Music Websites & New Age

[haptalaon]

Speaking of very vintage websites for niche music genres: I've come across the 15-year-old New Age Music Guide and the rather more vintage-looking New Age Music.com

My first thought on presaging a list of canonic ambient records: “What music isn’t ambient in the 21st century?” Given the current life demands, multi-tasking has become a mono-activity, one that takes up our entire sensory field. Gone are the days where—eyes closed, headphones on—we can readily slip in and away for the side of a tape, lest an album. Listening to the average three-to-five-minute pop song with the distractions and thought processes of the world abated feels like a heroic act. That said, the appeal of ambient is ever apparent; much like a science project, when executed perfectly, the outcome yields the desired results: time becomes elastic, malleable - Keith Fullerton Whitman

New Age music is an odd beast, it's like the tacky twin of eminent genres like jazz and ambient. It's designed to be inoffensive, reassuring and uplifting - and, predictably, this is not as valued as sounds which are difficult or shocking; and it's politically sinister, intertwined from its explosion with appropriative acts and intentions and with the texture of brochures for a spa days, music for people who are invited. And for me, they have a nostalgic quality: the delight of those walls in clutter shops where you could click to listen to samples from Pan Pipe Whale Song Synth Moods or Healing Sounds Solo Digeridoo.

I guess at heart, I am a very sincere fan of the populist - and the magical, too. I like music which is designed to shift the vibration of my room. I like dark vibrations, pastoral vibrations, cold vibrations, history vibrations, summery vibrations; and some days, I like vibrations which elevate my dolphin chakhra to the indigo sphere of pure crystal love energy.

In every colour there's the light

In every stone sleeps a crystal

Remember the Shaman, when he used to say:

"Man is the dream, of the dolphin"

- Enigma

It's interesting, too, as a 90s genre I think. The 90s is remembered as this superficially peaceful and prosperous time - pre-internet, its victims were further out of view - and the mood of the era is epitomised in so so many films about successfully employed white men having existential crises about the horrors of earning a good wage in a steady job. Can you even imagine that now? The Matrix / American Beauty / Fight Club / Office Space etc. Or the figure of the stoner in things like Clerks, the existential wasteland of bumming through your life in a nowhere minimum wage job...which nevertheless paid sufficiently well for your main problem to be boredom and worries about wasted time.

The New Age 90s boom was the huge success of Enya and Enigma and the like, & it's interesting to contrast to the ambient boom now because to me, ambient is more of a dissociative genre. It's more difficult, it's more self-consciously boring, it's more wallpaperesque and often dark or unsettled. Enigma is mood music, but its lush and filled with personality, it slaps in chanting and monologues about SHAMANIC DOLPHIN WISDOM: it has a presence! It is abundant sound! It calms the listener, but it is certainly with us in the room. It's not the Disintigration Loops.

Ambient has a distracted quality, a going-down-the-clickhole nothingness. It's perfectly paired with the internet, echoing its hollow spaces and passive horror. New Age is music for the successful - sink-into-the-bathtub-with-incense relaxation. Paganism tends middle class because only the wealthy can believe in a magic they control, and New Age is sounds to soothe frets. The music of the marginalised tends to sound very, very different. We suspect music that wants to make us feel good because we know it is a lie. Ambient is numbing and anxious all at once, the sustain pedal of the troubled soul. It papers indifferently over the little cracks of your day like making the best of a dangerous house. Sonic landlord mid-beige. No dolphins.

Ambient does make time malleable: but is this something our era needs to seek? What if we need to make it more focused and moment-ous, sounds to ground us in the body and a place in time.

But you know, I really love New Age. I guess it's come back around, like these things do - out of the cultural consciousness enough to become strange when you look at them. I can't tell you how obsessed I am with that Enigma album right now. It sounds like airplanes looked.

And because its simple magic works. In my life as a pagan, there's always been a sneery prejudice against 'fluffy love and light' magic, possibly for the exact same reason people pick on New Age music. & I think that's dopey and that life is dark enough without our helping it along; & there's a different kind of wealth in doing the witchcraft of all-darkness-all-the-time, as spice to an otherwise safe life.