Another Day on Earth

I remember going to a dance event at a community center in Tiburon, nestled in the nape of Marin County, in the summer of 1994. DJ Cheb I Sabbah had traveled beyond the comfort of his regular gig at Nicky's on the lower Haight to spin for twirling tricksters in tie-died tank tops, yoga-toned tantrikas and polyamorous playmates. As he busted out TransGlobal Underground and Loop Guru, I listened and watched the scene unfold around me. In the planetary heart of the new age movement, new beats and rhythms were shaking the kundalini loose, and I knew that new age music as it was more or less defined was dead — transformed by a new, savvier blend of urban hip and cosmic cool.

In fact, transformation is at the heart of the new age movement. Some postulate that the movement was a cultural meme implanted into the collective psyche by Madame Blavatsky and Alice Bailey at the behest of the Tavistok Institute (see "Enter the Now Age"). While there's some debate about that, there can be little disagreement as to how new age music got its start and how the genre was driven: It was marketing, pure and simple — major labels needed a rubric in order to gather together a bunch of different yet related styles that had no other genre to slot into. But there can be no doubt that the type of music now selling online and in the few music stores that still cater to spiritually based lifestyles has very little in common with the "new age music" of the '80s and early '90s.

To further explore what new age music has morphed into, I called on some influential people from the business and musical sides to address the state and fate of a genre that might now exist in name only.

Steve and David Gordon started Sequoia Records in the '80s. Incredibly popular with new age-based retailers in the '80s and '90s, Sequoia was an early adopter when it came to providing music for scene and setting, i.e., the "lifestyle" market. "In the beginning new age music meant ambient music for meditation and healing," says Steve Gordon. "Then in the '90s there started to be an inflow of world fusion music into new age, which is the time when we recorded Sacred Earth Drums, which became a very influential world fusion recording. In addition, there started to be Celtic, Sanskrit chant and other styles. In recent years even electronica chill/lounge started to become sold in the new age genre. We have welcomed all of these changes because we never wanted to be limited to one kind of music." As Gordon puts it, "New age music has expanded now to include so many different styles of music that it is getting to the point where calling it new age music does not make much sense any more."

Stephen Hill has an interesting explanation for why all those different styles of music sprouted up in the new age pasture. Hill started out as a radio producer, beaming the sounds of German electronic music and early space music on his weekly show before founding the seminal new age label Hearts of Space. He links the profusion of subgenres under the new age tag with a simple but revolutionary fact of recording technology: "[New age] was the first new commercial category to be established after the home studio and audio publishing revolutions," he notes, "which gave access to cheap recording tools and release media (first cassette, then CD) to everyone." But Hill also sees the flood of music as a point of commercial decline for new age: "The genre shot itself in the head early on due to the stylistic chaos, total lack of barriers to entry, wild variations in quality and the hyperbolic, unsubstantiated claims that were made for it," he says. "As a result, after a few years it became known for mediocrity and a favorite target for criticism — much of it richly deserved."

Bob Duskis of the Six Degrees label has had a front row seat to the shift Hill is talking about. Duskis cut his teeth in the music business while doing A&R at perhaps the most influential new age label of all time, Windham Hill. At Six Degrees, he foresaw the changing face of the genre, featuring more deeply electronic music such as the aforementioned Cheb I Sabbah as well as Banco De Gaia, Shrift and Euphoria, music that in some ways is the new new age. But Six Degrees has lately become much more successful with heaping servings of cool, groove-oriented Brazilian fare by Bebel Gilberto and others. "The public seems to have moved on a bit from the [new age] genre," says Duskis. "New age sections in record stores continue to shrink, and there has not been a significant breakout artist in quite some time. The catch phrase seems to have shifted from 'new age' to 'ambient' and 'chill out.' One could argue that this is more a function of industry marketing than anything else."

But is it due to industry marketing — or industry mis-marketing?

It's the latter, according to ambient music pioneer Steve Roach. "New age music hit its zenith in the early '90s," he says. "It seemed that most major labels had some kind of microbrew-style new age label that was trying to understand this kind of 'lifestyle' music. This is where the focus on certain superficial aspects of the music — as well as just downright superficial music that was being churned out — really hit the fan. I feel at that point the merging of all the new subspecies of new electronic, chill, ambient, drum and bass, world and tribal started to spawn and crossbreed at an exponential rate. That's where we're at now — a world mutant sound that someone needs to classify, but we know is impossible!" Roach's music has long embodied that "world mutant sound" — with recordings like Light Fantastic, Core, and On This Planet, as well as collaborations with Stephen Kent and Kenneth Newby, Jorge Reyes, Vidna Obmana and others, Roach was simply waiting for the idiom and the genre to catch up to him.

Robert Rich, an occasional collaborator of Roach's and a former HOS labelmate, is another artist who has defied the categorization of new age — " Pick a category and you'll find something I have done that won't fit that style," he says. Rich feels that new age music as we know it has, as he puts it, "Devolved into a modern version of Liberace, or 'easy listening' functionality — music for massage/candlelight/yoga, etc. This musical world has very little to do with me, and I really don't think about it much."

Neither does Stephen Hill — and according to him, neither should you. "I'll say again what I've said for the last 20 years — everyone should forget they ever heard the term 'new age' applied to music," he says. "It has so much negative baggage attached to it that it's a handicap in almost all cases. The genre should have been called 'contemporary instrumental,' with as many sub-categories as necessary to make sense. Besides, when you think about what's happening in the mainstream culture, the idea of any kind of new age is laughable. If anything, mainstream culture and the political arena seem to be devolving."

Looking back on the golden age of Yanni and John Tesh battling it out on sacred ground, and George Winston tickling ivories in the key of Satie, it all feels rather quaint and innocent, a time where our choices seemed as unlimited as a future that promised more than it's currently delivering, in rather large doses of Orwellian Newspeak and atmospheric paranoia. One artist that has somehow seemed to mostly elude the new age moniker is Brian Eno, who as the ultimate outsider sums up the state of the new age quite succinctly: "It was just another day on earth."