Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: Jan. 02 2001, 16:55 |
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I started thinking about this (phases in Mike's music, that is, not porn films, although as an aside, someone told me that there is more than one porn film using Ommadawn as a soundtrack...).
See, I don't feel that Incantations quite 'sits' with all the other 'old style' albums. The feel seems different. Maybe it's more bare or something. There's much more obvious use of synthesisers, for example...The sound of it, to me, indicates that a change is (or rather, was) starting to happen.
Platinum has some links with Incantations and some with QE2, but doesn't really seem to sit alongside either album. Guilty is perhaps the track that provides the 'missing link' between Incantations and Platinum...Five Miles Out again seems to be a little bit of one to stay on its own, although it has similarities with QE2 and Crises - I guess putting it in the same bracket as QE2 might work...
Discovery and Crises seem to make a sort of pairing - perhaps the influence of Simon Phillips as producer helped this. Islands doesn't quite fit - it seems a little bit more 'pop' than those two, as far as its songs go, although The Wind Chimes still has little hints back to the style of The Lake and Crises. The fact that several years separate Islands and Discovery seem to make a difference...Bits of it could be related to parts of The Killing Fields soundtrack, I suppose.
Then comes Earth Moving...I guess it's showing a big leaning towards mainstream rock and pop. The songs on Islands were doing that as well, but by Earth Moving, Mike seems to have refined that style a bit more. It could be put together with Islands, but the style has definitely changed in the time leading up to it (although that could be said about Ommadawn as well, as that seems to be more refined in its style than TB and HR...I've chosen to leave that alongside those first two though).
Amarok and Heaven's Open - I too see that these go together. I wouldn't necessarily say that Amarrok is best and Heaven's Open is worst (here comes another of these big opinion situations...  ) - I find the ties between them too close for me to be able to say that. They do indeed both show Mike's annoyance and frustration with Virgin, and that comes across...Both Amarok and Music from the Balcony are quite disjointed - themes come and go, then return again, like thoughts going in and out of a mad mind...there's also big experimentation with sound textures on both albums. On Amarok it's more acoustic textures that Mike is playing with, whereas on MFTB it's more samples that he's playing with(like that weird bit where the tune is played on a sampled monkey). The songs fit into this as well - Mike experiments with his voice, for example, and sounds like the heavily distorted guitar on No Dream (which seems much more 'fuzzy' than anything he'd used before) and the distorted slide guitar on Heaven's Open are brought in.
The Warner period (bennyboy's phase 5) does seem to be more varied. Ideas do return between albums to tie them together though - the dance influence on Tubular Bells III and The Millennium Bell, for example (of course, there was Guitars inbetween)...The orchestral idea explored on Voyager for Mont St Michel also returns for The Millennium Bell, especially wwith lake Constance, which goes into similar guitar-with-orchestra territory.
I agree that generally, his music from this period is more varied, at least in superficial style (I say that because there does seem to me to be an overall 'feel' that ties many of them together). Is this, as bennyboy says, Mike pushing himself, or is he just lost and unsure of his true musical identity?
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, Tim!