Altered Zones

This past Sunday, LA Times writer Andy Beta published a trend piece on underground music's growing fascination with New Age, long dismissed as the lowbrow, commercial kid sister of psychedelic rock and experimental minimalism. Over the past few years, Beta says, New Age trademarks like the panflutes of Gheorghe Zamfir and the swirling animations of the recently profiled Iasos have exited the realm of bad taste and crept into the pool of archival influences that matter to today's weird music purveyors-- not just for their kitsch appeal, but for their emphasis on slowness, spiritual awakening, and meditative healing. Beta inducts AZ regulars like Oneohtrix Point Never, Teengirl Fantasy, Emeralds, and Stellar Om Source into the "new age for New Age music," and provides a little background on the genre for those of us who can only half remember it.

"In late 2009, noise-pop group Animal Collective followed up its critics-poll-topping album "Merriweather Post Pavilion" with a stopgap EP, "Fall Be Kind." It generated buzz for featuring the first-ever licensed Grateful Dead sample, but what was more peculiar was a curlicue of pan flute woven into the song "Glaze" and credited to Gheorghe Zamfir. Zamfir, as the Romanian pan flute musician is best known, was a ubiquitous presence on television in the '80s, peddling wispy flute albums. For many people, it was one of the first sounds that came to be known by the label of New Age music.

"It didn't even dawn on me that people would have the reaction that it was a New Age flute thing," said Animal Collective's Dave "Avey Tare" Portner from his home in Baltimore. "It just seemed like something that would work for the song."

Portner is part of a new generation of musicians and producers who are working such calming, serene, yes, even sappy sounds into their music. Despite its association with crystals, color therapy, holistic medicine, incense, lucid dreaming and chakra manipulation, New Age music— once resigned to the dollar bins of record stores and the vitamin section of health food stores — has somehow entered into the misty echelon of coolness." --Emilie Friedlander, Altered Zones via The LA Times