One Perfect Sunrise

To listen to One Perfect Sunrise by Orbital is to realise you have reached a very important landmark in your life; equal in importance to how Jesus' disciples felt when they heard the sermon on the mount. It’s a bit like: hang on a second, nothing will ever be the same again. But for the better.

At its best music transports you from wherever you are, away from everything but the song itself. Different types of music transport you to different places. Some are angry or indignant. Some are euphoric. Some are harder to put into words, other than to say they are heavenly – which is to say they conjure up the image of what heaven would be like. One Perfect Sunrise is certainly one of those. Orbital do those kinds of songs well. There are four or five others in a similar mould: Halcyon; Dwr Budr; Belfast. But One Perfect Sunrise is special for being the last song on the last album Orbital made.

I can’t think of another example of a band declaring its intention to disband and producing a final song so fitting of their legacy. It is a work of art equal in grace and beauty to the Sistine Chapel or The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Mona Lisa is a hag in comparison.

I often think about modern artists – be they musicians, DJs, rappers or whatever – in the pantheon of artistic greats over the ages. Of course Mozart is always going to be held in higher esteem than the Hartnoll brothers. And of course I am not seriously refuting that. But I do wonder what Mozart would be about if he was alive today. I can’t help but think he would be in the Orbital / Aphex Twin school of music. I think he would have had a crack at DJing too. (I can’t mix.) Sasha is the closest to what I think he might have been like, composing something unique, even though you are actually using other peoples’ music, by creating later upon layer of sound. That is why Northern Exposure is my favourite single album. Sasha and the Hartnoll brothers would have taken 1700’s European courts by storm.