Mount Florida, the duo of Edinburgh techno stalwart Twitch and multi-instrumentalist M.P. Lancaster, wish you to relive your first Orb experience. Where were you when you first heard Minnie Riperton's reed-thin sopranino trill emerge from the ambient nebula that ever remains "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Centre of the Ultraworld." Or did you come under the thrall of the good Dr. Paterson when he prescribed Rickie Lee Jones' waffling on about heavenly purple-and-red condensations of water (taken aurally as "Little Fluffy Clouds")? Or perhaps the Victor Lewis Babylon and Ting phone prank endeared the ambient house pioneers to the dread Bart Simpson repressed within you.

Whatever that moment was and is, and as precious as it remains, Twitch and Lancaster want you to remember the moment right before that. Arrived Phoenix is an album designed to pop your ambient cherry again, as though it had never been popped.

Arrived Phoenix is like pre-post-rock. The idea of returning to the instant before some cultural shift took place is certainly intriguing. Billions of dollars are spent building and operating the Immenso-Cyclotron 76, a county-sized contraption designed to accelerate some Fludoovium molecules to light speed and smash them against an upturned beer can so that physicists can recreate the instant of creation. Alas, billions of dollars and one hideously irradiated beer can later, they're still no wiser as to what went on before the instant of creation.

Across the campus from the physics block, and away from the futile mathematics of the primal nothingness of pre-existence, we find copies of Arrived Phoenix (one for each culture studies student, since the disc comes out at arts faculty-friendly mid-price). Each student can dissect and analyze the components of the compositions and work out which elements were milling around undifferentiated before the Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld solidified ambient house and chill-out, and thus gave a stoned order to an immensely chaotic cultural state.

"In There," Arrived Phoenix's leadoff track, grabs Brian Eno's Another Green World and sprinkles atop some whibble from a BBC2 announcer that's had some oh-so transformative experience whilst absorbing some tedious piece of Mahler, or some such starchy can-do-it-all. "Space, Echoes" lifts a harmonica line (similar to the one the Orb's used on "Little Fluffy Clouds") and adds some tight-as-a jelly-jar Renegade Soundwave snares. Twitch and Lancaster leaven the repeated "Lost in Space" vocal sample with some expert Leftfield dub effects. "Ultimo" follows suit until the deep dub breaks away into some intense drum-n-bass roll-outs. But so as not to really disturb any headz out there, the duo slide in a heavily processed female snippet, similar to the one Mental Generation incorporated into their bliss-dub "Café Del Mar" 12-inch.

More digi-dub as we drift down "Jamaica Street" yielding to the post-rock rawk guitars and Jazzanova percussion intricacies of "Celebration." "Yo La Kinski" is all Hammer-Horror menace (drones, batacuda drums, stabbing synths, and Eno-ish nonsense singing) and further convicts Mount Florida of being wholly derivative. But no one will forgive them for "Postal" and their baffling inclusion of someone's four-year-old loose approximation of Gang of Four's guitarwork on "To Hell with Poverty."

Arrived Phoenix will not be the reliving of your first Orb experience. Unfortunately, Twitch and Lancaster have omitted a key ingredient: humor. And though concluding one's debut album with a reading from Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent may endear one to the Nation-devouring Godspeed You Black Emperor few, it's hardly a comic moment. The Orb have never lost their Goon Show sense of surreality. From posing as Marcus Garvey or as Ming the Merciless, LX Paterson and Thrash have imbued their dubby chill with a trickster spirit. Twitch and Lancaster have taken their aural sculpturing far too seriously. Perhaps rather than trying to recreate what we've long since processed and continue to enjoy, Mount Florida ought to come down from their solitary Pensacola peak and seek out an enlighteningly playful Loki experience for themselves.

-Paul Cooper