Album review: The Orb featuring Lee Scratch Perry, More Tales from the Observatory (Cooking Vinyl)

The Orb featuring Lee Scratch Perry, More Tales from the Observatory (Cooking Vinyl)

Recorded at the same sessions that produced last year's The Observer in the Star House, these tracks offer a similar union of the imaginative and the inspirational, with Lee Perry and The Orb's Alex Paterson and Thomas Fehlmann making musical magic from the most minimal of resources.

With the balance between cavernous sub-bass and delicate, itchy high-end detail judged perfectly, and the echo delays meshing neatly to create relaxed, striding grooves with restrained synth fireworks, there's plenty of space for Perry's genial, abstract ruminations on various matters. Sometimes, as on “Fussball”, it's little more than encouragement to “kick the ball! win the game!”. Elsewhere, more carnally analagous stuff about planting seed in the earth mother.

Download: Fussball; Africa; Making Love in Dub