You Can't Find ORB On The World Wide Web, But You Might See It Tagged In Skate Parks

It's a serious struggle to find ORB on the internet. There's a UK DJ duo dubbed The Orb that comes up in most rudimentary searches, and it poses a bit of an issue for the Geelong boys. "Someone bought The Orb's records. Oh wait, they bought an ORB record sorry, thinking it was The Orb, and complained to us about that. They sent the record back and everything," laughs Jamie Harmer. "What an idiot," someone pipes up in the background.

Harmer, Zak Olsen and Daff Gravolin are sounding off their names every time they answer a question due to a bad phone connection, but it doesn't often work. It turns out that the name ORB was chosen because it's "three letters, three band members, sounds powerful" someone starts to explain, but a loud "and it's easy to tag everywhere!" drowns out the answer.

"They sort of are real interested in what it would sound like. I showed them the clips and they really like the clips."

Growing up together, "we all used to skate together, and old skate movies kinda introduced us to cool punk music and stuff," explains Gravolin. As similar as their influences may be — you'll hear a lot of doom, psych rock, prog and garage on their debut LP Birth — Harmer's musical education varied slightly from that of Olsen and Gravolin. "Well, I guess I didn't sort of automatically hear all the music," Harmer starts off tentatively. Both of his parents are deaf, and it was his older brother who first got him hooked. "My older brother was pretty into hip hop, he was like a rapper and stuff. So I was real into hip hop when I was in like primary school. But then, yeah. I just got into skating and got into music through skating, as a bunch of music people do." He's nonplussed about his parents being unable to hear the result of his work with ORB, "It's sort of the norm to me. But they do talk about the fact that they'd like to hear it. And they sort of are real interested in what it would sound like. I showed them the clips and they really like the clips."

It's taken almost a year since completing the album to release Birth, which dropped on 1 Jul and sports just five tracks - albeit five tracks that average six minutes long, with Electric Blanket clocking a stellar 16:03 minutes. "When we did it, we didn't have a label to put it out. We didn't know if someone was going to or who was going to do it and we wanted to wait to see if we could get someone from overseas to get it out. It worked out in the end," explains Olsen. The day was saved by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard's own label Flightless. "It wasn't like a big thing, we've known those guys for a little bit and they wanted to put out some of our older band's stuff - the Frowning Clouds - but that never really happened. It just seemed like a good one to do with them. So it didn't seem like this big 'oh my god we signed with King Gizzard' or something. It was just sort of our friends helping us out," muses Olsen. "We're allowed to do what we want to do [with our music], and we wouldn't do it with them if we weren't!"