Feel free to sit back, relax and space out again: The Orb have returned.

The land of chill-out music has lain fallow since 1997, the year the most recent Orb album, Orblivion, was released. And that, arguably, wasn't even an "ambient" album, at least in the conventional Orb sense. Now, after record-label entanglement delayed its release, Cydonia — the latest concoction to spring from the multi-dimensional mind of one Dr. Alex Paterson — is being offered for public consumption, starting Tuesday (February 27).

Its flavors are many.

"It's a bit more songy, a bit more poppy," Paterson said from his West London flat, where he lives with his girlfriend and their newborn daughter. "I didn't want to make it sound too corny, though."

Exhibit A for the new Orb songcraft is "Once More," Cydonia's first single, on which Dr. Alex manages to squeeze into the four-minute format enough dreamy mood and pensive texture for several tracks.

Japanese singer Aki, who appears on three songs, provides an added element of otherworldliness with her breathy, floating vocals. Paterson then slows the tempo down to the familiar ambient-dub pace he loves best on "Promis," a cut that seems to mine the soil of the album's title, which refers to a purported ancient city on Mars that looks like a face when viewed from a distance.

"There's a really good book called 'Planetary Mysteries,' written by Richard Grossinger," Paterson said, sifting through the shelves of his library when queried about Cydonia. "I picked this up around the time of 'Blue Room' " — from the Orb's 1992 album, U.F.Orb — "and all my sort of UFOlogy sh--. It talks about the actual logistics of how an object like a face can be created by natural erosion, which is totally impossible."

Two more tranced-out dubby tunes, "Ghostdancing" and "Turn It Down," follow "Promis," before "A Mile Long Lump of Lard" launches into a churning swirl of stomping madness. "Centuries," with Aki's goddess voice atop again, heads back down to the roots, exploring the ambient-house territory that Paterson himself defined nearly a decade ago and which has since spawned a genre unto itself.

Paterson referred to "Lard" as "industrial techno, but with a mad back groove to it." He said Cydonia, his first release without engineer Andy Hughes since U.F.Orb, represented several new directions for the Orb. "Rather than make it some kind of 4/4 out-there techno music, which is pretty much what we've done in a lot of respects, it's very much in the same sort of experimental side as Orbus Terrarum," he said, referring to his 1995 LP.

Although Cydonia sags a bit toward its close, it's buoyed by the drum'n'bass tune "Thursday's Keeper," which is fueled by a variety of reggae samples, as well as the multi-tiered, epic closer, "Terminus," which slowly bubbles up from the gurgling ocean floor to emerge as waves of classic Orb ambient grooves.

For his part, Paterson is pleased with the album, but more than anything he's just happy to still be relevant.

"I'm really, really lucky that people are actually interested in what I'm doing," he reflected. "Ten years ago I never even thought it would go this far."