“Matter of fact it’s all dark”

I suffer from an affliction, most common among men of a certain age, whereby every few years I feel compelled to return to the early catalog of Mike Oldfield (the first four albums). But lately, having been feeling fidgety and unwilling to leave well enough alone, and confronted with my longstanding belief that even though the musical materials making up his Incantations are among his very best, the studio version is just too damned long. It’s 72 minutes, and a couple of sections in particular are endlessly repetitive. There’s a reason, in each case, for the repetitiveness…but in listening to the whole thing, one’s ears reach the point of “okay let’s move on now shall we” sooner than the point of that repetition cements itself.

Something like that.

So I edited it.

I cut it down to about 54 minutes. For the first half (parts 1 and 2), I largely followed what I assume are Oldfield’s own edits as heard in the live version on Exposed (including the omission of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th stanzas from his setting of Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha). To help myself out, I gave titles to sections (without creating any track breaks) which ended up running as follows:

1. The Waxing (5:19)
2. The Reflections (3:09)
3. Diana 1 (3:57)
4. The Ebbing Tides (3:54)
5. Diana 2 (3.22)
6. Hiawatha (6.46)

In the second half, I was a little more creative. I moved a few pieces around (notably, the synth-pennywhistle-led section whose main phrase is 10 beats long), and (the part I most regret) shortened Oldfield’s brilliant guitar solo by quite a bit:

1. The Spark (2:12)
2. The Phases (3:37)
3. The Waves (1:17)
4. The Resolution (7:36)
5. The Waning (1:44)
6. The Rising Tides (6:44)
7. Cynthia (4:39)

Two sections worth hearing in full on their own were shortened or omitted. The first one, as noted, was the extended guitar solo (titled “The Phases”) cut nearly in half, while the second is the extended flute solo near the end of the first part (titled “The Breaths”)…which is now an imaginary single.

I couldn’t find a place for the short near-reggae-ish section in part 3. Oh well.

Incantations (parts 1 and 2, edit)
Incantations (parts 3 and 4, edit)
“The Phases“
“The Breaths”