Music: Round and round again

It's a grey weekday lunchtime in glamorous East Anglia. Cambridge town centre is brought to a resentful standstill as a series of huge pantechnicons disgorge their cargo. Leathery-looking men with loud laughs, and eyes that have not so much bags as whole sets of matching luggage under them, hump a succession of huge boxes into the municipally-supported music venue. The catering woman struggles upstairs with crates containing piccalilli and other toxic delicacies.

The particular nature of the performers seems to have little impact on the time-honoured ritual of the rock'n'roll circus coming to town. For the two men contemplating 10 years on the road in an unfurnished dressing room illuminated by brutal strip lighting are not hardened rock beasts; they are Phil and Paul Hartnoll of electronic trailblazers Orbital. Phil (gleaming scalp; well-trimmed goatee; three children) did not sleep a wink on the overnight trip from Wolverhampton because he worries too much about the tour bus crashing. His more carefree younger brother Paul (luxuriant locks newly trimmed; clean-shaven; as yet unreplicated) is contemplating taking a stroll along the river before the soundcheck.

Despite exhibiting none of the fratricidal tendencies of the Gallaghers, or the creepy telepathy of the movie-making Coens, these Kentish soul brothers have developed a sibling mythology every bit as lustrous. When they play live - trademark torchlight spectacles dancing firefly-style, bodies bobbing beneath like hatchlings in an electric nest - they exude a heady sense of familial intuition which spreads out to encompass the whole of their audience.

People on this tour are hearing songs from Orbital's new album - their fifth - for the first time, and yet electric tingles of anticipation and recognition still pass back and forth between the Hartnolls and their audience. Not because Orbital are repeating themselves, but because their music still communicates as directly as it did when they first translated Acid House and clubland communion into a gig-going environment. All that's gone from this transaction is the novelty.

While familiarity has not bred contempt among the populace at large, the critical community has been less understanding. A recent gig was greeted in these very pages with the damning verdict "all that's missing is the pipe and slippers".

"That's what we're facing now," says Paul, resignedly. "Ten years ago, it was [assumes fascinated voice of Sixties science documentary]: `What are these strange computerised sounds?' Now it's: `Oh, more electronic music. That's not very original.'"

"It's funny," Phil adds, not looking particularly amused, "no one ever says that about Blur or Oasis. They can go on ripping off the Beatles for ever and nobody says: `Oh God, it's this again.'" (I thought everyone said that but obviously Orbital don't move in such sceptical circles.) They're not ones to moan, but they have been catching it from all sides lately. "Muzik magazine disses us just for being old," Phil continues mournfully.

He has put his not-so-ancient 35-year-old finger on it there. While the date of the Allman Brothers' first heart bypass remains an enduring source of fascination in the tolerant world of rock criticism, techno is not supposed to have a history. As bizarre as it may seem for a music which traces its roots back to Kraftwerk as clearly as Led Zeppelin traced theirs to the blues, entrenched - and frankly outmoded - futuristic rhetoric insists that every year must be year zero. Hence, to critical ears at least, it's a young man's game.

But if all Orbital's music (or anyone else's for that matter) had going for it was that it was new, then there wouldn't be much point to it anyway. The same way their new album The Middle Of Nowhere unfolds in all sorts of unexpected and delightful directions - stretching and furling like a shy sidewinder making its getaway - so the duo's achievements become more interesting with time, rather than less.

When Orbital first appeared on Top of the Pops early in 1990, "dance acts" were not expected to play live or make long-playing records. "That was never a problem for us," Paul explains, "because we'd grown up on New Order and Cabaret Voltaire, who did both." With their first two Untitled albums (aka "The Green One" and "The Brown One"), and a burgeoning live reputation taking them from the ground-breaking Midi Circus package tour of 1992 to the main stage at Glastonbury three years later, Orbital nimbly vaulted every obstacle in their path.

Traditional constraints on electronic music could no more restrain them than the M25 motorway they took their name from could contain London's urban sprawl. Whether playing eight minutes of "Satan" on Later - at last, something Jools Holland couldn't plinky-plunk along with on his infernal boogie-woogie piano - or storming the Royal Albert Hall in 1996, nothing could stand in their way. A particularly treasured memory of the latter event was the sight of red-coated RAH custodians shining torches into the eyes of transported aficionados to try to get them to step down off their seats and stop dancing, only to have these cheerily incorporated into the revellers' interior lightshows.

Orbital's determination to take their music to places it was never meant to go reaches new heights with The Middle Of Nowhere. As well as its demonically infectious Rolf Harris stylophone intro, and a remix featuring bagpipes from the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, the album's first single "Style" boasted a vocal sample from early-Eighties pop reprobates Dollar - not previously a name to drop in techno circles.

"Our parents used to run a pub," Paul explains, "and my mum used to collect the old seven-inch singles from the jukebox man - he'd just have thrown them away otherwise. As a result we've got about a yard of early-Eighties pop singles to dive into if it ever happens that we're stuck for a sample."

When they do things like this, is it to break up the surface of the music or to give people a familiar hook to hang on to? "It's just a matter of whether it's something that makes me laugh," Paul explains, turning his attention to the new album's greatest sampling coup - track two's demonic relocation of the sinister theme to Eighties children's TV current affairs staple, John Craven's Newsround.

"The John Craven sample has a lovely old-fashioned synthesiser quality to it," he beams, "and when I find something like that, it just makes me happy."

Despite its rather ominous title, The Middle Of Nowhere is probably Orbital's most felicitous record to date - forsaking the edgily compelling widescreen paranoia of its predecessors, Insides and Snivilisation, for a new mood that is upbeat to the point of jauntiness.

So where did this new cheerfulness come from? Phil speaks fondly of his new home in Brighton. Paul points to a change of studio - not some lush, Caribbean fleshpot, but "a fresh room with a window and a bit of a view", a hundred yards down the road from where they used to work in Old Street. What's the view like then? "Just a light-well that is two floors down," Paul smiles. "It's not much, but it's a start."

`The Middle Of Nowhere' is on ffrr