So I recently got interested in new age music. And oh my god there's some great stuff out there. What are your favourite artists in the genre? I particularly enjoy Enigma which I've never heard recommended on here before. They've got some amazing new age/ambient stuff with tantric themes and heavy influences of indian classical music, gregorian chants and meditation music.
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Sep-03-2024 07:03
szm
Supreme tranceaddict
Registered: Feb 2021
Location: canada
dont know too much about the genre but I dig some of delerium. pretty good production for the time. and I own deep forest - deep forest, so that too.
Sep-04-2024 03:40
SYSTEM-J
IDKFA.
Registered: Sep 2003
Location: Manchester
"New Age" is famously one of the most nebulously defined genres of all time and while I suppose the likes of Enigma or Deep Forest qualify under the criteria of "Likely to be sold in a rack next to the dream catcher display in your local Global Crystal Tribe apothecary", for me this kind of stuff is closer to world beat, ethno-dub or whatever other short lived buzzwords came and went around the time this stuff was at its peak. And while I would like to say Enigma is complete rubbish - because it is - I unfortunately have to admit that there's some pretty spine tingling stuff on The Cross Of Changes, which is the one album where monsieur Cretu gets it together. I'll never be too cool to admit that I Love You, I'll Kill You is an absolute tune. The rest of his discography though? Pass me the sick bag.
Incidentally, I'd recommend checking out this album by Enigma guitarist and co-producer Jens Gad. It's basically the exact same stuff but with more of a Nordic, "Twilight of the Gods" feel to it. Your mileage may vary.
The kind of "New Age" I get more on board with is the more straightforward ambient style descended from the 1970s and 1980s school of bearded acid-fried hippies like Steve Roach and Kitaro. Erik Wollo, Andrew Lahiff, Thom Brennan and co all spring to mind. Probably my favourite out of this lot is Rudy Adrian, who is capable of some seriously deep stuff that would send your average middle aged, incense burning, vaccine-denying meditation mom into a panic attack. I once listened to his Coastlines album late at night while heavily stoned, and this track took me to some very strange places:
I've never thought of Rudy Adrian as New Age. I've always lumped him together with Jonn Serrie and other ambient musicians, but now that I Googled Jonn Serrie again, it says "new-age" on his Wikipedia page, too. Kind of sad if people associate this type of music with new age fucking healing or what ever it is. Now people who know I listen to ambient probably think I'm into long, oily massages or something.
Sep-04-2024 16:54
SYSTEM-J
IDKFA.
Registered: Sep 2003
Location: Manchester
The really simple answer to what "New Age" means is anything peaceful and relaxing with a random assortment of non-Western traditional instruments / samples thrown in. Crucially, it has to be made by Western hippies rather than anyone from the cultures where these instruments / samples originate from.
If you take out the "spiritual" non-white instruments, it's admittedly sometimes difficult to see what objectively separates a lot of the New Age I'm talking about from just plain ambient. The common element seems mainly to be that it's all made by greying Americans who look like they live in a pine forest and exclusively wear T-shirts with pictures of wolves on them. It does seem to be quite a self-contained scene though, with a few common tropes: the artists are enormously prolific, they love colourful album artwork with natural vistas, they tend to play some kind of real instrument (often pedal-drenched guitar) as well as noodling endlessly on big analogue synths, and they seem largely shunned by the respectable ambient community.
As I wrote on Ishkur's Guide, the main difference between New Age and Ambient is, whereas Ambient producers try to turn music into an abstraction, dissociating the artist from the art, New Age artists make damned sure you know there's an actual musician making it.
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Sep-05-2024 03:20
szm
Supreme tranceaddict
Registered: Feb 2021
Location: canada
from what i've gathered online, it has to have chants; lmao. it does seem like a very ambiguous genre. in my eyes I kind of peg it to a time/place thing thats run its course. beats me.
Sep-05-2024 17:35
SYSTEM-J
IDKFA.
Registered: Sep 2003
Location: Manchester
quote:
Originally posted by szm
from what i've gathered online, it has to have chants; lmao. it does seem like a very ambiguous genre. in my eyes I kind of peg it to a time/place thing thats run its course. beats me.
I wouldn't say chants, or vocals of any kind, are necessary, but as I said above, some kind of sampling or instrumentation to represent "spiritual" vibrations is usually a hallmark, and that almost invariably involves a flattening of non-Western musical tradition into the all-encompassing mystic "Other". ('90s progressive house producers coughing uncomfortably right now.)
Singularity: if you're looking for other recommendations, mid '90s Mike Oldfield will probably be right up your street. Around that time he had retreated to Ibiza and built a studio more sophisticated than NASA Control where he embraced his inner chakras and channelled native ley lines, only to end up a raging drug addict and ultimately having to sell his £2million villa to Noel Gallagher from Oasis. Verily a moral fable if ever I doth hear one. The music he produced in the meantime was sufficiently messianic for any fan of Enigma's quasi-religious grandiloquence. Just get a load of these track titles!
I'm quite familiar with Mike Oldfield because of parents but thanks for the recommendations of his favourite songs. Also how is Enigma quasi religious? They are. They reference a lot of religious themes and I wouldn't be surprised if they believe a lot of them. Especially the hindu related themes I think they are followers of. Mike Oldfield is far more ambient/trancey though so that's not really what I'm looking for.
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Last edited by Singularity55 on Sep-09-2024 at 04:25
Sep-09-2024 04:18
SYSTEM-J
IDKFA.
Registered: Sep 2003
Location: Manchester
Personally, I have my doubts that a white guy born in 1957 in Communist Romania is a devout Hindu, but maybe you know something I don't. Similarly the Christian imagery in his tracks seems mainly to be there for vibes rather than any kind of spiritual content - "The Cross Of Changes" with its opener "The Second Coming" doesn't strike me as having any Christian messaging in it whatsoever, apart from the track Silent Warrior which tells the story of some unnamed villager having his peaceful imaginary tribal existence destroyed by Christian evangelists "in the name of God". I don't think Pope Francis will be setting that one as his ringtone any time soon. I've never been able to sit through MCMXC aD all the way through, so maybe that has some more genuinely Christian faith to it.
Overall though, the whole point of what makes this stuff "New Age" is that it aims for some vague, global spirituality rather than subscribing to any actual religion. The term, after all, comes from the 1970s hippy dippy esoteric thought movement.
