By 1992, as they’d gone from the edge of a DIY rave scene similar in nature to punk (low cost of entry, indie label distributed, off the industry’s radar) to outstripping that phase’s commercial and cultural boundaries and then heading off into “What next?” territory.

Unexpectedly hitting Top of The Pops with the bubbling morse code techno of Chime, the duo’s first album had then been recorded in the same home studio, the family then located in Sevenoaks, a quiet spoke on London’s commuter wheel.

For its follow-up – much to the chagrin of Paul – they relocated to a pre-gentrified Shoreditch, a then sketchy part of the capital, but the ultimate effect on both of them was catalytic.

If what had become known simply as the Green Album was, they said, “A mix of everything you’ve ever done”, its successor, made in collaboration with former Shamen engineer Mickey Mann, had an entirely new backstory.

Suddenly, as well as the external stimulus provided by touring, Orbital were routinely clubbing and drawn into the mesh of the free party scene.

With perspectives altered courtesy of spending time in haunts like Megadog, they were ready to make something for the, “Oddballs and weirdos”, they newly recognised were very much their clan.

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Unofficially christened the ‘Brown Album’ (a clue that this was before the time of search engine ubiquity), its scope was grand, almost symphonic, but also unpolished.

Opener Time Becomes felt like it had arrived from the Twilight Zone, whilst the dubby Planet Of The Shapes had scratchy rust and the eerie, sampled tones of Paul McGann in Withnail And I whispering: “Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day.”

It seems almost crass now to talk about visions when most of the scene’s protagonists were living weekend to weekend. However, tracks like ‘Halcyon + On + On’, both Lush episodes and Impact (The Earth Is Burning) are with hindsight transcendent, the reedy acid sirens of the latter sounding a timely environmental warning that was ignored by many.

In the crosshairs of authority, this was in many respects the underground’s overground peak, but regardless of your tribal loyalty – whether it was to seminal labels such as Warp, Plus 8, R&S, Tresor et al – it was meaningless to deny that Orbital sounded like almost nothing from any of them.

It’s hard to decide whether this expansive four-disc retrospective either distracts from that legacy or gives it the space it deserves to be fully marveled at.

Possibly the most interesting tranche is a suite of live material culled from a gig at New York’s Limelight club, the results a more intimate snapshot from an era not long before the brothers made Glastonbury their spiritual home.

Of the rest, there’s a welcome outing for the reworkings made while in session for John Peel’s eclectic radio show, whilst Underworld, CJ Bolland and Dutch producers the Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia each work Lush into their own unique, urgent shapes.

By the time they were done making the Brown Album, Orbital had discovered themselves fundamentally changed by the process of its creation, an outcome that would’ve been impossible without taking the jump from bedroom to bedlam.

A high-water mark in nineties’ British electronic music, it remains also a very human record, one framed by an idealism which seems naïve now, but that more than three decades on still has joy to share with the uninitiated.