Customer Reviews

Ancient Dreams

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Patrick O'Hearn was one of the first "New Age" artists I discovered many moons ago. "Ancient Dreams" is still one of my all-time favorite albums of any genre. The moodiness struck a chord with me during a trying time in my life and it remains with me to this day. Putting this CD in the player takes me back to a time in my life when i needed an outlet for my darkness. And as a musician, I like to think I can see colors in sounds and this offering sends me all kinds of colors and textures. Even, at times, overwhelming me with it's landscapes - some of them alien, some of them from deep inside.

Do yourself a favor and at least sample this disk. My only complaint is that it is only about 30 minutes long.

Patrick O'Hearn's, "Ancient Dreams," is truly a wonder! This is such an extraordinary album that anyone who listens to new age music should not pass it up. The musical atmosphere is strange & mysterious, sparce yet rhythmic, evoking a sense of the deep and hidden passageways of dreams, ancient or contemporary. The music is timeless.

This is Patrick O'hearns first album. It came out WAAAAAYY back in 1985(I was just a toddler then). I first heard the title track and the dark disturbing masterpiece song Beauty In Darkness when I got his Private Music Collection in 1998 and O'hearn has since become one of my top ten all time favorite musicians.

The music on here is rather dark, spacey, and electronic, contrast to his post Indigo material which I like as well.

Give a listen to the haunting title track with those thundering drums combined with a spacey atmosphere, Beauty In Darkness with a dark almost like an approaching storm with. The opening track At First Light is a gorgeous song with haunting synthesizers combined with some tingling synths. I heard that the melodic structure of this song was sampled in a club hit ten years later with Robert Miles Children and Patrick was not too pleased. While I love children a lot, At First Light is a new age classic.

My only complaint is that this CD is only 32 and a half minutes long but the incredible quality of this timeless masterpiece makes up for it. This album is a new age classic and all fans of Patrick O'hearn, both fans of his acoustic medievel mid 90s material as well electroheads like me should have this one in their collection.

In fact every album by Mr. O;hearn is worth owning from this one all the way to his new album So Flows The Current.

I share the same enthusiasm as my fellow reviewers here. For a short period of time in the 80's we had New Age music. Which of course was a subjective category. It encompassed all sorts of kinds of musical styles ( usually instrumental). Patrick O Hearn might have held the title as the best of this era.

Wonderful soothing synthesizers with crashing, primitive percussions along with exotic flutes and other musical instruments from around the world tied together in a transfixing musical combination carrying the music along winding through your imagination. Turn off the lights and let yourself experience this CD with your imagination. Even after all these years I find this CD better than ever. Time has not dated it. It sounds as fresh and introspective as ever.

"Ancient Dreams," released in 1985, is the first "dark" New Age album I ever acquired, and it's still one of my favorites--juicy, complex and predominantly electronic. While filled with percussive textures, this is not mindlessly beat-driven club music; it's a fascinating, ever-changing and very intelligently crafted journey through mood and sound. One of the things I love about it is how seamlessly and elegantly Patrick O'Hearn manages to combine apparent opposites--heat and chill, denseness and light, drama and funk. It's truly a unique and deliciously striking brew of musical nuances--simultaneously relaxing and stimulating. In the liner notes, commentator Freff writes "Music wears a thousand masks, and exists for a million reasons. It reaches our heads, hearts, and our bodies. It can be gentle, pleading, angry, demanding, healing: as fierce as fire and as cold and dangerous as thin ice. It is so many things because we are so many things, inside. The most special music reflects our private selves." This is a perfect description of Patrick O'Hearn's keyboard and synth-driven compositions. For more electronic explorations of the dark and mysterious, try also the work of Tangerine Dream, Enigma and Amethystium.

"Ancient Dreams," released in 1985, is the first "dark" New Age album I ever acquired, and it's still one of my favorites--juicy, complex and predominantly electronic. While filled with percussive textures, this is not mindlessly beat-driven club music; it's a fascinating, ever-changing and very intelligently crafted journey through mood and sound. One of the things I love about it is how seamlessly and elegantly Patrick O'Hearn manages to combine apparent opposites--heat and chill, denseness and light, drama and funk. It's truly a unique and deliciously striking brew of musical nuances--simultaneously relaxing and stimulating. In the liner notes, commentator Freff writes "Music wears a thousand masks, and exists for a million reasons. It reaches our heads, hearts, and our bodies. It can be gentle, pleading, angry, demanding, healing: as fierce as fire and as cold and dangerous as thin ice. It is so many things because we are so many things, inside. The most special music reflects our private selves." This is a perfect description of Patrick O'Hearn's keyboard and synth-driven compositions. For more electronic explorations of the dark and mysterious, try also the work of Tangerine Dream, Enigma and Amethystium.

extremely well structured album, perfectly rounded, not your typical cheesy new age!!! The texture of sounds and melodies are purely mesmerizing (malevolent landscape...), the recording, wich is fairly old, is truly state of the art... True passionates of textural music, don't miss that cd...

