I first heard (and saw) The Orb's "Little Fluffy Clouds" on a public access music video channel in Denver, Colorado, summer 1991. The KLF were then prying open the door of my musical tastes with their goofy and loveable house music, but the Orb tore it from the hinges. Unfettered, all kinds of brilliant sounds flowed in, clearing the room, sweeping the floors. I didn't know dub from the Doobie Brothers. It didn't matter. The Orb inspired me. Besides how could you be from Arizona and not immediately embrace "Little Fluffy Clouds" as an anthem?

"We lived in Arizona, and the sky always had little fluffy clouds in them," Rickie Lee Jones reminisced to Levar Burton on the old PBS show Reading Rainbow. "They were long and clear and there were lots of stars at night. They were beautiful, the most beautiful skies as a matter of fact."

Somehow this forgettable bit of television seeped into the brain of the Orb's Alex Paterson and emerged as a chilled out house groove. Rickie Lee wasn't so happy that her voice served as an instrument in the Orb's orchestra and sued the band. The suit was settled out of court, the Orb survived and prospered.

Again backed with the praise of British music magazines Melody Maker and the NME, I sought out and bought an import copy of the Orb's first record, The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld. If I had first heard the record now, I would probably have really enjoyed it, but I would have picked apart its influences and intentions, blunting the audacity of the music. In '91 I was just simply blown away. I had heard nothing like it before.

Spread across two discs, Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld is an ingenious patchwork of samples, ranging from NASA recordings to chickens, and an array of house, dub and ambient textures. It's as if Dr. Alex  and his cohorts strapped their Kraut Rock and Pink Floyd obsessions to a dub-fueled rocket and blasted it off, destination the Sun. Along the way there are moments that groove and moods that elevate the senses. The album is at once unfathomably deep and gossamer thin. Echoing drums and dub bass lines shudder from beneath, while wispy, beautiful melodies and haunting samples weave about overhead like northern lights. And at the end of disc two is "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Center of the Universe", easily one of the most beautiful and enduring pieces of electronic creativity I've ever heard. It's too bad it's only 18 minutes long.

"Though it's a mouthful of a title and a tremendously challenging idea to conjure with music, both title and production merge with surprising ease," writes John Bush for the All Music review of the track. "The single rides a wave of ebb-and-fade ocean sounds and cascading synths over the pastoral vocal from diva Minnie Riperton's 1975 hit `Loving You.' [the Orb] injected dozens of samples into the mix -- church bells, white noise, jet sounds, gentle waves and trickling water, what sounds like the distorted clip-clops of a cantering horse, and a chorus of wordless vocals drifting in and out of the mix with imperial grandeur.

For mortal ears, at least, this is indeed the soundtrack of just such an omnipotent presence as might be found at the end of the interstellar rainbow in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Paterson's use of samples became much more complex later, but he's rarely matched the electronic elegance found here."

So where did I go from such ethereal heights? Intrigued by the music worlds the Orb had opened for me, I began searching for other records that would recreate the experience. This search led me to Orbital's "Green Album." More on this record in the next edition.

- Watch the "Little Fluffy Clouds" video on YouTube.

- Listen to Ennio Morricone's "The Man with a Harmonica" (MP3) from the Sergio Leone film Once Upon a Time in the West. A sample of this track is used at the beginning of "Little Fluffy Clouds."