* William Orbit

PIECES IN A MODERN STYLE

(Maverick)

William Orbit toiled in relative obscurity as a solo artist, techno remixer, and trance-pop producer under the pseudonyms Torch Song Trilogy and Bass-o-Matic before being hand-picked by Madonna for her Ray of Light album, which earned him a Grammy and a deal with the material girl's Maverick label. And now he's an in-demand producer -- the Don Was of the post-techno era -- who specializes in helping rock artists like Blur break into the electronica racket.

For his first post-Grammy solo effort, Orbit pulls a Wendy Carlos and puts together an album of "classical" music, or synthesized interpretations of various classical pieces. The ambient stylings of Pieces in a Modern Style place the disc somewhere in the realm of old-skool chillout. And Orbit deserves praise for selecting iconoclastic composers, including John Cage and Polish spiritualist Henrik-Mikolaj Górecki (not, incidentally, the blockbuster tearjerker Symphony No. 3). But the new-agey musical results are, well, new-agey. And, even worse, the glacial synthesizers Orbit deploys on Barber's Adagio for Strings -- which has been remixed into a dance hit in Europe -- and the Largo from Handel's Xerxes make both pieces sound like the incidental music from a porn flick.

-- Patrick Bryant