Alex Paterson / The Orb

Do you have any advice on how to stay on top of the music business for so long, how to be popular all the time without making compromises? Was that a question or compliment?

A question. Ok, but thank you anyway. Well, the most important thing is to be true to yourself, to have an audience that appreciates what you do and to have a chance to travel around the world winning new fans. We are not only a British band. Thomas lives in Berlin, I live in London and our collaborators in other places. Therefore we don’t have the London sound and do not reflect the music so typical of that city.

I think that your music is mainly appreciated by sophisticated, adult music fans... (Laughs) Is it really? Which album makes you think that?

All of them do. Don't you think that it is not for kids, who perceive music as just fun? Well, it’s interesting that you say that, because my daughter really loves listening to our music. Her favorite track is Little Fluffy Clouds.

Okay, but I just wanted to ask if you feel that the number of mature fans has been growing over time. In my view it has. It is all about experience. Our music appeals to a lot of fans and a number of people get connected with our world without knowing it, which is great. It's a kind of mystery we didn't even know we could expect. We all have little angels who take care of us. If you are nice to them, they are equally nice to you.

In your opinion, which track on your new album could become a hit like Little Fluffy Clouds or Oxygen? Judging from the reaction of the audience, it could certainly be DDD or Mother Nature.

I agree. I listened to Mother Nature on your MySpace page and it’s very impressive. Did you know that these two tracks would receive such a good response when you were working on them in the studio? Sure I did. The point is that if you work on something in the studio, it’s good to test it at live gigs and then adjust it accordingly. If something works live you can be sure it will also work on the album. I feel good about The Dream album overall. People like it, which always helps you as an artist.

The Orb’s music is largely based on sampling – which sampled sound are you most proud of? It's not so easy to say. I would tell you something and then someone could come running to us asking how we could do it when they didn't even know about it. Anyway, each of the sounds goes through a certain process and is ultimately changed beyond recognition. We are very careful about this. Often, we even compose a whole track based on a certain sample and then take it out completely. This is our favorite method of working and it works.

At the beginning of the 1990s, The Orb defined one style of electronic music. Do you think that you are still an inspiration for your followers or do you look around now to get inspiration from them? It's quite funny that today's music derives a lot of inspiration from the 1980s. People spend a lot of time making the bass sound like that time. But generally speaking, inspiration is a funny thing, really. You can draw it from the entire outside world, even a radio play can transport you into a totally different world. And again – you can sample it and take the samples out of the music at the right time. A lot of old music, such as funk, Led Zeppelin, and T-Rex can be inspirational too. I’m 48 and I really have a lot of experience with the music. As you grow older, you tend to go back in the past, for example to the sound you played with twenty years ago. And this brings many ideas too.

Tell me, how does one manage to live the rather hectic life of a musician for so long? It's a life path. It's not work you can go home from and switch off. Sometimes it’s really extremely difficult, but it is also the only thing I do now and I have ever done. Give me another picture, show me another path, but I very much doubt there is any. I have a good life, I regularly play around the world, and that’s the way I love it. I have nothing to complain about; it’s always about your point of view, so why not taking a positive one. I look forward to all my gigs that lay ahead, including the one in Prague.

Have you thought about how far you are able to stretch your musical limits? Projects such as High Frequency Bandwidth show that I’ve been stretching them all the time. There I do things not everybody would probably expect from me. For example, I sing. And the same goes for Rootmasters – we create a very inorganic sound, so it is again something completely different. We are now going to work on film music for an Austrian director. The limits are and have always been very elastic.