A remix done properly is an argument. It says Here is what your song was actually about, and you may not have known. Alex Paterson has been making that argument for close to forty years, usually with a dub delay and a stolen sample where the punchline should be, and Auntie Aubrey's Excursions Beyond The Call Of Duty pt.3 is where the evidence gets collected. The series went dormant for the better part of two decades before Liquid Sound Design revived it, and Part 3 has existed since 2020 as a double CD. What it has never been is vinyl. Fans have been asking for a proper pressing in the comments under the release for years. On September 4 they get one: a limited opaque white 4xLP at £63, shipping on or around September 7.
Twenty tracks of classic, new, and previously unreleased remix work spanning three decades, all recognizably built in the same workshop. Coldcut and Hex open with Timber. System 7's Davy Jones' Locker arrives as sun-dappled ambient dance nostalgia, which is a very specific and very Orb-shaped feeling. David Harrow appears twice, once as the Housewives on LSD mix of Steppers and once on a Revolution rework featuring Bim Sherman. The Gyuto Monks of Tibet get an ambient mix. Francesca Lombardo, Violeta Vicci, DF Tram, Sarmacja, Gaudi, and Sendelica fill out a tracklist the label tags across ambient dub, downtempo, chillout, space rock, and trance without any of it feeling like a stretch. There is also a track called Phone Chat Line, which is exactly the kind of thing you expect buried in an Orb record and would be disappointed not to find.
The peak is the Killing Joke remix of European Super State, built as something close to an imaginary spy thriller score with Jaz Coleman's voice doing what it does and label founder Martin Youth Glover on bass. Youth recurs throughout, including on Conscienta with Lara Smiles. The other standout is Transit Kings, the outfit that included Jimmy Cauty of the KLF alongside the original Orb lineup, whose The Last Lighthouse Keeper gets a remix leaning into the melancholy rather than sanding it off. That restraint is rarer from Paterson than people admit. Twenty tracks is a lot and the middle third sags, with a few pieces built for particular dance floors in particular years that never aged into home listening. Most people will end up with a playlist of about twelve, which is what people do with compilations regardless of what reviews pretend.
Michael Rendall mastered at Meridian Studio. Art and design come from Simon Ghahary, whose Blue Room work shaped the visual world Orb records have lived in for years, and whose cover here carries the title The Big Bark. The eight-panel digipack CD represses at £17, digital runs £13 in 24-bit, a slipmat is £15, and organic cotton shirts land at £27 with a later September ship date. Everything signed is already gone: the test pressing, the 4xLP, all thirty hand-signed CDs, and the bundle with the canvas bag. Vinyl mastering genuinely matters on ambient dub, where the noise floor is load-bearing, and that is the honest argument for £63 on a six-year-old CD. Anyone who owns the digipack is buying the object. Anyone who does not should start with the digital and see whether four sides earn the shelf.
