“Little Fluffy Clouds” by The Orb with Rickie Lee Jones

"Little Fluffy Clouds" first drifted out on Big Life in November 1990, the Orb's soft-focus calling card, and the group later tucked it onto their 1991 double album The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld.

This is ambient house at its most blissed-out: a lazy, loping beat, shimmering loops and a sense of weather rolling slowly across a wide sky, the kind of track built for the chill-out room at dawn rather than the main floor at midnight. Dr Alex Paterson and Youth produced and mixed it, with Greg Hunter and Thrash also at the controls, and the writing credit goes to Martin Glover, Paterson and, notably, Steve Reich.

It barely scraped the UK chart at first, reaching number 87, but it kept coming back with new B-sides, and the 1993 reissue climbed all the way to number 10. The critics caught up too: NME placed it at number 275 among its 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and Pitchfork put it at number 40 on its list of the top 200 tracks of the 1990s.

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