Matt
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Posted: June 11 2008, 04:52 |
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A Biography including some comments from Mike was posted prior to the release of Light + Shade. Since this seems to be now difficult to find on the net without the aid of www.archive.org I thought I would post the text here for tb.net posterity!
Light + Shade - Biography 2005
"That's the trouble," Mike Oldfield sighs. "I really don't fit into anything categorisable."
Defiant and proud to this day, the man behind the phenomenon of Tubular Bells, a teenage prodigy turned one-man band revolution who has defied all manner of movements while creating one of his own, has continued to go his own way. From turning his hand to maverick pop, explorative rock, progressive ambience, orchestral manoeuvres, Celtic and African taints (well before both forms of music came into vogue), chill-out sophistication and designing his own internet-based Virtual Reality games (with soundtracks, of course), not forgetting penning the theme to the world's most iconic horror movie The Exorcist and the soundtrack to equally powerful The Killing Fields, Oldfield is a singular character.
In fact, he doesn't even consider himself, "a normal musician. I'm a technician who gets ideas and translates them into sound." But how do you label that sound? Might it be named, as one fan posted on the internet, Oldfield Progressive?
At this juncture, the man has arrived at a double album project that expands on both the ambient chill-out ("though I hate those terms!" he laughs) side of his brain, which he's called Light. And then there's the darker, moodier counterpart, namely Shade. "Two sides of my musical personality," he concludes.
What has emerged is an enduring mix of simplicity and complexity - from elements of electronic dance (Quicksilver, Slipstream, Romance) to Closer's bluesy serenade, from The Gate's uncanny, varying shades of man-machine melancholy to Tears Of An Angel, which flow from stirring orchestral minimalism to a soothing guitar passage, to African-tinged chorus to a stinging guitar coda. Despite First Steps' 10-minute duration, Light And Shade is Oldfield in bite-sized form, taking in numerous vistas (much like his two Virtual reality games). But if you ask its creator where Light And Shade slots in to the canon of his 33 years and 22 albums of solo work, he can only sigh again. "I hit the 'go' button and see where I end up," is his response. "I often say this, but I feel like the messenger. The inspiration comes from within. I have to slog through some hard work to get it out, but I'm experienced enough now to know that, when it's me making the music, it's usually rubbish, but when I have the muse, it flows."
In the context of a timeline, Light And Shade comes after a three-year period of designing two Virtual Reality games, Tres Lunas (2001) and Maestro (2003). "That felt a bit like a sabbatical from music. Then I felt it was about time that I got back to making pure music. When you have a complete blank page, the best way to start is to have a really good look around, and in those intervening three years, technology has advanced and most studios are selling off their old mixing desks and multitrack machines and " Going Virtual ". So I spent a good few weeks trawling around, and I realised that my studio too was virtually obsolete, and that I could do virtually all the recording and mixing in fact everything apart from live instruments using computer software. So a truck and eight hefty chaps came and took everything away...I wasn't scared, just excited about what would replace it. ( A large train set perhaps ! )
It's magnificent what you can do. It's almost intuitive; you think about what you want to do, then it's a few clicks and bingo, it's done!
The Guitars and piano are of course still hand played "alone, at home, you see. Right back to 1971, when he was assembling the demos for what became his solo debut Tubular Bells (16 million sales and still counting..), Mike worked painstakingly in his Tottenham bedsit, using equipment lent by his first employer, the inimitable ex-Soft Machine founder and solo dilettante Kevin Ayers. Mike was a 16-year old guitar virtuoso in Ayer's off-the-wall backing trio The Whole World, circa 1970-71, which followed Mike's own nascent, folkier beginnings. With this new album, he's gone full circle. Light And Shade was also constructed in the contemporary version of a home studio in his music room in current Buckinghamshire, namely two computers (specifically a Mac deploying Logic Audio to a PC with FL Studio software, also known as FruityLoops, plus numerous plugins).
"The basic framework is mostly programmed. But I have this guitar sound, or several guitar sounds actually, so I make sure that guitar is on most everything. Though I wanted a couple of tracks to feature just piano - even though I'm a pretty lousy pianist!"
Initially, Mike confides, he planned to create "a big, complicated album, a bit like one of my earlier works, like Tubular Bells, which had 30 to 40 different sections. It was a bit like Monty Python - "And now for something completely different!" From beautiful to crazy, and back again. But doing it like that seemed to date it, back to the seventies.
I'd heard a CD in the series of chill out compilations by Buddha Bar, in Paris - the two-CD set was called Dinner and Party, with two different genres of music for two different moods. Though I didn't like that much music on that Buddha Bar CD, I thought I'd do something similar in that format."
Searching for detailed insight into the Oldfield persona, though, is always a challenge. "I can't describe what I do in words; I do that with music," he maintains. Sometimes, when he does use words, it backfires; you can bet that those who love Tubular Bells, in its original incarnation or its sequels Tubular Bells II (1992) Tubular Bells III (1998) and 30th anniversary re-recording Tubular Bells 2003 would wish to think of it as its creator does, namely "a symphonic Monty Python."
