British Techno artists Orbital have been making music for decades and will get 2023 started off with a new album filled with “post-pandemic creativity”. “Optical Delusion” is set for a February 17 release. The tenth studio album comes on the heels of a career spanning “30 Something” released earlier this year.
Paul Hartnoll saw the quotation “a human being experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest [of humanity] – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison…” attributed to Albert Einstein and said that he knew that was the title for the next album. “It just seemed to say so much about how people construct their own realities, how we see patterns that aren’t there, how we see what we want to see,” he said.
The duo have already released two singles from the album as a teaser of things to come – “Dirty Rat” and “Ringa Ringa (The Old Pandemic Folk Song)” – inspired by the nursery rhyme “Ring of Roses” which itself was inspired by the Bubonic Plague.
Along with the group Mediaeval Baebes; Anna B Savage, Dina Ipavic, Penelope Isles, Coppe, Sleaford Mods, and The Little Pest all make guest appearances on the “Optical Delusion”.
Brothers Paul and Phil Hartnoll were members of the Class of Acid House in the eighties and have gone on to become the most successful artists of the era.
Tracklisting for “Optical Delusion”
“Ringa Ringa (The Old Pandemic Folk Song”
“Day One”
“Are You Alive?”
“You Are the Frequency”
“The New Abnormal”
“Home”
“Dirty Rat”
“Requiem for the Pre Apocalypse”
“What a Surprise”
“Moon Princess”
feature photo credit: courtesy of Orbital