Mike Odlfield Hergest

Since the days of Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the guitar/bass/drums trio has been convened by visionary tone scientists as a laboratory for music of primal power and tonal subtlety. ON COMMON GROUND features three such players. Mike Sopko has explored the frontiers of the guitar with Los Lobos and Dosh, Thomas Pridgen. Laswell, like Sopko a Midwesterner, here transmutes the industrial crash and hum of the region into music of muscular authority. Even followers of the protean career of composer, instrumentalist and conceptualist Tyshawn Sorey might be surprised by the oceans of primal rhythm he conjures here. Together, the sounds brought into being by these 3 improvisors are at once grounded in a deep inquiry of traditions that span space and time while cracking open a window onto eternal radiance. This is fearless music, the kind that can only be made when master musicians meet ON COMMON GROUND.

For Islands, Mike Oldfield gathered a host of musicians to further his run of more mainstream-sounding albums. The album includes vocals by Bonnie Tyler, Kevin Ayers, and Max Bacon, as well as saxophonist Raphael Ravenscroft (famous for his work on Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street"), along with the album's producer and former Yes member Geoffrey Downes…

Little Mike & the Tornadoes don't alter their musical approach on Payday at all, but they don't need to - they deliver driving Chicago blues with no frills and lots and lots of passion. The group doesn't just churn out the same old covers, either - they tear through a set of 12 originals that are written in the style of classic '50s and '60s blues. Occasionally their songwriting falters, but never their performances. Every song is delivered with conviction, and Little Mike positively wails on both the piano and harp.

Mike Oldfield's groundbreaking album Tubular Bells is arguably the finest conglomeration of off-centered instruments concerted together to form a single unique piece. A variety of instruments are combined to create an excitable multitude of rhythms, tones, pitches, and harmonies that all fuse neatly into each other, resulting in an astounding plethora of music. Oldfield plays all the instruments himself, including such oddities as the Farfisa organ, the Lowrey organ, and the flageolet. The familiar eerie opening, made famous by its use in The Exorcist, starts the album off slowly, as each instrument acoustically wriggles its way into the current noise that is heard, until there is a grand unison of eccentric sounds that wildly excites the ears…