The technological expertise Mike Oldfield invests in his music is its most singular and redeeming quality. Building great clustered cathedrals of sound from instrumental solos is a difficult process, requiring much patience and a firm grasp of one's ultimate goals. But there are pitfalls inherent in being one's own orchestra, which Oldfield has yet to overcome. His contrapuntal tapestries often move sluggishly, principally because his bass work is haphazard and his smallest rhythmic units ill defined. Harmonically and melodically he is firmly entrenched in 19th-century European music, and while he writes with grace and charm, the homogeneity of his instrumental voices results in a flat, almost antiexpressive ambience. It's as though the expansiveness of the music's intent were being continually undercut by the constricted circumstances of its execution. Oldfield is purveying head music, trancelike and soporific. In the right setting, Hergest Ridge will doubtless sound attractive, even profound. But Oldfield's piecemeal approach invites a piecemeal response, and this listener finds himself marveling at the process rather than admiring, in a very real sense, a work of art. (RS 172)

BOB PALMER