Orbital have been keeping us on our toes since they announced that anniversary compilation called 30something, delayed by the damn pandemic. But they are leaving us a trickle of songs that began with those remixes of Anna from Belfast, and have continued with other anthems composed by Phil and Paul such as Satan and Are We Here?
And with the new remix, we couldn’t help but review it, because it’s another anthem but this time it’s truly generational. I still remember the first time I heard it, and since then, for more than thirty years, I’ve never tired of hearing it. We are indeed talking about Chime.
In 1987, the Hartnolls decided to turn their musical career around and, as Paul says in several interviews, “There was a cupboard under the stairs at home that my father set up as a home office, and that’s where I set up my equipment once my parents left home to run a pub. That’s where all of Orbital’s early work was recorded, including The Green Album“. Phil brought the devil into the house in the form of the Roland TB-303, the infernal contraption that formed the basis for those early recordings. Paul added a synthesizer and with those weapons began the process of creating those early songs.
The basis of Chime, one of the most revered and sacred anthems in the history of electronic music and an indispensable part of any self-respecting rave in the first half of the nineties, was born from Paul’s hands and that first synthesiser in the two hours he had free between his job washing dishes and going to his parents’ pub.
“In those same days, I was trying to pair a four-track recorder with my dad’s two-track cassette recorder to make a six-track studio. This meant I had to come up with six different sounds or melodies to play simultaneously. You could say that Chime cost a whopping £3.75, which was the cost of a metal cassette”.
Paul Hartnoll told The Guardian in a 2018 interview: “When some of the local soul guys showed our stuff to Jazzy M, I was invited to meet him at his record shop in Croydon. He was a real evangelist when it came to getting house music off the ground in the UK and he was always telling us: ‘Make music like this. And then come back. As soon as he heard Chime, he decided to start a record label, which he called Oh’Zone. We sold 2,000 records and then six major labels came after us and we signed to London Records (on the FFRR sub-label). Their A&R manager, Pete Tong, used to buy records from Jazzy’s shop”. Chime was first released on Jazzy M’s Oh’Zone label in December 1989 and re-released on FFRR Records in March 1990.
Now, in February 2022, thirty-two years later, this authentic generational hymn, one of the first of the definitive start of electronic and dance music born at the end of the eighties, receives a new remix by Eli Brown, DJ and producer from Bristol. As could not be otherwise to achieve a good result, Brown reverentially respects the original and simply adds sounds and rhythms that do not distort or distort this piece of electronic music history.
Honestly, we at the 1051 office can’t wait for spring to come and hear the rest of the album.
