For Fans of Mike Oldfield

Ommadawn (1975) is where Oldfield fully trusted himself. The first side builds from a solo guitar sketch into something involving African percussion, uilleann pipes, and a children's choir, and the escalation never feels forced. Where Tubular Bells can seem like a curio, remarkable more for being made than for how it sounds, Ommadawn is simply beautiful. Start here and Tubular Bells will make more sense when you return to it.

Released in 1990 with no singles and no tour, Amarok is sixty minutes of unbroken music that refuses to be anything other than exactly what it wants to be. Oldfield was in a public dispute with his label at the time, and there are Morse-code insults to the Virgin Records chief executive buried in the mix. The record sounds like someone with nothing left to lose. It is dense, angry, funny, and astonishingly good. If you have only heard the pop Oldfield of the 1980s, this will reframe everything.

Both Oldfield and Jarre made their breakthroughs in the mid-1970s with long-form instrumental records that became mainstream pop hits in spite of themselves, and both spent the following decades absorbing every new technology (sequencers, sampling, MIDI, digital production) into a recognisably personal sound. Oxygene and Equinoxe are the Jarre equivalents of Tubular Bells and Hergest Ridge: made alone, built layer by layer, impossible to categorise.

Enya emerged from Celtic folk via the Clannad family and built her sound around layered vocals and synthesised orchestration, much the same palette Oldfield was using on Ommadawn and the The Killing Fields soundtrack. Where Oldfield is restless and sometimes violent, Enya is still. But the instinct is shared: ambient texture as emotional shelter. Watermark and Shepherd Moons are the starting points, and The Celts (her 1987 BBC soundtrack) is the one that Oldfield fans find most immediately familiar.