At Last, Things Turn His Way

You can take the mad scientist out of the lab, but you can’t take the lab out of the mad scientist.

Record producer and electronic musician William Orbit has been set up in a rustic Brentwood neighborhood, but instead of opening his windows to the sunny hills, the way most Englishmen can’t wait to do when they hit L.A., he has them covered by curtains. He hasn’t furnished his living room with leather couches and other symbols of his remarkable career reversal, but with keyboards and computers that fill it from wall to wall.

“I’ve never spent money on frivolous things,” says the tall musician, standing amid the hardware. “I’ve never bought cars or drugs or holidays or things like that. It’s always been plowed into equipment.”

Guy Oseary, co-partner at Maverick Records, is the one who proposed the operative metaphor.

“He’s always worked in his little studio,” said Oseary, whose label released Orbit’s album “Pieces in a Modern Style” two weeks ago. “The mad scientist would sit in his house and do these amazing things there, but he never really had to deal with an extra person there. He would do it his way. And now he had someone with a very strong sense of what they wanted and strong sense of direction.”

That someone is Madonna, of course, who plucked Orbit from an unrewarding life as a remixer for hire when she enlisted him to co-produce and co-write “Ray of Light.” With its Orbit-trademark bleeps and squeals combining with the singer’s pop sensibility, the 1998 album, the conventional wisdom goes, revived Madonna’s career.

And it looks like a real team. They currently have Madonna’s “American Pie” getting heavy radio play and another collaboration in the singer’s new movie, “The Next Best Thing.” And they’re well into the full follow-up to “Ray of Light.”

The process has inevitably drawn the reclusive Orbit out of the shadows, but he’s adjusting to the bright lights, joining Madonna onstage last year to pick up two Grammys for their work on “Ray.” They won another one this year for “Beautiful Stranger” from “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.”

With his career as an artist back in gear with the release of “Pieces in a Modern Style”--a series of electronic treatments of classical pieces by composers ranging from Beethoven to Cage to Gorecki--he’s game to do the media, and he’s even talking about a concert tour this summer.

“I haven’t suddenly latched on to the formula of making records that sound commercial,” Orbit says. “The reason I have commercial success now is because the world has come to where I’m at. Knowing as I do how ephemeral the world of music is, I’m not [overconfident], but for a short while I think I’m in clover, to be honest. I’m enjoying this experience.”

Orbit’s mild tone suddenly intensifies.

“Do you know something that really bothers me? So many interviewers go, ‘Oh, Madonna got together with William Orbit and he rekindled her career.’ But her career was fine. She rekindled my career.”

*

“I sort of wonder what the people I knew back then would make of me now, sitting here chatting with the Los Angeles Times in a very urbane way. Back then I was Mr. Noncommunication, Mr. Catatonic.”

Orbit, 43, sits in a small office off the living room. Like the rest of the house, it’s sparsely furnished--a couple of computers, a fax machine, a boombox. Tall and boyish-looking with a shy manner, he has the air of the perpetual grad student as he sorts through his unlikely career path.

William Wainwright was a directionless youngster in the early ‘70s, drifting through what remained of the hippie scenes. Friends nicknamed him Orbit because he seemed to be in one of his own.

“I wasn’t a communicator and I also had a hard time just getting on,” he says, sitting in a desk chair and absently twirling a straightened paper clip. “Just 17, you know. . . . I had a hard time just getting through every day.”

Like many of his peers, Orbit found salvation in music--but not the rock ‘n’ roll that draws most alienated youths. At age 12 he had become fascinated with German electronic and progressive rock groups such as Kraftwerk, Can and Van Der Graaf Generator. His prize possession was a tape recorder that he used to splice together sound collages, speeding up the machine’s motor until it finally broke.

In the late ‘70s he joined two friends who had acquired some recording equipment, setting up shop by squatting--that is, living rent-free--in a century-old London schoolhouse, living on the dole and devising makeshift security doors out of scrap metal.

Orbit began creating music in their ad hoc studio with no thought of selling it, but eventually the enterprise--which they called Torch Song--was signed by IRS Records.

The label released two Torch Song albums in the mid-’80s, launching Orbit toward prominence in the realms where ambient, electronic and dance music intersect. He partnered with singer Beth Orton in a project called Spill, recorded dance music as Bassomatic and did a lot of remixing. Most significantly for the development of the Orbit cult, he released a series of atmospheric albums under the name Strange Cargo.

