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**Orbital - In Sides**
★★★★☆

By 1996, the Hartnoll brothers had already established themselves as the thinking person's electronic act, the duo who could make ravers weep and rockers dance. But with *In Sides*, Phil and Paul Hartnoll delivered something altogether more ambitious – a double album that felt less like a collection of tracks and more like a manifesto for what dance music could become when it stopped trying to be anything other than itself.

The origins of *In Sides* can be traced back to the brothers' growing confidence following the critical and commercial success of *Snivilisation*. Where that album had seen them flirting with conventional song structures and guest vocalists, *In Sides* found them retreating into their Sevenoaks studio with a renewed sense of purpose. This was Orbital unleashed, freed from the constraints of radio-friendly running times and the expectation to deliver immediate dancefloor gratification.

The album opens with "The Girl with the Sun in Her Head," a 12-minute odyssey that perfectly encapsulates everything Orbital had learned about tension and release. Beginning with an almost ambient whisper, it gradually builds into something approaching euphoria, with layers of melody weaving in and out like dancers caught in strobing light. It's a masterclass in electronic composition, proving that dance music could be as emotionally complex as any symphony.

But it's "Halcyon + On + On" that remains the album's undisputed masterpiece. Clocking in at nearly ten minutes, this reworking of their earlier "Halcyon" transforms what was already a beautiful piece into something approaching the transcendent. The addition of Kirsty Hawkshaw's ethereal vocals – sampled from Opus III's "It's a Fine Day" – creates a sense of weightlessness that few electronic tracks have ever matched. It's the sound of summer festivals at dawn, of comedowns that feel like ascensions, of technology achieving something approaching grace.

The album's scope is breathtaking in its ambition. "Out There Somewhere?" ventures into darker territory, its industrial rhythms and distorted samples creating an atmosphere of urban paranoia that predicts the anxiety of the new millennium. Meanwhile, "The Sinner" offers a more playful approach, its bouncing bassline and scattered breaks suggesting the brothers hadn't entirely abandoned their sense of humor.

What sets *In Sides* apart from its contemporaries is its refusal to pander. This isn't background music for chemical adventures; it's foreground music that demands attention. The Hartnolls understand that electronic music's greatest strength lies not in its ability to soundtrack experiences but in its capacity to create them. Each track unfolds like a journey, with destinations that can't be predicted from their starting points.

The album's production remains staggering nearly three decades later. Every sound occupies its own space in the mix, from the sub-bass frequencies that threaten to shake speakers apart to the crystalline high-end that sparkles like digital fairy dust. It's a testament to the brothers' understanding that electronic music isn't just about the sounds you make, but how those sounds relate to each other in three-dimensional space.

*In Sides* arrived at a crucial moment in electronic music's evolution. House was becoming increasingly formulaic, techno was disappearing up its own conceptual backside, and the second wave of British rave culture was beginning to fragment into a dozen micro-genres. Orbital's response was to create something that transcended genre entirely – music that was undeniably electronic but refused to be constrained by electronic music's supposed limitations.

The album's legacy is impossible to overstate. It proved that dance music albums could be more than collections of singles, that electronic artists could be album artists in the truest sense. Its influence can be heard in everyone from Underworld to Boards of Canada, from Aphex Twin to contemporary producers who weren't even born when it was released.

Today, *In Sides* stands as perhaps the finest example of what electronic music can achieve when it stops apologizing for itself. It's an album that works equally well through headphones in a darkened room or booming across a festival field at 3am. Most importantly, it's an album that still sounds like the future – not the future we were promised, but the one we actually got, complex and beautiful and occasionally overwhelming.

In an era when attention spans are measured in seconds rather than minutes, *In Sides* remains a powerful argument for the transformative power of patience.