"New Age Music", search and destroy.

"journey to the edge of the universe" by upper astral is the only one with more than a few ratings on rym. no reviews, but i'm giving it a listen and if you're into super-ambient berlin school stuff it should be up your alley.

― the event dynamics of power asynchrony (rushomancy), Saturday, July 9, 2016 8:23 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thanks! Yeah, this is one Brown's piece recommends. I'll track this down today.

I've heard a lot of Valley of the Sun releases via slsk and Upper Astral is indeed the best of the lot. Just checked discogs and had a laugh to see a collection of 7 UA tapes offered for $1800!

Yeah, I saw that! Wish someone would reissue this stuff, though the Wire piece mentions some sort of legal battle between Sutphen and his ex wife. What a shame. All the Upper Astral stuff I've heard so far is terrific, though I don't know which are the duo albums and which were done by either Naegele or Storrs alone. Lots to explore here. Going well with my recent Calvino binge.

If you're not fussy about format and just want to listen, you could just jump over to http://hiddenvalleyofthesunpublishing.blogspot.com

nice, thx for sharing

http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/reader/natural-selection/

^^ about irv teibel

Not a lot of discussion about this latest LITA comp, a sort of European companion to the I Am The Center box:

www.discogs.com/Various-The-Microcosm-Visionary-Music-Of-Continental-Europe-1970-1986/master/1106146

I'm digging most of it so far. Exactly half of these names were already familiar to me, but of those, I'm not sure I've heard any of the actual tracks included here. Still digging in, but my first impression is that it flows better than I Am The Center (could just be the sequencing), though it may lack the immediate 'highs' (Wilburn Burchette, Joanna Brouk, etc) of that comp.

The weird thing about compilations of this kinda stuff is that it frees the individual tunes from their original context, which maybe misses the point a little? That said, this has been sounding great to me today.

I got this on CD, btw, because flipping 3 sides of vinyl is a pain in the butt and I'm not sure vinyl is really the best format for this kind of music.

I thought the point of these collections was to compile rare tracks and/or artists who haven't yet been critically reappraised? What's the point of including folks like Vangelis or Popol Vuh, who are well-known and liked and whose albums can be acquired easily and cheaply?

Also, considering that New Age is one of the few genres where a lot of women have been producing and recording music autonomously for decades, these compilations are surprisinly male-heavy. Where's Lucia Hwong, Alquimia, Therese Schroeder, Meg Bowles, Suzanne Ciani, Deborah Martin, etc? At least the first one had Constance Demby on it.

suspect that for every person who sees eg Vangelis on something like this and turns their nose up at the obviousness of it all, there's someone else for whom it's the hook to investigate further

LITA is more a label for curious dabblers rather than srs heads I'd say

not sure I agree with that. I don't see a lot of curious dabblers shelling out $50+ for a box set because they're mildly curious about ambient music beyond Eno

tbh I was a bit put off at first by the inclusion of some of the "big" names on here, too; I'm pretty sure I own everything Popol Vuh and Ash Ra Tempel have released, for one thing. But there's a lot on here I'd never heard, and the whole thing flows rather nicely, like a playlist where you occasionally recognize the song playing but not the ones surrounding it.

xp the complaint about the maleness is valid enough, but I Am The Center is what introduced me to the music of Joanna Brouk, for which I am very thankful. Probably one of my favorite discoveries of 2013

i get not wanting to include more well-known artists on a comp like this, but I also think it's useful/interesting to hear those "big" names in the company of obscurities. i'm probably a curious dabbler in this kind of thing anyway. love to dabble.

and while i'm here, let me highly recommend this series of amazing mixes (some of which falls into the "new age" category, some of which may not) that a friend of mine put together over the last few years: http://loveallday.com/category/gown-control/
so good!

xp relatively speaking, so am I! I leave it to experts to compile stuff like this because I no more want to needle drop on a thousand shitty new age LPs looking for hidden gems than I do scour bins looking for demotik Greek 78s or researching unlabeled dub plates.

These comps looks great, Tyler, thanks!

yr welcome -- the piano one in particular is AMAZING. but they're all good -- this guy Michael has indeed needle dropped on a thousand shitty new age LPs (and listened to even more tapes) looking for hidden gems. he is great at finding them.

and the whole thing flows rather nicely, like a playlist where you occasionally recognize the song playing but not the ones surrounding it.

sold

I wonder if anyone can ID the first track here or have a stab at who it might be by. Or indeed any others in the first 17 minutes (before the two Kraftwerk tracks), or the one at 29 minutes after No Man...

https://www.mixcloud.com/distantdrums/offshore-state-circus-outer-bongolia-solid-steel-kiss-100fm-6-2-1994/

And the echoey acoustic guitar + wave sounds & flute + harmonium tracks after that, before the Robert Leiner etc. You get the idea.

Gown Control mixes are amazing (I am through Volume 3 and Sunpath are blowing my mind. Thinking about picking up the two tape set. Loved the Planetary Pleasure track on the first one, downloaded the whole tape and found it a little different (more Christian hippy dippy amateur harmony vocals over Joseph Byrd style experiments than I was expecting) but pretty charming none-the-less.

been listening to those sunpath cassettes on Apple Music ("yasimin and the snowflake dragon" and "sunpath 2") and yes they are marvelous

Sunpath! Where has this been hiding?! Beautiful stuff.

