[3] Beginning as ambient and dub DJs in London, the Orb's early performances were inspired by electronic artists of the 1970s, most notably Brian Eno, Cluster, and Kraftwerk.

Paterson has been the only permanent member, continuing to work as the Orb with Swiss-German producer Thomas Fehlmann, and later, with Martin "Youth" Glover, bassist of Killing Joke.

Featuring colourful light shows and psychedelic imagery, their performances often incited comparisons to Pink Floyd, whose guitarist, David Gilmour, later collaborated with them on the album Metallic Spheres in 2010.

Alex Paterson began his music career in the early 1980s as a roadie for the post-punk rock band Killing Joke, for whom his childhood friend[5][6] Martin "Youth" Glover played bass.

[17] For its release as a single on the record label Big Life, the Orb changed the title to "A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld".

[6] The signature of the piece centres around the repeated phrases sampled from the voice of singer/songwriter Rickie Lee Jones, her spaced-out childlike ramble taken from a promotional CD released by Geffen Records for her 1989 album, Flying Cowboys.

[2] Falconer's and Weston's technical abilities and Hillage's guitar work allowed the group to craft panoramic sounds portraying aspects of space travel, including the launch of Apollo 11.

[14] The Orb promoted this single with a "legendary avant-garde"[28] performance on Top of the Pops where Patterson and Weston played a game of chess in space suits while footage of dolphins and an edited version of "Blue Room" ran in the background.

Weston integrated his technical and creative expertise with Paterson's Eno-influenced ambience on U.F.Orb, combining "drum and bass rhythms" with "velvet keyboards" and "rippling synth lines".

[8][31] Over the next year and a half, Paterson and Weston continued to produce "new" material, and the Orb left Big Life to sign a deal with Island Records.

[11] The Orb's first studio production on Island Records was Pomme Fritz, a chaotic EP noted for its heavy use of strange samples and its lack of conventional harmonies.

[32] Soon after production finished on Pomme Fritz, Paterson, Weston, and Orb contributor Thomas Fehlmann joined with Robert Fripp to form the group FFWD as a side project.

[39] American critics gave it great acclaim, including Rolling Stone who made it their album of the month, citing its symphonic flow coupled with the Orb's "uniquely British wit".

[32][47] Upon release, critics noted that Cydonia merged pop, trance, and ambient-dub music, which they felt to be a conglomeration of bland vocals and uninventive ambience that lacked the appeal of the Orb's earlier work.

[52] The Orb, now composed of Paterson, Phillips, and Fehlmann, with guest John Roome, accepted an invitation to join the Area:One concert tour with Moby, Paul Oakenfold, New Order and other alternative and electronic artists.

[53] Though the Orb were paired with more mainstream artists during the tour such as Incubus, Paterson and Fehlmann made their next releases a series of several low-key EPs for German label Kompakt in 2002.

The Daily Telegraph praised Bicycles & Tricycles as being "inclusive, exploratory, and an enjoyable journey";[57] other publications dismissed it as "stoner dub" and irrelevant to current electronic music.

[67] Beken described Living in a Giant Candle Winking at God as "self-consciously musically written and less sample-based" compared to the members' previous work.

In May 2009, the British Malicious Damage Records (run by the members of Killing Joke) announced the release of the Orb's ninth regular studio album Baghdad Batteries (Orbsessions Volume III) on 11 September 2009.

[75] In March 2010, Internet station Dandelion Radio broadcast a seventeen and a half-minute long Orb session track by Paterson and Fehlmann on the Andrew Morrison show.

In 2012, the Orb worked with dub musician Lee "Scratch" Perry to produce a reggae-infused album titled The Orbserver in the Star House, which was recorded in Berlin over a period of several months and features the single "Golden Clouds".

[81] The Orb's central figure, Alex Paterson, had early musical tastes and influences that included King Tubby, Alice Cooper, Prince, Kraftwerk, and T.Rex.

[2] The same night, Paterson was also inspired while listening to Cluster's Grosses Wasser and found that the steel works' "huge metal arms were crushing molten rocks in time to the music", which was something he'd "never seen, or heard, anything like it before".

[86] During production of Cydonia and Bicycles & Tricycles, Paterson's biggest influences were drum and bass and trip hop music, as seen on the tracks "Ghostdancing", "Thursday's Keeper", and "Aftermath".

[2] Even after the Orb began producing original material, they kept the same sample-heavy model for live acts by spontaneously integrating obscure samples into their pre-recorded tracks.

Their shows in the early 1990s would often be three hours of semi-improvised, continuous music featuring a wealth of triggered samples, voices, and pre-recorded tracks which were barely identifiable as the original piece.

[4] The Orb have used a wide variety of audio clips from sources ranging from McCarthy era speeches to prank phone calls by Victor Lewis-Smith to David Thewlis' apocalypse-driven rant from the film Naked.

[31] The Orb are lauded for their "Monty Python-esque levity" in their use of audio samples,[38] though NME asserts that Paterson "sabotage[s] his majestic soundscapes" with "irritatingly zany" sounds.

[91] Even during periods of label conflict and contractual limbo, the Orb found steady work remixing for artists including Depeche Mode, Lisa Stansfield, and Front 242.

The Orb's remixes from the early and mid-1990s feature a large number of comical samples, Progressive-Sounds describe them as "ahead of their time" and NME notes them as "not entirely incompatible with contemporary chilling".