The Orb - A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld

If the organizers of the second annual Manitoba Electronic Music Exhibition (MEME) wanted to book an artist for the headlining set Saturday night at The Cube that had a rich musical legacy, but was still releasing interesting, relevant albums, they couldn’t have made a better choice than Berlin’s Thomas Fehlmann.

Best known for his genre-defining work with The Orb, the Swiss born producer was also around during the early days of the Berlin electronic scene, was a resident at the legendary Tresor night club, has produced a popular radio show for the past 14 years and released a number of well received solo albums on the eclectic, but highly influential Kompakt Records.

Originally Fehlmann was slated to play the inaugural year of the festival and the opening of The Cube, but the gig was postponed after other dates on the tour fell through. He doesn’t play North America that often, and when he does it is usually a special affair like his performances this weekend at Canada’s newest electronic festival.

Don’t expect some by-the-numbers DJ set. The accomplished producer will be performing live, reworking, reimagining and reinterpreting his own music on the fly. Fehlmann will play twice at MEME. His set Saturday night at The Cube will showcase his melodic tech-house and deep dub techno, while Sunday afternoon will focus on a trippy, ambient, chilled out vibe that’s perfect for his 3:30pm time slot.

“The good thing about being connected to The Orb is people have wide and open expectations,” explains Fehlmann over the phone from his flat in Berlin. “I am always happy to come to North America. The reason I am not playing here that often isn’t that I don’t like to, it’s more a question of finding the right spots. I’m not actively working on gigs. I often leave it to fate.”

As fate would have it, one of MEME’s founders saw Fehlmann’s much talked about performance at Mutek’s Piknic Electronik outdoors at Parc Jean-Drapeau in 2009 and knew he had to get him to Winnipeg.

Although the mini tour didn’t end up happening last summer, Fehlmann was keen to play at the fledgling festival. His long time girlfriend, Gudrun Gut, had performed in the city with Vancouver based artist Myra Davies as Miasma, and he liked the idea of a free electronic festival in the downtown.

Between carefully selected gigs, his radio show and experimenting in the studio on his own tracks, Fehlmann has been collaborating with long time Orb partner Dr. Alex Paterson on new material, and the duo are also working on a commissioned opera piece.

“At the moment, we are in the process of finishing the music. We also have to write the lyrics for it which is very unusual for us. That’s obviously something we don’t have much experience with and it’s a bit of a challenge,” explains Fehlmann with some trepidation. “We are instrumental musicians at heart. I’ve never really had a knack with lyrics. When I listened to music as a kid, I was not able to understand what they were singing about. For me, it was always a more rhythmic aspect going along with the music. It was never so much a matter of content. It wasn’t 10-15 years later that I started to understand what they were singing about.”

Set to be delivered by the end of 2011, their score then needs to be transcribed and they’ll spend some time in rehearsals and working on revisions. Outside of their comfort zone, but clearly a project they find fascinating, rewarding and challenging, it will eventually debut in June 2013 at the Opera House in London.

Based around a lunar theme, this will be one of Paterson’s and Fehlmann’s most ambitious projects to date.

“We want to look into the various ways the moon is presented in poetry, literature, science and the various ways that people have been looking at the moon over history,” says the 54 year old rookie composer.

While many electronic producers are clamouring for the media spotlight, seeing how many air miles they can collect bouncing from meaningless gig to gig and releasing far too many mediocre tracks, Fehlmann has taken a different path.

 “One of the advantages of me not being the perfectly marketed artist is there is still space to discover new avenues,” suggests Fehlmann. “There is always a new angle to approach.”

 For the veteran producer this has also meant working with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra on an adaptation of Mahler's first symphony, along with scoring the soundtrack to a TV documentary called 24H Berlin. He recently released his reinterpretation of Mahler, Titan One, and a reworking of an older track, Du Fehlst Mir, on Kompakt. The material he created for the show would end up on his 2010 album, Gute Luft.

“The director said he was listening to my music while driving through Berlin thinking about the whole concept and knew he wanted to ask me to take part in it,” says a surprisingly flattered Fehlmann. “I didn’t really know what to expect. That was my first real connection with making music for film. It was kind of unusual in the sense that I didn’t have a picture to work to. It was being produced while I was making the music. I had carte blanche, but since it was filmed in Berlin, I felt very close to it.”

The city has always been an important part of the veteran artist. From seeing the wall fall in 1989 and being part of the embryonic stage of the development of techno in Germany, to his time as a resident at Tresor to Berlin’s current trend setting electronic scene, Fehlmann has seen the city change, grow and be moulded by modern techno.

“It’s kind of interesting looking back to see the music has really shaped the cultural ingredients of the city and made it far more relevant to the outside world,” Fehlmann reflects. “It was really the music which early on brought people from the East and West together. It was very much a connecting point. It was a very euphoric situation politically and socially and connected to that music, it gave it an additional dimension.”