The music of Damon Albarn's Dr. Dee project is "spookily evocative."

The opera, about the life of an Elizabethan scientist, first opened last year at the Manchester International Festival, and has been turned into a studio album which is described as "visual" and "evocative" by collaborator Mike Smith.

"It's spookily evocative, that's what I think when I play it. It's very visual. You can almost see it, it's that evocative. There's a dramatic element to the music on its own," he said.

Conductor André de Ridder agrees with Mike, calling Dr. Dee "emotional."

"It's very deep and emotional music. It's kind of magic but also mysterious subject matter but as it sinks in it grows on you. It's wonderful and it opens up new rooms and spaces each time you perform it," he said.

Damon previously said he wrote the opera because of his ''strong emotional connection'' to the character: "I've got a really strange emotional connection - it really gets to me, that haunted, magical England. It's something that really stirs me in an irrational way. It's just amazing how much color there is in his ideas. Just imagine the English now if we had kept that spirit in our hearts."