HERGEST RIDGE

Well said, this is obviously a legendary album by multi instrumentalist Mike Oldfield and I have to admit that I am not a big fan of his music even though I have many albums of him. Actually it's for a simple reason: because Mike is the seventies musician where I knew prog music at the first time. So, I had couple of his albums in the forms of CD as well as cassette. For Hergest Ridge I only have the cassette version. Honestly this is not the cassette that I regularly play as at first I was not quite familiar with the kind of music Mike plays especially with this album. A friend of mine during college tiem in Bandung, West Java, always played the music of Mike Oldfield whenever he studied in the evening for next day exam. I was with him at that time when he played the Tubular Bells album. I could not afford to listen to that kind of music where to me was a bit of boring as only rarely the triable sound of THING comes up every one minuet or so. What a boring music!

Fortunately this Hergest Ridge is not as bad as Tubular Bells as the music is quite varied in terms of style and composition with main structure lies on the keyboard-like sound and unique guitar sounds of Mike Oldfield. I can not quite differentiate, really, between part 1 and 2 as they both alike. The music is ambient in nature and You won't be able to guess on the direction of the melody as it sounds like a free flow melody that does nt form something really memorable. So to me the key to enjoy this kind of music is listening to the subtleties of the sounds produced segment by segment of the track.

Overall, it's a good album as you can get various kinds of instruments that flow in an ambient mode throughout the album. Keep on proggin' ...!

Peace on earth and mercy mild - GW