Oldfield's relationship with Virgin Records had become increasingly fraught. As a result of ongoing arguments about his contract terms, royalties and advances he decided to create an album designed to both please his fans, and annoy executives at Virgin. Virgin had been trying to convince Oldfield to release a sequel to Tubular Bells, possibly because of the cachet associated with the name, particularly as Oldfield's contract was nearing its end, with three albums left to deliver to the company.
Amarok was designed as a single piece, which made it more difficult for Virgin to produce a section for radio-friendly airplay or single release. Given its length of approximately one hour, it was also extremely unlikely the album could ever be played on popular radio. Oldfield has never performed the piece live in its entirety, though he has played excerpts; excerpts have also appeared on artist "best-of" collections and samplers.
Oldfield had expressed his displeasure at Virgin's lack of promotion of his works on a number of occasions,[citation needed] and Amarok can easily be seen as his riposte to their perceived indifference: an almost unmarketable album that still showcased his talent as a composer and performer. Amarok, along with Heaven's Open (Oldfield's final album for Virgin) can be seen as an emphatic and dismissive farewell to the record company.
In Australia the album was released in a double pack with Tubular Bells.[4]
Oldfield's previous works featured the artist playing a wide variety of instruments. This continued with Amarok, including (in the spirit of techniques such as bricolage and the ethos of Musique Concrète) a number of items such as shoes, spoons, a Hoover vacuum cleaner and the "contents of aeromodeller's toolbox". Though tubular bells are used on the album, they are listed as "long thin metallic hanging tubes" in the liner notes.
The work has many influences from African music, mainly through the use of both vocal and percussion elements.
Many fans do claim that Amarok is to be considered "Ommadawn II. Oldfield himself has said as much: "It's not Tubular Bells II; if anything, it's Ommadawn II".[5] Many of the same people that were involved in the creation of Ommadawn: Jabula, Clodagh Simonds, Bridget St John and Paddy Moloney also appear again.
In addition, William Murray, who co-wrote the song "On Horseback" for Ommadawn, photographed the Amarok cover photo and wrote the short story included in the liner notes. Murray used David Bailey's Ommadawn cover photograph as an inspiration and Tom Newman created the brass lettering that accompanies the photograph on the album cover.
Oldfield has said that Amarok was an experiment to see if he could again create an album without the aid of computers, which he had used more increasingly in his work. He said that he wanted to focus more on the musicianship, playing all of the instruments himself, by hand.[6][7] However, slightly contrarily, he has also discussed the role that Amiga computers had in the album's creation.