ACP Recordings presents The Ideal Condition, the solo album from Paul Hartnoll—his first major release since he and his brother disbanded their group, Orbital, three years ago. From their early success with, 'Chime' in 1990, Orbital became one of the most acclaimed electronic artists of the next decade. They made seven albums, and their live shows ground breaking both in terms of performance and production became a legendary fixture of the festival circuit around the world and particularly at Glastonbury, where they performed for the final time in 2004. Work on The Ideal Condition began that same summer. “I wanted to do something different from what I’d done before, that was the point of not doing Orbital,” says Paul, “It just took time to discover exactly what that was…”

What evolved, whilst recalling the cinematic sensibilities and crowd-shaking rhythms of Paul’s earlier work, is a collection of songs that takes those instincts and moves them into new and at times experimental terrain. “I started trying to piece it together like a novel, each song being a chapter and building it up in the same way a plot line might do. I can’t honestly say it has a narrative from beginning to end, although it does strangely feel like a concept album without a concept.” The most obvious conceptual shift is that the balance of this record is tipped in favour of acoustic (as opposed to electronic) sounds. As Paul explains, “I wrote the whole album and then realised there were aspects of this that weren’t gonna work unless it was done with real instruments.