Ommadawn
| Ommadawn | ||||
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| Studio album by Mike Oldfield | ||||
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Publication |
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| Label (s) | Virgin Records | |||
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Format (s) |
CD, LP, MC |
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Title (number) |
3 |
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running time |
36 m 44 s |
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Mike Oldfield and Tom Newman |
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Studio (s) |
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Like its predecessors Tubular Bells and Hergest Ridge, Ommadawn is a largely instrumental music album , which was composed, produced and mostly recorded by Mike Oldfield in the summer and autumn of 1975. It reached number four on the UK charts shortly after its release in late October 1975.
Emergence
After Oldfield had impressively demonstrated with the groundbreaking success of Tubular Bells and its successor Hergest Ridge that instrumental rock music could also be sold in the 1970s, at the end of 1975 he put together his remaining ideas from that time and now moved into his own manor- Studio in Chipping Norton to record a third album. As a title he chose Ommadawn , which is equivalent to the Irish term "amadán" (or: "fool", "fool").
Unlike Tubular Bells , which impresses with its variety of topics, the first part of Ommadawn is dominated by a kind of competition between two very different topics that determine the entire musical material. While the melancholy opening theme is characterized by a high degree of individuality, the counter-theme has more of a hymn-like character - consequently it is sung by the choir in the movement finale. In a way, this way of composing is reminiscent of the classical sonata form . In the large-scale finale of Part 1, Oldfield brings the two themes together, with the addition of more and more instruments, drums, choirs and the highly emotional playing of the distorted electric guitars to achieve an enhancement effect. Oldfield upgrades his album by giving space to an excellent foreign musician: With Ommadawn , Paddy Moloney did what he had already done perfectly in his band Chieftains : he played an Irish bagpige wind instrument with the Uilleann Pipes , which is characteristic of the Sound of this album was. However, Oldfield also introduced another sound component to Ommadawn that he would use again and again on later albums: African drums. The latter is noteworthy because in the first half of the 1970s so-called world music did not play the role in the music industry that it played about ten years later. For Ommadawn , Oldfield invited the musicians of the South African drum band Jabula ( IsiZulu : "joy") to his studio, which had found asylum in England during the apartheid period . The first movement / the first LP side of Ommadawn ends with a fade-out from Jabula lasting over forty seconds . Towards the end of the first movement you can also experience the resolution of the album title, because there the choir sings “ta me / an amadán le cheoil” which means nothing other than “I am the fool of music”.
While the Uilleann pipes - / guitar - duet of Oldfield and Moloney was recorded live in the middle of the second set (albeit after some 40 attempts and a half bottle of whiskey , as Oldfield 1981 the magazine Musician Music News revealed in an interview), were the At the beginning of the second LP side by Ommadawn (with the exception of the bonus title and the above-mentioned Oldfield / Moloney duet) put together piece by piece and again used repetitive sound textures and half-speed recording technology, with Oldfield playing the previous recordings at half speed and he played normally, as he revealed in the same interview. In the end, the guitar parts he has played in this way are twice as fast and virtuoso as if they had been recorded with conventional recording techniques.
As a special feature, Ommadawn contained a small extra track by Mike Oldfield and William Murray with the title On Horseback after the end of the second movement (however, Ommadawn remains Oldfield's shortest studio album). In December 1975, Oldfield released the single In Dulci Jubilo with On Horseback as the b-side; the single reached number 4 on the UK Singles Chart in January 1976.
Oldfield was actually planning a kind of Ommadawn II with the album Amarok - both the title and the cover photo are a reminder of this. In the course of the recording an independent, completely different concept developed.
Alternative versions
In 1976, Oldfield made “Ommadawn” suitable for the four-part LP set Boxed Quadrofonie and remixed in the course of this. Some sound tracks with instruments have been removed, while others have been given an upgrade in terms of overall level. However, new tracks were not recorded.
Excerpts from Ommadawn with additional synthesizer tracks were used by Mike Oldfield for his music for the NASA documentary The Space Movie .
In 1981, Oldfield presented an adaptation of Part I during his live performance in Montreux , including a 5-minute drum solo ( Live At Montreux 1981 ).
In 2010 the album was released in a completely new stereo and surround mix as well as enriched by a previously unreleased "Lost Mix" from 1975 as CD, deluxe CD / DVD and vinyl LP on Oldfield's new music label Mercury Records .
In 2013 a club remix called Ommadawn (Mike Oldfield & York Remix) was released on the album Tubular Beats , a remix album that was created in a collaboration between Mike Oldfield and Torsten Stenzel from the band York .
Track list
- Ommadawn - Part One - 19:23
- Ommadawn - Part Two - 13:54
- On Horseback - 3:23
Web links
- Mike Oldfield Discography Ommadawn. In: Tubular.net (English)
- Tubular World - overview of various editions
- Reviews of Ommadawn on the baby blue pages