When did new age music become cool? The mellow tones of new age were once the province of spas, wellness centers, yoga studios and hippie bookstores. These days, new age records – particularly the more rare LPs and cassettes released in the 1970s and 1980s – are a touchstone of cool. Younger record collectors have been rediscovering vintage new age records by musicians such as Iasos, Laraaji, Steven Halpern, Constance Demby, Michael Stearns and Suzanne Ciani. A wave of recent well-received reissues, coupled with a wave of younger musicians releasing brand new records in the genre, are keeping the flames of new age music alive.
Some record stores are finding it hard to keep new age albums in stock. At Amoeba Records in Berkeley, California, a new generation of listeners are cleaning out the dusty new age bins. “It used to just be old Berkeley hippies and quiet, unassuming, middle-age types, but now I see lots of millennials and folks in their 20s and 30s shopping it, especially the LPs,” says Michael Henning, who has been in charge of Amoeba Berkeley’s new age section for the past eight years. “The stigma that it is ‘uncool’ music has disappeared, and it is now even seen by many younger folks as very cool.”
Musician Greg Davis, who founded the popular new age cassette blog Crystal Vibrations, says that the surge of interest in rare new age albums – many released on cassette tapes – was inevitable. “I would say eight or nine years ago, there was a big resurgence in cassette culture,” he says. “All these bands were starting to make cassette releases … that went hand in hand with the pinnacle of internet blog-sharing culture that was happening. It was easy to find that stuff and sample it and listen to it and see if you liked it, and people were checking it out. If you’re into cosmic music and ambient music and drone stuff, it’s not too far of a reach to move over into new age music and discover what’s there.”
A recent Laraaji show in Brooklyn was packed with people in their 20s and 30s. Many were laying on the hard floor under a haze of incense and soft lights, listening to Laraaji’s soft clouds of processed zither and gong. “People are moving towards more mindful practices, and new age is a part of that,” says RVNG label head Matt Werth, who organized and DJed at the show between acts.
Interest in mindfulness practices such as yoga and meditation have become more popular with younger audiences. There’s well-reported trends of millennials opting for healthy juice crawls over bar crawls, and a recent New Yorker feature chronicled the rise in popularity of rituals involving the age-old psychoactive substance ayahuasca. Vintage new age music from the 1970s and 1980s continues its process of rediscovery, possibly without the baggage that originally surrounded it the first time around.
“I think that outsider music is very appealing for this young generation – this new experimental music generation,” observes 32-year-old musician Matthew McQueen, also known under the alias Matthewdavid, from his home in Los Angeles. His label, Leaving Records, is working to unearth new age gems from the 1980s. “A lot of it is weird music and very experimental and unconventional. A lot of it can be cheesy and unappealing for the exploratory sound seeker, but there are a lot of gems in the new age genre that are being spotlighted now.”
McQueen, who had been making sample-based hip-hop, connected with new age music during a rough time in his life. “Some events had happened in my personal life that I needed to heal from, and some friends bestowed some musical gifts unto me,” he says. “A lot of it was new age music from Michael Stearns and Iasos. I started to heavily personally pursue the music for active therapeutic listening purposes – meditative purposes. Then very naturally, I started making the music for therapy and art and creative self inner exploration. But the origins were being a nerdy record collector.”
Leaving Records has reissued several records by Laraaji, most recently Om Namah Shivaya, originally released on cassette in 1984. Laraaji is still best known for his blissful 1980 record Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, produced by Brian Eno, but his discography runs deep; his album Essence/Universe (1987), in particular, is a gem of the new age genre.
“When I look into contemporary new age music, there is a commitment to providing a sound environment that is compassionate toward the listener, and visionary images that can inspire,” he says from his home in Harlem, New York.
Laraaji actively tours, makes music and runs popular “laughter workshops” around the world – extended laughter, followed by deep meditation. “It involves chanting, and getting into extended laughter and relief as a way we might get into in the morning,” he explains. “It reduces tensions and opens the flow of endorphins and relaxes the body into a natural meditation – the kind you would go through through yoga.”
Many trace new age music’s roots back to California in the 1970s. “It’s a homegrown American phenomenon; I think it’s an American art form,” says new age authority Douglas MacGowan, who organized the critically acclaimed new age reissue compilation I Am the Center in 2013. MacGowan’s latest work – an upcoming reissue called The Microcosm: Visionary Music from Continental Europe, featuring artists such as Vangelis and Deuter – makes the case for a parallel world of very similar music developing across the Atlantic. Certain strands of ambient music, drone music, and so-called kosmische music blurred with the sounds of new age music, but the intentions, he says, were often different.
As an example, he brings up Valley of the Sun – a powerhouse new age label and publisher that was based in Malibu, California, which released hundreds of cassette tapes employing an array of techniques including hypnotism and subliminal messages. “For me, the whole idea – that to me is where the irony comes in – is in the extreme nature of some of the claims on guided meditation tapes, particularly,” MacGowan says. “Guided meditation is a catch-all term for all spoken content that is telling you what’s what. But also the tape stuff, the Valley of the Sun stuff. I have a Valley of the Sun tape, that’s like subliminal sounds to erase someone from your mind, which is ludicrous, but I love it.”
California in the 1970s, says the author Erik Davis, was an apt place for new age music to form. “There was the emerging space of the therapy room or the massage studio, all these other spaces that needed their own soundtracks,” Davis says. “It’s sort of an anything-goes situation in the 1970s. Any system or technique or practice that you have that might increase consciousness is up for grabs. All these people were going for new therapies, new ideas.”
Iasos, based in northern California’s leafy Marin County, is thought to have released the first album with the “new age” tag – 1975’s Inter-Dimensional Music. (Fellow Marin County resident Steven Halpern also released a new age album that year, so it may be a tie.) “The original impetus of new age music was music to connect to your own divinity … music to connect to your higher self, to do yoga, to find inner peace, to enhance harmony,” says Iasos, who believes he receives energies from a cosmic being named Vista, who he has a telepathic connection with. “I actually wasn’t directly focused on healing, but beauty by universal standards – like the beauty of a sunset, the beauty of a mountain reflected in a lake,” he says.
“But I learned, inadvertently, that the music was healing … I found out inadvertently that if music is beautiful, it is healing,” he continued. “Love causes beauty, and beauty causes healing. My focus was creating beauty.” The appeal of new age music, Davis says, is partly because it isn’t ironic at all – like so much of the music favored by so-called ‘hipsters’ over the past several years. “It’s fetishizable because it’s outside the dominant taste,” Davis says. “But there’s a sweetness and earnestness about it, too.”
The Microcosm: Visionary Music from Continental Europe is out on Light In The Attic on 25 November; Laaraji’s Om Namah Shivaya is out now on Leaving Records
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