He also owned a Warner Bros.-affiliated label called N-Gram, but that folded, forcing Orbit to remix for a living.

“I was immensely frustrated,” Orbit says. “I wanted much more than that. I wanted what’s happening now. I wanted to make a record that was mine that I really believed in and was uncompromised.”

That’s when Madonna came calling.

Orbit, who had done remixes of three Madonna singles in the early ‘90s, accepted the singer’s invitation to do a couple of recordings together in New York.

“At the end of the five days I was about to catch my plane and she said, ‘Would you like to do the rest of the album with me?’ I said yeah.

“I didn’t see the life-changing implications at the time. . . . The sheer velocity at which we were working meant that I didn’t have too many times to pause and reflect. . . . It was only toward the end of the project that I’d be listening, remixing it, and I’d be thinking, ‘Whoa, something’s going on with this. This is really good, and it’s Madonna. I’d be happy to be making this in my little studio in my back room with any artist.’ I started thinking this could be something. And it was something.”

*

The Madonna connection generated Orbit’s own recording deal with Maverick, the label she owns and records for. That’s given a second life to “Pieces in a Modern Style.” The album actually came out in England in 1995--for two days. It was recalled when composer Arvo Part denied permission to use his work. Orbit has heard that most of the copies ended up in a landfill, and he’s met a few people who bought it during its brief surfacing.

The instrumental record, with its cool, contemplative tone, isn’t likely to snare the Madonna audience. But a dance remix of Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” has become a hit in England, and the album has been a surprise as well, entering the classical chart there at No. 1 and the regular sales chart at No. 2.

That has Maverick executives hopeful that they have more than a “prestige artist” on their hands.

“The success over there is really what’s given us something to take to the modern rock stations and get their interest,” says Maverick President Bill Bennett. “KROQ’s played it a few times already, and we’ll see. We’re cautiously optimistic.

“It’s also exciting to be able to go to classical stations and PBS and NPR stations. . . . We’ve serviced it already to some of the classical radio stations, and I can’t tell you that we’ve had a lot of success so far. But they are beginning to take notice, and we are really going to zero in on L.A. and San Francisco and Boston, markets where there are big classical stations.”

The big classical station in L.A. is still waiting.

“No I’m not familiar with it,” Bob Wennersten, program director at KKGO-FM (105.1), said during the week of the album’s release.

“Wait a minute--is this the one that has the Barber Adagio?,” he added, laughing. “Yes, I have heard [the dance remix]. I haven’t heard the original. . . . I can tell you we don’t play electronic music--not that that’s a hard and fast rule. If I heard this and liked it, I wouldn’t have any objection to playing it, but I haven’t heard it.”

All of which is fine with Orbit.

“The classical thing, I think, is a bit of a red herring,” he says. “It tends to set people thinking along lines I’d rather they didn’t. . . . Obviously I want to acknowledge the sources, that’s very important, but it should be regarded as a record to relax to. If it works on that level, then it’s good enough actually. You don’t have to think too much about it.

“I was just trying to understand what it was that intrigued me [about the pieces]. . . . My way of choosing to perform it and interpret it is rather computerized and sort of chilled out. It’s not visceral.

“I like to make music that somehow brings forward people’s own reflections. . . . I’m really drawn to records that stir up all sorts of thoughts that wouldn’t have happened. . . . I also like to make records that get people’s hearts beating fast and get on the dance floor. I like to emotionally play with my listeners.”

Orbit unfolds his lanky frame as he reflects--with mixed emotions--on his emergence from what Maverick’s Oseary refers to as his “cave.”

“I don’t like to be exposed like this, it’s not what I’m about,” he says. “But I don’t have to worry that it’s gonna get any more than the level it’s at now. It’s not people like me that the media feeds on. I’m a kind of a slug on a log really. So it’s not freaking me out.

“It might sound a bit like I’m contradicting myself, but I wouldn’t mind a bit more commercial pizazz. It’s kind of enjoyable. I want to have my cake and eat it, really.

“I like the fact that I’ve got tracks like ‘American Pie’ out--that’s as pop as you can go--and at the same time I’m getting e-mail from Rachmaninoff’s publisher asking me to do some stuff with the Rachmaninoff catalog.

“The schizophrenic nature of that, I’m enjoying that. The extremes.”