Webpage dazeddigital.com has posted an article called “How new age healing music shaped underground music in 2018”, written by Kieran Devlin. It is a must-read for both artists and fans of our genre.
The article goes like this:
“In 2018, the trend for all things new age became an everyday mundanity. Meditation and yoga are universally endorsed methods of exercising and de-stressing, you don’t have to look too hard to find more avant-garde treatments like gong baths or bowl therapy, and mindfulness apps like Headspace are just a few taps away on your phone. It’s infiltrated popular culture, too, be it the prevalence of tarot cards, crystal grids, and astrology, the fact that 1.5 million Americans say they’re practicing witches, or how a show like Netflix’s recent zeitgeist-tapping The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina seamlessly integrated wicca mythology and mysticism into an otherwise conventional high school melodrama.
This ubiquity is echoed by the state of music in 2018. Last month, the idea was explicitly embodied when electronic artist Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s announced that her next album was designed to accompany her mother’s yoga sessions, but more quietly, a renaissance of new age music ideas is filtering into the mainstream. While this encompasses affiliated genres like ambient and drone music (with exemplary records from Sarah Davachi, Laurel Halo, and Ian William Craig this year), new age ideas aren’t only vibrating through yoga teachers’ speakers, but nightclub subwoofers. There are festivals and events dedicated to wellness raves, sober parties celebrating spirituality and healthy living through dance music without a gurn in sight. Sober or not though, clubbing has always been clued into spirituality, and this is reflected in dance music’s creation and consumption.”
Read the complete article here. Highly recommended!
Above picture copyright Bigstockphoto – marty
There’s also an interconnectedness to what was called Progressive Rock…example bands like Caravan, Pink Floyd, Gentle Giant, Yes, Gong. The intent was to take pop music to a deeper place. Some sins were committed such as over playing and a tiny bit of pretentiousness, but I liked the intent as well as the will to stretch musical boundaries (Key change, tempo change, extended – yes sometimes overdone – improvisations.) Maybe prog rock as well as new age will eventually get their own category when musicians must choose genres in signing up to digital playgrounds (Sometimes new age musicians must choose “experimental” or other categories when describing their music