She's featured alongside Gloria Kaba on closing track "Free Glo," which ends the proceedings on a playful, symphonic dance-oriented note. Before it's over, Orbit works in an appearance by Laurie Mayer, whose collaborations with Orbit date back his first band, Torch Song. The more club-oriented "Bank of Wildflowers" featuring Georgia is more playlist-friendly, while non-English entries like "Nuestra Situación" featuring Lido Pimienta and the over-eight-minute "Heshima kwa Hukwe" with Hukwe Zawose seem to treat language like a timbre - or in the case of The Painter, a color. There are still standouts on board, however, including the Polly Scattergood collaboration "Colours Colliding," whose twinkling piano and keyboard tones, pixie-like voice samples, brittle lead vocal, and melancholy harmonic center achieve a more cinematic effect. That's generally true of the entire over-hour-long album, which like Orbit's previous non-classical solo work is much more concerned with creating a hypnotic, head-bobbing vibe than particularly memorable hooks or melodies. She reappears later, on "No Other World," a glitchier track with more focus on wide-ranging timbres but with a similarly low-key, danceable disposition. Just before the two-minute mark, Orton's glimmering-keyboard-accompanied humming switches to a half-whispered monologue about relationships, her surroundings, and painting. (The other is "The Diver" featuring Natalie Walker.) Developing slowly, "I Paint What I Can See" eventually settles into a melodic bass groove with ticking hi-hat. She appears here on "I Paint What I Can See," one of two reworked tracks from the limited streaming release Strange Cargo 5 (2014). It finds him welcoming a number of guest vocalists, including longtime collaborator Beth Orton, who lent vocals to 1993's Strange Cargo III around the time he was producing her debut album. That said, there still needs to be an adequate retrospective compiled of only his productions and recorded work, but the licensing for that project would be a real labor of love - i.e., a nightmare - because there is so much.Now entering his fifth decade in music, pioneering producer and overall song stylist William Orbit returns to his trademark blend of ambience and world fusion, progressive house and electro-pop, and seductiveness and spaciousness on his 12th solo album and first in eight years, The Painter. " The hallmarks of Orbit the producer are, however, evident on almost every bit of this set in the form of an added tweak here and there, some bells, a bass echo, cymbals, reverb, a guitar line overdubbed, etc. There's also a thoroughly reworked version of Larry Tee's "I Love U. But it also contains remixes of Terry Lynn's "Kingstonlogic," Dirty Vegas' "Dance with Me," and Orbit's own crazy "Chicken," under his WTF? moniker (it's a nutjob percussion solo). It’s most notable for the rare original demo of "Water from a Vine Leaf" that he cut with Orton - the first vocal track the pair every cut together. Disc three is a continuous mix that works on the club level. This is a selection one might hear on his KCRW radio program in Los Angeles. Disc two is an extension of disc one with none of his exclusives, and is unmixed. Disc one is split into a cocktail with two-thirds made up of tracks that he likes or has produced (or in some cases here, reworked a bit) by various artists including Robbie Williams, Gavin Friday, Laurie Mayer, Dusted, John Barry, and Skye, with the remaining one-third comprised of some of his own rarities: a reworking of Bassomatic's “Fascinating Rhythm,” an instrumental version of Beth Orton's “Where Do You Go” (a song they co-wrote), All Saints' “Black Coffee,” the bonus track of “G155” from the Hello Waveforms album, and some others. Odyssey is a three-disc, 43-track collection that features ubiquitous producer, DJ, and music fan William Orbit doing all three.
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