Orbital - Orbital (The Green Album)

The record that started everything. Released on September 30, 1991 on London/ffrr Records and known ever since as The Green Album to distinguish it from its equally legendary successor, Orbital's self-titled debut announced the arrival of one of the most ambitious and consequential acts in the history of British electronic music.

The journey to the album began with "Chime," the landmark dance track that Pete Tong championed on BBC Radio 1 in 1990, sending it to number seventeen on the UK Singles Chart and making Phil and Paul Hartnoll overnight sensations in the rave scene that had grown up around the M25. When Tong signed them to ffrr and gave them the creative freedom to make the album they wanted to make, the Hartnolls did something that set them apart from every other act on the rave circuit immediately and permanently. Rather than delivering ten formulaic four-to-the-floor piano bangers, they went exploring. Wider textures, different rhythms, stranger mind spaces, music that treated the dancefloor not as a destination but as a launching pad for something far more expansive and far more curious.

The result is an album that sounds as restless and visionary today as it did in 1991. "Belfast," one of the most emotionally resonant pieces of electronic music ever recorded, stands alongside a live version of "Chime" and a collection of tracks that together map out an entirely new territory for what dance music could be and where it could go. The Hartnolls would go on to collaborate with minds as diverse as Madonna, Kraftwerk, and Professor Brian Cox, and to inspire everyone from Björk to Bicep, but it all began here, with two brothers from Sevenoaks deciding that electronic music deserved to be as ambitious as any other art form.

A landmark of the genre, reissued and ready to be discovered all over again.