Incantations

Artist: Mike Oldfield
Type: Album
Release date: 1978
Run time: 72:52
My Rating: 8

1. Part One (19:08)
2. Part Two (19:37)
3. Part Three (16:58)
4. Part Four (17:01)

Comments

Mike's last 70s uber-instrumental album before he started breaking his music up into smaller tracks is, I think, heavily influenced by the orchestral version of Tubular Bells he collaborated on a few years earlier. The most obvious results being the album's extensive use of strings, and the fact that its instrumentation is almost perfectly suited to being performed live - the acoustics suggest much of it was recorded in a larger space than the usual recording studio (it was actually recorded at Mike's home).

Although I referred to this above as an instrumental album, there are long passages of vocals, somewhat unusually for Mike's early work. The vocals take the form of poems - notably from Longfellow's "The Song of Hiawatha".