands into rich and fibrous jazzlike humanity beneath her nor gives a satisfying sense of artificiality to challenge our standard perceptions of her as a perform. Instead, it feels, sadly, more like a standard pop electronica piece with an incredible vocalist on top. Similar missteps occur with the collaboration with performers like Hukwe Zawose and Lido Pimienta, who each provide compelling performances that wind up married to subpar production which shimmers with the gloss of a million-dollar job but without the character or soul needed to really drive those performances either into the beating heart of intimacy or the wide beaming lights of absolutist pop.
The Painter offer suffers from a confused aim, seeming unsure of what space or how much of it it wants to take up. The result is a record that seems frustratingly incapable of rising beyond background music, like it was born to be a soundtrack for a film or video game or TV show but not to demand attention drawn to itself. It’s not hard to imagine these pieces brought to life by some image-driven component. “Colours Colliding” for instance calls to mind a meditative walk in the snow, drifts swirling in the air and dropping to the ground, the crispness of icy air and the coziness of knitted wool wrapped around you in hands and scarves and gloves and sweaters. Each of these pieces feels tantalizingly close to something that could be powerful and some, like the aforementioned track, achieve it, despite minor grievances in somewhat cliched melodies or production movements. If the album were perhaps more committed to an ambient sensibility, moving more toward textural work rather than pop-aligned work, it could achieve a painterly palette; for a pop record, it lacks that definitive boldness or heart-bared sincerity that makes work in those fields work. It is capably produced, revealing Orbit’s mastery of the studio as an instrument. I just wish it had better (or more consistent) songs to back that up.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/aug/28/william-orbit-the-painter-welcome-return-of-the-classy-dance-master
It’s good to have William Orbit back. After a brief and unrewarding dabble with drug addiction, the veteran English musician had a comeback of sorts with 2021’s patchy Starbeam EP, but The Painter is a more satisfying return. Orbit’s definitive work is surely All Saints’ Pure Shores, where sleek, subliminal layers of electronic effects add depth and wonder to its gorgeous melodies. While there’s no sign of Orbit resuming that imperial phase when he was first-pick producer for Madonna and U2, his distinctively ambient-classical take on dance-pop proves surprisingly durable.
Longtime collaborators Katie Melua and Beth Orton seem almost smothered by his efforts here, but there’s a gentle grandeur to first single Colours Colliding, with Polly Scattergood giving it her best Björk among some lovely strings and piano. It would be nice to have more dancefloor-friendly beats, like the Despacito dancehall kick powering Nuestra Situación, but there aren’t many artists who could create Heshima kwa Hukwe, a tribute to departed Tanzanian singer Hukwe Zawose without seeming grimly exploitative. Like the album as a whole, it’s slightly overlong and unnecessarily repetitive, but clearly made with great care and affection.
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- Days ago: MOM = 3889 days ago & DAD = 543 days ago
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2608.17 - 10:10
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
