A new William Orbit album only comes round every once in a while, but the Blur and Madonna producer has been busy, he tells Tony Clayton-Lea.
'The most boring question is when people ask me how would I describe my music, but the one that's worse than boring is when people ask me what new music I like. I have the same thing with jokes. I love a good joke, but for the life of me I can't tell them. I feel like I'm letting myself down because I always draw a blank. Oh, no, you're probably going to ask me that worse-than-boring question now, aren't you?"
William Orbit (born plain old William Wainwright more than 40 years ago) isn't used to the cut and thrust of the promotional interview. There's a reason for that, and it's not because he isn't well-known - it's just he's more used to standing behind the glass wall of the recording studio as producer/mixer/sonic tactician. So, in order to assuage his fears about having to answer the worse-than-boring question, I tell him that no, actually, that particular question isn't in my conversational drift.
Relief oozes its way into the room. "Good, that's really good. That's us off to a great start, then." For the past 10 years, Orbit has been twiddling the buttons and overseeing the soundscapes of some of the best and biggest acts in rock music - both Blur (13) and Madonna (Ray of Light) have benefited from Orbit's experienced way with sound waves. The likes of Prince, Seal and The Cure have surely earned a chart placing or three by virtue of Orbit's involvement. Yet there's always an itch to scratch, isn't there? Long before Blur formed or Madonna became the true Queen of Pop, the teenage Wainwright was tinkering away in his bedroom studio splicing magnetic tape together to make sound collages. His first music releases - in the mid-1980s - were under the moniker of Torch Song; then Wainwright became Orbit and Strange Cargo was duly formed.
It was with Strange Cargo that Orbit's inventive, ambitious and often beautiful electronic music came to the fore. Whereas previously he had been noted for fun and games in the dance arena (particularly through his electronic house work with Bass-O-Matic), Strange Cargo's brief became ever more shifting and serene, influenced by the likes of Brian Eno and Can's Holger Czukay. Come the mid-1990s, Orbit's name became one to drop from a height.
Life and other stuff (including marriage, divorce, a child) have got in the way of release schedules; the last we heard of Orbit was in 2000, on the release of his Pieces In A Modern Style record, an updated reinterpretation of classical works (Barber, Satie, Vivaldi, Ravel, Gorecki) that was originally released on his own N-Gram label in 1995. Now, effectively 10 years later, comes Orbit's first new batch of material - the rather typically titled Hello Waveforms. You take your time, don't you, William?
"Yes, now you mention it, 10 years does sound like a long time, doesn't it? But I'm quite prolific, really. For years I've been loading tracks onto my website - stuff that is generally unreleased. I do that because I can and because it's something I'm quite into, but when you have a record out on a label and are promoting it, you tend to get noticed more than if you're just loading up tracks on to a website, which is the kind of work that's under-the-radar."
Outside of feeding the gaping abyss of his website, Orbit says he is connected to activities that are unrelated to music. Time and life drifts by. "I'm divorced, I have a daughter; I travel and I read. I research things a lot, so I'm always writing and reading, and try to make sense of that information. I run a company - a small company, I might add - and all that kind of stuff seems to take up the day.
"The theory is that because I'm so busy helping out other people on their albums I should find time to make my own music, but it doesn't work in practice. In reality, there's a bit of a car crash of timing between the two. I try to do two things at once, and along the way something gets left out - sleep more often than not."
Yet having one without the other, he says, would be a strain.
"If you're producing an artist you need to be there for them, because it's their record. You don't want to go planting your music into their audience - it's about them communicating with their audience, and as a producer you're just the magnifying glass. You're better doing that if you've done your own thing.
"I can throw myself into production, and be at the service of the artist I'm producing without any frustration. It's getting the balance right. I might not be very good at piecing together the mosaic of timing, but the two opposing forces co-exist really well."
Hellow Waveforms is itself a mosaic of timing that works very well. Its innate tranquillity is bound to be damned with faint praise through use of words like "pleasant" and "inoffensive", but, reckons Orbit, such criticism enables him to insert several sonic time bombs that aim to continually engage the listener's interest. Why so much serenity, though?
"Perhaps it's because my life is so tense," replies Orbit. "Maybe the only way I can get to that sense of calm is through my music - it can be quite meditative. A lot of my friends have told me that Pieces in a Modern Style calms down their fractious children. It's great doing high art and having artistic motivations for wanting to reach people, but when children who are crying calm down that's not too bad either. That's a valid contribution to the world, isn't it?
"I'm quite realistic about the music I do. I know, for example, that most if not all of Hello Waveforms will be looked upon as background, unobtrusive music. Most music that you hear in treatment rooms and spas is soothing, yes, but it's indistinguishable from everything else. I say that you can have music that is soothing and profound.I don't mean to be arrogant, but I could knock out loads of what I term aromatherapy music pretty swiftly. If you want something that is going to last, however, you're going to have to spend a lot more time on it.
"Art forms like film, photography and writing - there's a superficial buzz about them, but if you want them to last, to get beyond the ephemeral, to create something that builds the layers and subtleties which keep art forms alive, then you have to work at it. Those things do not come quickly."
Hello Waveforms is out on Sanctuary Records