The Middle of Nowhere by Orbital

The Middle of Nowhere, Orbital's fifth album, finally surfaced on FFRR on 5 April 1999, after the label sat on the finished record for nearly six months over problems nobody spelled out. The wait didn't hurt brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll, the Kent duo who named themselves after the M25 ring road that fed the early rave scene: it went to number 4 in the UK and stayed on the chart for 7 weeks.

It's techno with a magpie's eye. "Style" got its name from all the Stylophone buzzing through it and nicks a vocal hook from Dollar's "O L'amour"; "Spare Parts Express" borrows a sliver of John Baker's "New Worlds", the Newsround music, plus a line of dialogue from Carnival of Souls; "I Don't Know You People" lifts its voices from The Legend of Hell House. "Know Where to Run" ended up in the PlayStation game Wipeout 3. AllMusic's John Bush heard no great leap forward, just the pair still hitting every mark at full speed.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.