Mike Oldfield

condition (records/cover): EX / VG+ (light edges wear and creasing)

CBS Aston Pressing. Gatefold sleeve.

Released October 1978, the fourth proper Mike Oldfield studio album and the first double of his career. Incantations was recorded across nine months at Througham Slad, the cottage studio in Gloucestershire Oldfield had built after the Ommadawn sessions, and remains the most ambitious of his long-form pieces. Four sides, four parts, ninety minutes of music, all of it played and overdubbed by Oldfield with a small cast of guests: Pierre Moerlen on tuned percussion (of Gong), Sally Oldfield and Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span on vocals, Mike Ratledge of the Soft Machine on synth and a chamber ensemble drawn from London session players.

The compositional method is closer to American minimalism than to anything in 1970s progressive rock. Phasing patterns are introduced and held for ten or fifteen minutes, slowly transformed through orchestral colour and timbral substitution. Part Two sets a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Hiawatha text to a long sequence of female-voice rounds. Part Three uses a Ben Jonson Hymn To Diana setting and resolves into an extended instrumental coda. The whole record is more austere and more sustained than Tubular Bells or Ommadawn, with passages closer to Terry Riley and Steve Reich than to anything else in Oldfield's catalog.

The original vintage Virgin UK 2LP gatefold pressing on VDT 101, cut at Utopia Studios and pressed at the CBS plant at Aston Clinton, with the Utopia lyre etched into the runouts. Oldfield's most overtly classical record and one of the strangest things ever to chart in the UK top twenty.