Music 1 - Richard Cook on the producers who call the tune

Producers have always been critical to successful pop music, but where they were once backroom boys unused to the limelight, they have become, like DJs, stars in their own scientific way. Artists are, presumably, still the ones who birth the original impulses behind music, but producers and remixers midwife the results so comprehensively that it often scarcely matters who started the sound. Their godlike role is chilling and remote. They operate like the bored inhabitants of a decadent Olympus, meddling in the affairs of mortal musicians, changing a whole composition with the twitch of one digit on a dial. Many performers with flagging careers pray to them to revitalise their sales, beating a path to the lonely darkness of the remix studio.

The celestially named William Orbit, once a more or less faceless artist himself, has become an exemplar of this superhuman race. Orbit has a knack for surrounding a familiar name with a fresh yet plausible facelift, and Sting and Madonna are but two of the majors he has helped out in recent years. A full diary of working for other people isn't always enough, though, and he has come up with one or two projects of his own. The latest is Pieces in a Modern Style (WEA), an album of interpretations that was trailed before Christmas by the unlikely hit single, Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings". Orbit has reworked some of his favourite classical bits, from Vivaldi to Gorecki via Beethoven, Mascagni and Ravel, and turned them into the shimmery, ambient, sci-fi, spooky-soundtrack music that is one of his most practised settings. It is at once a virtuoso performance and a ghoulishly empty one. Each interpretation is played by Orbit via synthesisers and samples, but the "playing" is like nothing the composers would have imagined. However the melodies are caressed, to whatever degree the lovely harmonies of Barber or the raindrop melodies of Erik Satie are recreated, the effect is coolly anodyne. It recalls the diligent young man in N F Simpson's One-Way Pendulum, who teaches a roomful of speak-your-weight machines to sing to each other.

All this might have provoked a certain amount of outrage 30 years ago. Walter Carlos had plenty of fun with his "Switched-On Bach" transcriptions for analogue synthesisers, and I seem to remember a great deal of huffing when a couple of rival versions of Mozart's 40th Symphony (cut to three-minute single length) battled it out over a mild pre-disco beat and managed to tickle the lower reaches of the charts. Orbit's choices are, on the face of it, less dependent on a taste for bourgeois kitsch, but the pieces by Barber and Gorecki are the classical tunes that Ibiza-goers might recognise as chucking-out music. At least he didn't have the temerity to attempt the other favourite of that ilk, Strauss's Four Last Songs.

Let's be fair. It's not really another clumsy example of a rock person trying to better himself (and us) with classical music. Orbit is quite a shrewd and knowledgeable man, perhaps the Brian Eno of his generation. But as with that boffin emeritus, some of his twilight projects are only of much interest to himself. Remixers have become bloated with their own importance in recent years, their names plastered ahead of the artists they are remixing, their interminable respray-jobs turning simple songs into repetitive rambles over headache beats. Orbit's classical bleepfest tries to evade that jigsaw approach and fashion something that stands somewhere between recital and evolutionary interpretation. Except he can't shake off the ghosts of the writers themselves. Unlike a jazz musician, improvising a new thing out of a familiar cloth, Orbit finds himself stuck with the same old notes. His modern style sounds like it might have come out of a Victorian musical box.

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