I’ve always had a healthy, unabashed and unapologetic enthusiasm for the old school. My most prized possession is Backlog by Leftfield, my introduction to electronic music was all things City of Angels, I could properly pronounce (and spell) Underworld’s Dubnobasswithmyheadman from a techno-toddler age, and I’ve stopped myself short of hauling off and sniping Young American Primitive from eBay more times than I can count. Included in these raw roots and influences is a healthy dose of Orbital, who I still maintain walk on water, heal the sick and raise the dead. They have all the versatility of the ‘option’ key in Mac OS X. The masterpiece known as Halcyon + On + On remains a defining moment of electronic musicianship, the coup de grâce that transcended into mainstream, and inspired a whole new generation of artists, not to mention turning Kirsty Hawkshaw into an instant star. So you can understand why I was extremely pissed, cranky and upset to discover Orbital was disbanding in 2004, making the Blue Album a fantastic yet bittersweet finale.

Enter Long Range to the rescue. The side project of Phil Hartnoll along with Nick Smith, I’m ashamed as shit that I wasn’t keeping close enough tabs on their post-Orbital work. Granted Long Range just struck paydirt by having a track featured on Hybrid’s Soundsystem 01 and a remix on The Formula of Fear, their first full-length album Madness and Me was released back in 2007. Oddly enough it wasn’t Hybrid that turned me onto them — it was my attempts to track down the members of the Propellerheads trying to find out what they were up to, and I discovered that Will White had played drums for some of Long Range’s shows. It’s a side project that measures up well on paper, but these are some big shoes to fill.

All of the above is written to underscore my seriousness when I say Madness and Me actually makes up for the breaking up of Orbital. This disc leaves me so ridiculously dumbstruck, so mind-boggled at the ingenuity of sound design that, for the first time since Fluke, I’m content to chalk these sounds up to pure magic. I don’t want to know what they did. I don’t care what they did. I’m so engulfed by the completeness of the final product that I simply don’t desire to dissect it. It’s chilled out. It’s experimental. It’s breaky. It’s industrial. It’s epic. This is a finished, polished work without a touch of overproduction. I feel like I’m listening to Psykosonik’s Unlearn again for the first time. I just want to huddle in a corner and let my brain explode.