But as Mike adds, "there's still been nothing like it that album." And so he has progressed, only obeying his own muse. He's had to stay true to that muse, even when the whole music industry changed around him in the seventies, when punk shoved him out of the spotlight after a series of albums that built his reputation as a composer and multi-instrumentalist par excellence. "With punk, it felt like the musical world in general couldn't think of how to continue in that way, i.e. progressive music like Tubular Bells ) so the best way ( was )to destroy it all completely, which personally I
think was a disaster." He goes as far as blaming punk for yob culture: "you can bet your life that, for those people who beat up others on the street, their hero will be Johnny Rotten rather than me," he declares.
He also confesses that he couldn't easily grab the spotlight back during those years: for a long time, he was too nervous to play live: "back then," he confides, "I was psychologically unstable...seriously mentally disturbed. I had panic attacks and paranoia, which took 20 years of psychotherapy, and EST, to get over that. Now I have the strength and personality to stand up and present myself."
Along with his increasing confidence, all the while juggling personal and creative issues, Mike is willing to break down his work; so here's a track-by-track; Light And Shade revealed...
'LIGHT'
Angelique:
"That's the name of one pre-set on one of my synths. As usual, I start off by just building the music up, and this piece turned out to sound angelic. I can't explain how it happens, as I say I just hit the buttons. I emerge from my studio every three days with a track and I'm exhausted! It feels like giving birth."
Blackbird
"I wanted a track with just piano, using one of the last surviving acoustic instruments, my 1928 Steinway. The title comes from one of my motorcycles; I have a garage of 180-mile an hour machines, including a Honda Blackbird. It's a slower track, but the title goes with it the way that Stanley Kubrick used 'Blue Danube' in 2001: A Space Odyssey. When I'm riding, even when I'm going fast, time goes into slow motion. I love working with machines, but then I'm off on my super bikes. I tried flying, and got my license, but it's too stressful. Motorcycles are so relaxing."
The Gate
"I wanted to use the virtual vocal software called Vocaloid. If you take the raw sound, it's not that good, but through various plug-ins, you can make it sound beautiful. The title comes from my grandfather, Michael Liston, who was from Cork. I knew he'd disappeared one night and returned three years later, but then I discovered that he'd been drafted into the Munster Fusiliers during WW1, and fought in Ypres in France, where the Menin Gate memorial was built after the war. Visit the museum in Ypres and see what remains of the trenches... for me, this track got exactly that mood."
First Steps
"This is compiled of pieces from my Virtual Reality game Tres Lunas. When you begin the game, you're alone in a desert in front of a cactus, and when you move off, this piece of music plays. Robyn Smith, a musical direstor and keyboard player I know, helped me arrange this."
Closer
I heard a hymn at a funeral during my trip to Ypres, and discovered it was called Pres de Toi I liked it so much that I made a Celtic version too. But the strong bagpipes didn't really fit the record I was making, so I turned it into a blues."
Our Father
"This is originally a tune from Tres Lunas. I worked on it around the time the pope died, and what a fascinating and wonderful life he had; when he died, it didn't feel like he was gone, and it all just seeped into my consciousness, and ended up with this title. For me, it encapsulates the whole man's lifetime, and his death.
Rocky
"That's the name of our horse. He's a beautiful Arabian colt, who always comes to see me and gives me a hug. If we leave him without gelding him, he'll become this really impressive black stallion."
Sunset:
"In Maestro, my second Virtual Reality game, there's a specific tune you can only listen to when you reach the winning level. Here, I made a variation on it, but this time around, I was thinking about a chill out album, so I thought it would be nice to call it Sunset."
'SHADE'
Quicksilver
"To me, this is not dance music, it's music with a dance beat. In this particular case, I wanted to recreate movement underwater, with dolphins and bubbles. When I lived in Ibiza, I saw dolphins on the bow wave of a ship, which was special."
Resolution
Where I live, in Chalfont St. Giles, there's a memorial to Captain Cook. I'm a real Trekkie and Captain Kirk was based on Captain Cook, whose ship was called Resolution, which travelled to the Antarctic. I made the music sound like ice. But when I was recording, it was the same time as the Iraq war, and somehow all the bits and pieces merged together and that track came out."
Slipstream
"I contacted FL Studio and asked if they minded me working on one of the demo songs for their FruityLoops software, because I really liked the riff. They said, absolutely, yes please, and that turned into Slipstream."
Surfing
"I overlaid tracks of my vocals mixed with virtual vocals from a software package called Vocaloid , which has a very robotic sound, and this track popped out."
Tears Of An Angel
"This track is about the feeling you get when someone is really down, sad, or unwell and you are unable to do anything to help. I was making an operatic kind of track and this was my first use of Vocaloid. I've mixed in my voice too, which makes a nice, thick choral effect."
Romance
"The first tune most people learn when they start to play Spanish guitar has these two sides, a minor key and a major ckey. Because I was trying to make a dance version, the major key didn't work, so I ended up with the dark side of romance. When a love affair goes wrong, and couples are hiring lawyers to attack each other."
Ringscape
"Another track from Tres Lunas. It comes from a scene when an owl takes you on this journey, across a desert, down a tunnel and into an icicle world. Robyn Smith helped me arrange this one as well."
Nightshade
"Christopher von Deylen and I decided we'd work on a track of each other's, so I play guitar on his album of his band Schiller, and he played bass and drums on this track. "
Besides Robin Smith's involvement, Christopher's the only guest. The rest is all me."
Biog
Martin Aston
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"I say I say I say I say, what's got three bottles and five eyes and no legs and two wheels"
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