Post by Barrington on Jan 1, 2018 6:39:08 GMT
I'm not a connoisseur of Mike Oldfield , I have Tubular Bells of course and have heard one or two after that , so the majority of his 20 odd albums are a mystery to me except this one.
So there I was just starting my early retirement when my sister asked if I could look after her pets for 6 weeks while she and her husband visited friends in various parts of the world.
Sister's house was an isolated villa in the hills of Andalucia , I took no music with me , evenings were spent outside on the patio looking down at twinkling lights of distant villages.
There was a CD player and a handful of CD's I used to thumb through them and put them back not interested , one night I stuck this one on (I liked the cover ) , talk about an album hitting the spot , I played it nearly every night sipping wine and dreaming.
The boss of Warner Records suggested to Mike to write an album based on Arthur C Clarke's book The Songs of Distant Earth , released in 1994 , the album is a melodic , new age vibe with a few sound clips .
Clarke himself wrote a few words about his book in the cover and finished with :
"Since the finale of the novel is a musical concert, I was delighted when Mike Oldfield told me that he wished to compose a suite inspired by it. I was particularly impressed by the music he wrote for The Killing Fields and now, having played the CD-ROM of The Songs of Distant Earth, I feel he has lived up to my expectations.
Welcome back into space, Mike: there's still lots of room out here."
So there I was just starting my early retirement when my sister asked if I could look after her pets for 6 weeks while she and her husband visited friends in various parts of the world.
Sister's house was an isolated villa in the hills of Andalucia , I took no music with me , evenings were spent outside on the patio looking down at twinkling lights of distant villages.
There was a CD player and a handful of CD's I used to thumb through them and put them back not interested , one night I stuck this one on (I liked the cover ) , talk about an album hitting the spot , I played it nearly every night sipping wine and dreaming.
The boss of Warner Records suggested to Mike to write an album based on Arthur C Clarke's book The Songs of Distant Earth , released in 1994 , the album is a melodic , new age vibe with a few sound clips .
Clarke himself wrote a few words about his book in the cover and finished with :
"Since the finale of the novel is a musical concert, I was delighted when Mike Oldfield told me that he wished to compose a suite inspired by it. I was particularly impressed by the music he wrote for The Killing Fields and now, having played the CD-ROM of The Songs of Distant Earth, I feel he has lived up to my expectations.
Welcome back into space, Mike: there's still lots of room out here."
