Vinyl Age

In 1985, Lucia Hwong showed a great deal of promise on her debut album House of Sleeping Beauties, which acknowledges the composer/arranger's Asian heritage but isn't traditional Asian music. Rather, this LP finds Hwong (a Chinese-American from Los Angeles) combining Asian music (Chinese and otherwise) with new age and ambient elements. Creatively, House of Sleeping Beauties was a step forward for both Asian music and new age…

Enigma’s complete catalogue is set for a special coloured vinyl makeover. On 4 May, Universal Music will release The Colours Of Enigma – The Vinyl Series: all eight studio albums and the acclaimed hits package LSD Love Sensuality Devotion: The Greatest Hits as strictly limited edition coloured vinyl. Five of these albums will be released for the first time on vinyl: Le Roi Est Mort. Vive Le Roi (1996), The Screen Behind The Mirror (2000), Voyageur (2003), A Posteriori (2006) and Seven Lives Many Faces (2008). Only the debut MCMXC a.D (1990), which spent over 200 weeks in the US Top 200 Billboard charts, 1993’s The Cross Of Changes and the latest album The Fall Of A Rebel Angel (2016) enjoyed releases on wax previously.

For fans of Jean-Michel Jarre, Chronologie contains more of Jarre's proven ability to blend familiar sounds in the New Music tradition into unusual, inventive compositions. The uninitiated will find Chronologie's blend of 19th Century classical musical themes with pop, rave and rap sounds downright danceable…

The second of two collaborations with Kevin Braheny inspired by the desert, this album pays homage to the Edward Abbey book of the same title. It inadvertently became a memorial to that Southwestern nature writer when Abbey died shortly after the music was recorded. Featuring some powerful work by Michael Stearns, this album taps into the psychological depths of stark Southwestern landscapes through a subtle set of soundscapes depicting the hidden dangers, unseen gifts, and intoxication that the desert promises.

Although it features the beautiful recorder of Leslie Penny and the Chieftains' Paddy Maloney playing the uilean pipe, Ommadawn didn't gain Mike Oldfield the success he was looking for. The album was released in the same year as the David Bedford-arranged Orchestral Tubular Bells and nine months after Oldfield picked up a Grammy award for the original Tubular Bells album…