William Orbit has left the building, or rather the studio, at the age of 69, departing this world with the same unhurried elegance he once applied to a drum machine. Born William Mark Wainwright in 1956, the son of teachers who had clawed their way into the middle class only to watch their boy reverse the process by leaving school at sixteen to squat and consume Mars bars with acid, he spent the rest of his life proving that the right sort of noise could elevate almost anything.
He began, as so many English experimentalists do, in a disused school with a synthesiser and a pair of like-minded dreamers, forming Torch Song. The results were interesting in the way that early experiments with electricity were interesting: occasional sparks, intermittent power cuts, and the faint smell of something overheating. Then came the Strange Cargo series, ambient records that drifted past like expensive fog, and Bassomatic, which briefly persuaded the charts that house music could be both fascinating and rhythmic.
The real trick arrived when Madonna, seeking reinvention after a period of professional turbulence, hired him to produce Ray of Light. Suddenly the Queen of Pop sounded as if she had been left overnight in a particularly stylish planetarium. The album collected Grammys the way other people collect parking tickets. Orbit had performed the producer’s highest service: he made a superstar sound as though she had discovered depth, while ensuring the beats remained sufficiently propulsive that nobody actually fell asleep during the discovery.
He repeated variations of the miracle for Blur’s 13, All Saints’ “Pure Shores,” and assorted other clients who arrived seeking transcendence and left with something that would play nicely in both clubs and elevators. His own classical-electronic album Pieces in a Modern Style climbed the charts, proving that Barber’s Adagio could survive a night on the tiles and still look presentable at breakfast.
Orbit was the rare producer who made the technology sound human and the humans sound slightly more expensive. He never shouted. He merely adjusted the atmosphere until everyone else sounded better for having breathed it. In an industry devoted to the loud and the temporary, he specialised in the luminous and the lingering. The silence he leaves behind is, characteristically, rather well produced.