Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark men Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys give us the low-down on their new space adventure, ‘The Grand Ballet’
From tape machines and DIY electronics to planetary telemetry and spatial sound, Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys are now pushing Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark further beyond the architecture of the pop song.
Their next project, ‘The Grand Ballet’ – detailed in public for the first time here – suggests a future where electronic music unfolds in planetary time rather than minutes. The multisensory collaboration with Hyphenate Studio, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Arup’s SoundLab will explore how the orbital telemetry of the Cassini spacecraft might be translated into a durational, spatial sound environment.
Chris Scoates: I’d love to start by looking back a little. From the very beginning, OMD seemed to treat technology almost as a collaborator – tape machines on stage, homemade electronics, systems thinking embedded in the music. When you think about those early days now, were you already imagining sound as something that could move beyond the limits of pop songs, or did that perspective evolve later?
Paul Humphreys: “From the beginning, technology never felt separate from the music. In many ways it felt like another member of the band. When we started out in the late 1970s, we didn’t have access to expensive studios or sophisticated equipment, so we experimented constantly – wiring things together, manipulating tape, and pushing machines beyond what they were designed to do. Winston, the TEAC four-track recorder we toured with, was literally on stage with us and felt like a collaborator.”
Andy McCluskey: “That way of working shaped how we approached composition. Instead of starting with a finished song, we often began with a system – a loop, a pattern, a texture – and explored where it might lead. We imagined the music, but the often primitive machines shaped the final sounds. Looking back, that connects us to a longer history of electronic music where sound itself becomes the material and the studio becomes the instrument.”
CS: People often describe early OMD as “experimental pop”, but it sometimes felt more like problem-solving with sound – building structures and testing systems. Were you thinking primarily in terms of songs, or in terms of mechanisms and processes?
AM: “The description of our early music as experimental pop makes sense in hindsight. We did think in those terms to a degree. We hoped to offer a different way of constructing music and therefore, hopefully, alternative outcomes. We were fascinated by systems – repetition, communication, signal, structure. Admittedly, this was often out of necessity. We would lay down a repeating linear refrain onto tape and then try to build something out of that minimal texture. There were no sequencers, midi, nor computers. We were endeavoring to create a new future vision by hand.
“Despite this, much of the early subject matter reflects electricity, radio, transmission, industry. Those were not decorative references; they were a humanized response to the changing world we inhabited. Many of the lyrics were almost anthropomorphic responses to machines and technology. Often a melancholy personalized disappointment. We were born into the post-war Utopian era, but were teenagers in the already dystopian 1970s.”
PH: “Melody also mattered to us, so of course there were songs. Concept is always the spark, but musicality allows the listener to respond emotionally to the theory. It seems that we unknowingly inhabited the liminal space between systems-based sensibility and warm sensitivity. Therefore, whilst we were interested in how sounds behaved when you set them in motion – how templates evolve and how electronic textures can create environments rather than simply accompany a traditional pop structure, we wanted the machines to sing and the patterns to dance.”
CS: There was a real sense of soaring optimism in records like ‘Architecture & Morality’,but ‘Dazzle Ships’reflected a darker sense of technology as a cultural force. Has your relationship with technology changed over time – become more skeptical, more philosophical, or simply deeper?
PH: “In the late 1970s and early 1980s technology carried a real sense of possibility. Synthesisers were still relatively new, and it felt like music could suddenly move somewhere completely different. Artists like Kraftwerk and David Bowie’s Berlin-era work showed that technology could shape not just sound but perception.”
AM: “Over time the relationship becomes more complicated because technology becomes embedded in everyday life. It has no innate moral compass but human’s usage of it shapes communication, politics, attention and memory. Our curiosity hasn’t gone away. If anything it has deepened. The same question remains: how does technology change the way we experience the world, and how can sound reveal those changes?”