It's weird to me that there isn't a book about this scene--its origins, politics, most famous practitioners--by now. Surely someone is working on one? If one exists, can anyone point me in that direction? A few years ago I had a book from the eighties that was sort of "who's who" of new age, and it was enlightening enough (if dated), but was more a 'guide' in the Trouser Press sense, with an alphabetical listing of artists and short, paragraph-sized spotlights on particular high points of the respective discographies.

This Sunpath stuff, I just want to reiterate, is great, btw. Almost in a too-good-to-be-true way, like it could be a hoax or something. Any way it could be a hoax or something? Kinda weird that the only link on Discogs is to this 2016 "reissue"

There's an interview out there with the guy who made it: https://www.stonesthrow.com/news/2016/05/sunpath

Well, yeah, but that could just be someone's dad or something in that photo! It wouldn't take a great amount of effort to just have someone pose as this guy in phone interviews and then provide a picture of some rando guy who looks the part.

Let me be clear: I am in no way suggesting this is a hoax, only that it would be funny / neat if it was, and would not diminish my enjoyment of it whatsoever. You have to admit, though, the fact that Google turns up no info at all on this guy before 2016 is somewhat suspect, given that even the most obscure shit (even obscuro new age tapes - see the many blogs) has at least some web presence.

"Sonic Seasonings" (1972) by Wendy Carlos must be one of the earliest ambient/new age albums in existence?

sunpath interview is awesome

i'm really digging the sunpath, thanks. esp. the song "gá te", particularly the passage from about 18:00 to 19:30. wow.

i realize it's silly to isolate a brief section from a 30 minute song, but it enters into a true magic zone there

the fact that Google turns up no info at all on this guy before 2016 is somewhat suspect

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=ZOsDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA70&lpg=PA70&dq=%22Jeff+Berry%22+sunpath&source=bl&ots=lR6-kW8oxb&sig=PI-Qk9SV1XRSTW4ykYAktxVGDr4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj036-Zg8HSAhXEg1QKHZrZAuA4ChDoAQg7MAY#v=onepage&q=%22Jeff%20Berry%22%20sunpath&f=false

Whelp I guess that answers that. I find the fake lost recordings phenomenon/marketing to be a little interesting as I'm not sure if most cases the music wouldn't be just as warmly received without it (Unknown Krautrock and Stefano Loprato spring to mind).

I agree. There was a metal band a few years ago called Velvet Cacoon who (iirc) were exposed as some sort of phonies, but the records they made are still great imo. See also: Marvin Pontiac

xp Yeah, good sleuthing! Still, crazy that that's what you turned up. It's crazy that something in this day and age can remain so (almost) completely off the grid.

Wasn't the Jurgen Muller 'lost' album from a few years ago famously a hoax?

Absolutely.

Lovely mix:

https://soundcloud.com/heavybreathingarchive/the-entrance-to-creation-sacred-gems

When I click show all messages in this thread, Chrome blocks the page and warns that www.technodisco.net is an attack site. I'm guessing there's a message with some embedded dodgy code/links? All I wanted were some blissed-out Aquarian vibes...

I put a note in to Mod Request

nice stuff on that mix

http://iasos.com/artists/chandler/
https://www.discogs.com/artist/561784-Geoffrey-Chandler

Word on FB from mutual friends that Geoffrey Chandler has passed. Only one album in his discography but that one helped define the entire genre. We need a cleaned up remaster of it very very badly.

idk about the first track but otherwise SEARCH: Remote Dreaming by The Ghostwriters, from 1986. absolute bliss. basically sounds like the album title + the cover illustration

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zfQ-_EIeWc0/VezZ6hojGnI/AAAAAAAACrw/TMdAO1NlpfI/s640/R-3802176-1352461788-6287.jpeg.jpg

CALM ENERGY CHROME

Mu-Psych Music!

i lived long enough to see this dollar bin record get a fancy new vinyl reissue that will probably cost you about 25 bucks with shipping:

https://www.discogs.com/Jon-Hassell-Dream-Theory-In-Malaya-Fourth-World-Volume-Two/master/33904

also came here to say that this album is awesome and should cost you about five bucks now so don't wait for the 30 dollar reissue in ten years:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=275&v=oHgek1ufoJI

when the hell what that a dollar bin album, the early 90s???

what=was

well, yeah. i'm old. i just meant nobody really wanted it until internet era.

ha yeah it's kinda quaint reading the beginning of this thread. "who the hell listens to this stuff? why?"

It’s totally not worth a search but just want to mention that in my city every adult seemed to have only 3 new age artists in their collection and they were always the same: Enya, Spyrogyra and Secret Garden. Era was also huge but that was in the new age revival attempt in the late 90’s. Were “Ameno” and “Misere Mani” as huge in the US or Europe? I know they were also huge in France. Here in Mexico they would play in the hits radio every single day. And both Era 1 and Era 2 were selling like hot bread and would be featured in the top 10 of every fucking music store you entered.

“Misere Mani” is actually a guilty pleasure of mine... I feel it would be an awesome song with better production it makes pop with gregorian chants work better than they should.