Orbital
Snivilisation

It's 1994 and Orbital finally decide to give a name to one of their albums, "Snivilisation:" an enigmatic title that announces a work anything but easy to digest, far from the rave/trance rhythms of the first two albums (aka "Green" & "Brown Album").

The stylistic change is felt in the longer, very reflective tracks, which seem to want to tell stories: "Forever", the opening track, lulls us for ten minutes in a rarefied atmosphere and makes way for "I Wish I Had Duck Feet" - don't ask too many questions about the title, impossible to relate to the track in question - which instead is a short mix of vocal samples over a watery and enveloping bass line.

The tempo speeds up (but only once) with "Crash And Carry", that is, metallic sounds that would not look out of place on the first album by the Hartnoll brothers.

"Kein Trink Wasser": either you're drinking non-potable water or you have in your ears perhaps the highest point of Snivilisation, where Paul and Phil unleash an incredible melody that fuels itself by adding piano lines on top of piano lines only to collapse in the second half into a dreamy beat.

The album is enigmatic, and often engaging: listening to "Philosophy By Numbers" and the concluding "Are We Here?" and "Attached", you get the feeling of being continuously engaged by the voices and sounds Orbital have managed to create: and that's exactly what remains most from this album, not so much the melodies but above all the sounds, the timbres, the wavefronts of a surreal and incredibly personal journey.