After two albums that were harshly criticized, “Heaven's open” and Tubular Bells II ”, in 1994, Mike Oldfield, very fond of science fiction, decides, for his next project, to take as a base a novel by the famous writer Arthur C Clarke, "The songs of distant Earth." Mike Oldfield already included in his previous album "Tubular Bells II", a fragment entitled "Sentinel", a short novel by Clarke, which then served Kubrick as the basis for the realization of that masterpiece that was "2001 a space odyssey" , and that Clarke himself would later recompose that short story to write the novel of the same title.
Although this album mixes passages from the book, with others that are not, the truth is that the final set is quite homogeneous as a whole. Even most of the themes are linked without continuity solution, as if it were a large suite.
As for the sound, Oldfield definitely opts for electronics, since the entire album is built with keyboards, samplers and computers, not forgetting, of course, the guitars, which there are here and very well executed. Ethereal keyboards and very suggestive melodies, dotted with those crystalline guitars, which give a very apparent final result. Many people criticized the abuse of electronics on the disk (there are no real batteries, as far as I know, everything is simulated), and according to them, it gave it a very artificial air and a “New Age” sound to the ensemble. I think the result was frankly good. Yes, it is a "commercial" album, so were "Crises", "Islands" or "Discovery", but they were not bad. For me, he uses this electronics very accurately in this album, but in my opinion in later works such as "Tr3s moons" or "Light and Shade", which are definitely albums "with sound" New age "and clearly inferior to" Songs of. . ”
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