ORBI — The Oscillating Revenge of the Background Instruments

With ORBI, bassoon, double bass, Hammond organ and percussion collide in a fearless mix of classical music, progressive rock, metal and film scores that ignores genre boundaries. At the concert where they presented their new album "The Age of Greed", the band takes the audience on a trip that goes from Mahler and Wagner to Metallica.

There are instruments, and then there are instruments. Some are born for the spotlight: the violin, trumpet or lead guitar, magnetic centerpieces that naturally pull the audience’s attention toward them. Others live more in the shadows: the bassoon, double bass, Hammond organ and percussion, the loyal laborers of rhythm and harmony who usually support while others take center stage. But what happens when the background instruments revolt?
 
That rebellion is called ORBI - The Oscillating Revenge of the Background Instruments - a Dutch quartet that gleefully overturns the hierarchy of ensemble playing. Their concert presenting the second album The Age of Greed was a declaration of musical freedom. Classical music, chamber music, progressive rock, metal, film scores and blues collided into something that didn’t need further categorization, it was exhilarating to witness.
 
A set of tracks, in arrangements by Marijn van Prooijen (a kind of 5th band member), performed by a group of classically trained musicians that have formed a band that’s 'guaranteed' lead-singer-free. A concept that might have appealed to Eddie Van Halen, who once complained about the LSD (Lead Singer Disease) both David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar were apparently suffering from. Here, nobody dominates the stage. Instead, the bassoon sings, growls and shreds. Bram van Sambeek’s instrument takes over lyrical melodies, vocal lines and astonishingly difficult guitar solos. Rick Stotijn’s double bass becomes both rhythmic engine and melodic foil. The Hammond organ of Sven Figee provides towering harmonic mass like a wall of distorted power chords, while Marijn Korff de Gidts’s percussion drives the whole machine forward with relentless momentum.
 
Listening to ORBI reminds you how musical curiosity works. When mainstream pop no longer nourishes you, you start searching elsewhere. For yours truly, that road lead toward opera and symphonic music. Wagner’s Ring cycle opened the gates to classical music for me, someone who grew up on pop, rock and metal. The movement also happens in reverse: once classical music’s borders begin to feel too confined, you return to rock and metal with newly sharpened ears. That journey lies at the heart of Bram van Sambeek’s brainchild. ORBI feels like the product of a musician refusing to choose between worlds.
 
The first ORBI album already hinted at the ensemble’s ambitions to bring classical music and rock together by three Metallica arrangements paying tribute to bassist Cliff Burton, whose fascination with classical harmony shaped pieces like Fight Fire with Fire, Orion and (Anesthesia) Pulling Teeth. The arrangements themselves are remarkable because they preserve not only the structure but the energy of the originals. Guitar riffs have long translated well to strings - Apocalyptica proved that already with Metallica on cellos - but ORBI goes further. Where many crossover projects eventually drift merely into atmosphere, making you miss the original versions, ORBI retains the aggression, momentum and dynamic force of the source material while genuinely adding new colors through the quartet’s instrumentation.

On their second album, The Age of Greed, ORBI continue along the path they have set out on, both musically and thematically. It is structured as a concept album, with the central theme being the current state of the world, in which everything – democracy, civil rights and the environment – is sacrificed to big money and the authoritarian tendencies connected with it. Dystopian visions of the future are nothing new in music (or art for that matter), they have produced some of its most powerful works. Maggot Brain by Funkadelic comes to mind. In Eddie Hazel’s ten-minute guitar solo (which will translate beautifully into a bassoon solo by the way - Ha!), the music moves from funk and soul into the realms of progressive and symphonic rock, traversing from Jimi Hendrix to Pink Floyd. Beyond its sound, the work endures because of its subject matter: the damage humanity inflicts upon the earth and the anxiety surrounding the future of our world. The same intelligence and curiosity that drive artists to ask (uneasy) questions about humanity’s future lie at the core of the The Age of Greed. It gives form to those fears, ideas and emotions and is therefore a heartening boost for anyone willing to listen.
 
At the concert of the album presentation, works by Prokofiev, Muse and Ennio Morricone sat naturally beside a startling suite in which Wagner’s Wotan’s Farewell from Die Walküre dissolved seamlessly into Mahler’s Totenfeier and Urlicht from the Second Symphony. (The moment when Loge is summoned by Wotan transitions quite naturally into the beginning of Totenfeier.) An arrangement that occasionally evokes the work of Uri Caine and the way he reconstructs Wagner and Mahler into chamber-jazz intimacy without sacrificing its emotional gravity.
 
ORBI’s performance was a kind of soundtrack of appropriate melancholy: dystopian, theatrical, darkly seductive and deeply cathartic. A perfect cross-section not only of the ensemble’s influences, but of an entire generation of listening habits in which Mahler, Morricone, Radiohead and Metallica coexist naturally on the same shelf. The colourful, diverse musical landscape that unfolded before us found its culmination in Metallica’s Fight Fire with Fire. The song exploded through the venue with authentic thrash-metal ferocity. It reimagined Metallica with such manic intensity that you half-felt compelled to start throwing chairs through the concert hall in sheer delight. A fast and furious rendition in which the old speed- and thrash-metal characteristic remained intact: an absurd quantity of notes per second. Astonishingly, that hyperactivity works perfectly on bassoon. Van Sambeek attacked Kirk Hammett’s lightning-fast solos with impossible agility, transforming the instrument into something between a concerto soloist and a shred guitar. The effect in this bassoon concerto for the metal age was virtuosic, hilarious and utterly liberating all at once - both musically dazzling and somehow deeply funny in the best possible sense.
 
Metal and classical share the same DNA: virtuosity, emotional extremity, architectural scale and theatrical grandeur. Wagnerian apocalypse and Mahlerian catastrophe are not far removed from progressive metal once amplification and distortion enter the equation. The emotional mechanism that powers film scores, opera, symphonic music and progressive metal are similar: sadness inflated into grand gestures so enormous they become strangely exhilarating. As Bram van Sambeek himself put it: “Sad music cheers me up". One believes him immediately (it’s basically my own premiss when cruising the musical landscape in search of new discoveries).
 
Technically, the concert was not flawless. ORBI initially struggled with some microphone feedback and balance issues - hardly surprising given the bass-heavy instrumentation and the precision required to amplify naturally softer instruments like bassoon and double bass. But once the sound settled, the ensemble unlocked a gorgeous sonic world.

At the end of the concert, during the handover of the new album to the band, the host mentioned a radio debate questioning whether The Age of Greed belonged on a classical music station. The question felt rather odd. For this concert proved, above all, that what may be important to marketing strategists and target-audience analysts is ultimately completely irrelevant to the listener themselves. Good music does not require border control. ORBI’s greatest achievement lies precisely in ignoring categories altogether and trusting the audience to follow. And follow we did - willingly, enthusiastically, into exhilarating new territories of sound.

ORBI - The Age Of Greed (album presentation) / Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ, Amsterdam, 13 May 2026

PROGRAM:
Ennio Morricone The Ecstasy of Gold 
Muse Unsustainable 
Sergej Prokofjev Suite nr. 1, op. 64 “Death of Tybalt”
Richard Wagner De Walkure WWV 86B “Wotan’s Farewell”
Gustav Mahler Symphonie nr. 2 “Totenfeier” & “Urlicht”
Radiohead Spectre 
The Doors The End 
Avenged Sevenfold Nobody 
Metallica Fight Fire with Fire  

ENCORE
Kurt Weill / The Doors Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)

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- Wouter de Moor