I am astonished to just realize this was his first album. When you first get a Patrick album, the songs sound nice, but you don't love them immediately. You have to listen to each album every day for 2 weeks to fall in love with a few of the songs. I would call the style "Experimental Jazz-based New Age." Similar to Tangerine Dream, but the sounds here are not so exotic. The whole album is good; the title track is a masterpiece -- it contains every facet that makes Patrick's music great: A very clever experiment actually using a piano as a percussion instrument (I've never heard ANYONE else do it!), the little heartbroken trumpets, and his unique genius at playing the melodic line of a song super-slow. (Each note lasting many measures.) The album would be worth it just for this song, but the rest is good! Metaphor, Indigo, and Eldorado are my favorite albums of his (in order).

While this is not a new recording, and the big-hair insert picture certainly dates it, it was a very forward looking recording that came out in the 80's. I remember this recording fondly, and still listen to it. While the 80's electronics are "dated" by modern standards, they were cutting edge and popular at the time.

This music is a bit more somber than others from this period, but some cuts easily slice into the space music genre, with the subtle rhythms carrying the listener along. It is good music in the car or home, and definitely helped launch Private Music's label. I may be just getting old, but miss the 80's cutting edge labels and their wonderful instrumental music.

A wee bit o'history: In 1985, Ancient Dreams was one of the flagship releases by Patrick O'Hearn on what was then a relatively new recording label, Private Music, which was founded by a former member of the German electronic group Tangerine Dream.

Patrick O'Hearn was also no stranger to the music industry when he signed on with Private Music, having been a songwriter and (I believe) electric base guitarist with 80's new wavers Missing Persons. O'Hearn's ability to craft melodic lines for friendly fm pop radio with MP aided him especially well when Ancient Dreams was released, as it validated Mr. O'Hearn as an accomplished songsmith in his own rite, as well as give needed visibility to the Private Music label.

What works for Ancient Dreams is that the melodies he was able to compose for pop-music translate so well to this ambient or electronic or 'New Age' format (I think the term used nowadays is 'Modern Instrumental Music'). Unlike many of his peers who were releasing similar-genre music at the time, but which could be hard to listen to and not very interesting due to it tendency to drone monotonously, Patrick O'Hearn was able to take his melodic songwriting skills and apply them to non-vocal, ambient sonic textures, with the result being a much more listen-able experience, which allows for repeated listens as more and more can be heard in the music each time, a hallmark of good music in any style.

What does not work for Ancient Dreams is the 1980's production: big, dense, characterless percussion, dated and especially the clich`ed keyboard sounds, including synth brass, synth vocals and synth woodwinds. To some degree it is not fair to attack Ancient Dreams on this level, as Patrick O'Hearn was simply going with convention both technology and taste-wise at the time (To bolster my point, note the really, really, Really big 1980's poodle hair on a young Mr. O'Hearn on the original Private Music cd insert!) However, at the same time, it is the case that these sounds do really have a tendency to make the listener cringe, no matter how many times you hear them - this production sounded bad enough in retrospect when applied to pop / rock music of that era; it sounds horrible when used on such music as Ancient Dreams, as there are no vocals and the music is much more subtle than other genres, so the production 'cringe-factor' is even more obvious. This is a pity, as the music itself on Ancient Dreams still has a lot to say. But then again, more current collections by Mr. O'Hearn, such as on the excellent 'So Flows the Current' (2000) or more recent Glaciation (2007) also combine the austerity and subtle melodicism that Patrick is known for, but with instrumentation and production that will outlast the era in which they were made - perhaps Mr. O'Hearn himself cringes when he hears Ancient Dreams now, and took these thoughts to heart years ago when crafting his future albums, such as the ones I've just mentioned.

If you are a Patrick O'Hearn fan, none of the above criticisms will probably change your mind about what a great composer and musician he is, and probably you will not subscribe to my critique of this album. However, if you are a new-comer to Patrick O'Hearn's music, my advice would be to start with a more recent collection, such as 'So Flows The Current', where you will be able to really appreciate Patrick's stunning songwriting in a more modern and lasting sonic setting.