CS: Looking at ‘Dazzle Ships’now, it feels less like a detour and more like an early attempt to think spatially and politically through sound. Did making that album shift your understanding of what music could do? And was there a moment when you realised that not everything you wanted to express would comfortably fit into a three or four-minute song?
PH: “‘Dazzle Ships’ was probably the point where we first allowed an album to behave like an environment rather than simply a set of songs. The radio broadcasts, coded voices and fragments of short-wave interference expanded what electronic music could do. The technology that we could finally access broadened our capabilities.”
AM: “We were fascinated by the idea that invisible signals – voices crossing borders, fragments of information drifting through the air – could become musical material. The UK was engaged in the Falklands war. Israel and Lebanon were at war. And the Cold War was still very much a dark reality. It was on the airwaves. It was in our heads and hearts.
“Those sounds suggested a landscape of communication networks and political tension that could be expressed through sound itself. At the time it confused people because it didn’t behave like a conventional pop record, but for us it was liberating. We allowed ourselves to float and transition between political musique concrète, ethereal emotional responses to those grounding brutal samples, and soaring dreams and hopes. It was spatial, conceptual and emotional. Something that could represent systems, atmospheres and technological landscapes, as much as love, fear and pain.”
CS: Fast-forward to now – working with planetary movement and orbital cycles means engaging with timescales that dwarf human experience. How does thinking at that scale change the way you approach composition? Does it alter your sense of pacing structure, or even what a “piece” of music might be?
AM: “Working with planetary movement immediately changes your sense of scale. Orbital cycles don’t usually make music, but they actually do correspond to human rhythms and narrative arcs. We are creatures of an orbiting planet but our musical compositions do not usually operate on these timescales.”
PH: “In a strange way it brings us back to our earliest experiments with loops and repetition – only now the loop happens to be a spacecraft orbiting a planet.”
AM: “That really shifts the way you think about composition. Instead of asking how a piece resolves after a few minutes, you begin thinking about how sound behaves over longer durations – how it drifts, transforms and accumulates. The music becomes less about individual moments and more about inhabiting a field of motion.”
CS: At this stage in your career, what made this feel like the right moment to take this step? Is this about curiosity, restlessness, scale – or something else entirely?
AM: “We are at a point in our lives where we can be whatever we want. Part of that is a return to our earliest days of exploring without boundaries. This project makes space central in a very literal way. In a conventional recording, space is part of the production language and usually – in real terms – very compressed. Here, space becomes the composition itself. The acoustics of the room, the placement of sound, the architecture of the environment and the position of the listener all shape the experience. The installation as we envisage it will never be the same for any performance. Cassini orbited 293 times around Saturn. There will be algorithms that randomly choose which orbits will be reproduced. Thus, ‘The Grand Ballet’ is NASA’s orbital data presented as an endlessly evolving audiovisual journey in time and space.”
PH: “In that sense the work connects with a broader artistic lineage – pieces like Christian Marclay’s ‘The Clock’, Brian Eno’s ’77 Million Paintings’, or even Andy Warhol’s ‘Empire’, where duration and perception become the real material of the artwork. Those works invite you to inhabit time rather than simply consume a piece from beginning to end.”
CS: Do you feel this move toward environmental and durational sound reflects something happening in electronic music more broadly – a shift away from releases and toward systems, environments and listening at scale?
PH: “Electronic music has always evolved alongside the technologies that produce it. In the early days that meant Dada machines and theremins, then tape machines and synthesiders; later it meant sampling and digital production. Now it includes immersive audio systems, spatial sound environments and new ways of experiencing music.”
AM: “At the same time, traditional formats are changing. The album cycle does not have the same centrality it once did, and people encounter music in many different contexts. That opens up interesting possibilities. Sound can now exist not just as a track or release, but as an installation, an environment, an experience unfolding across time and space.
“For us, exploring that territory does not feel like abandoning pop music. It feels more like extending the long conversation between music and technology that electronic artists have been part of for more than seventy years.”
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