The seed of The Orb's tenth studio album was a twenty-five-minute track that began as a favour. In 2009, Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour released an online single, a reworked cover of Graham Nash's 'Chicago', to support Gary McKinnon. The Orb took that single and made a remix, then asked Gilmour to add fresh guitar parts. What arrived was not a tidy four-minute edit but a sprawling piece of ambient music that would demand a much larger frame. The Orb released Metallic Spheres on October 12, 2010.
One day at Dreaming Cave
Gilmour recorded his contributions in a single day in June 2009, at producer Youth's Wandsworth studio called Dreaming Cave. Youth, who produced Metallic Spheres, also played bass and keyboards and handled programming. Alongside Gilmour and Youth, The Orb's Alex Paterson completed the core trio. The session had the looseness of a one-off experiment: one guitarist, one producer, one ambient pioneer, and no plan beyond seeing what the sound could do.
The material from that day became a foundation. Youth and The Orb expanded it into a full album, released on Columbia Records on 12 October 2010. Metallic Spheres was not a tribute or a side project but a proper Orb record, blending ambient, electronics, dub and progressive rock. The album split into two parts: 'Metallic Side' running twenty-eight minutes and forty-two seconds, and 'Spheres Side' running twenty minutes and twelve seconds. That structure gave the long Gilmour session a natural shape.
Chart positions for an ambient record
The collaboration carried real commercial weight. Metallic Spheres entered the UK Albums Chart and climbed to number twelve, while on the UK Dance Albums Chart it reached number three. For an ambient record built from a charity single remix, those positions were remarkable. The Orb had spent decades orbiting the edges of British electronic music; here they landed near the centre, with a Pink Floyd guitarist pulling in listeners who might never have touched a dub record.
The origin story matters because it explains the album's strange warmth. The online single that started everything was itself a reworking of Graham Nash's 'Chicago', released in support of Gary McKinnon. So the chain ran: Nash's protest song, Gilmour's cover for a campaign, The Orb's remix of that cover, then Gilmour's new guitar lines on top. By the time Youth and The Orb stretched the session to album length, the music had passed through four hands and two causes, which is why it never sounds like a standard studio product.
A three-way credit and two sides
All tracks on Metallic Spheres are credited to David Gilmour, Alex Paterson and Youth. That shared authorship kept the album from becoming 'The Orb featuring a famous guitarist'. Instead it worked as a three-way conversation, with Gilmour's bluesy phrasing floating over Paterson's dub spaces and Youth's low-end pulse. The split into two sides reinforced this: the metallic half more propulsive, the spheres half more meditative, both held together by the same long guitar takes from that single June day.
Sixteen years on, the record still stands as one of the strangest entries in The Orb's catalogue. It began as a remix request and ended as a top-fifteen UK album, sold on the strength of an unlikely pairing. The fact that it was later remixed and partly re-recorded for a 2023 release only proves that the material had more life in it than the original sessions used up. Metallic Spheres remains a document of what happens when a favour between musicians is given room to grow.
What started with one online single became a forty-eight-minute album that charted across Europe, from the Netherlands to Belgium to Greece. The Orb, Youth and David Gilmour never repeated the experiment, which makes Metallic Spheres feel like a closed loop: a charity cover, a remix, a day in the studio, and then a full record that nobody had planned to make. In the end, the album's best trick was making a Pink Floyd guitarist sound like he had been orbiting with The Orb all along.