Herb Sundays 136: New Age Outsiders (chosen by Eric Demby)
A starting point into a camp of 1960's and 1970's New Age outsiders, their pioneering spirit, their various influences, and much more.
Herb Sundays 136: New Age Outsiders (chosen by Eric Demby)
Playlist: Apple Music / Spotify
Art by Michael Cina
Unintentionally, we are going back-to-back with Smooth Jazz, as both (once) maligned genres, and this week, we present a light pillar worth exploring.
New Age music has flirted with the US mainstream a few times, obviously with Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells (Think: The Exorcist) or even an unexpected ’90s resurgence via Gregorian chant music and the As-Seen-On-TV Pure Moods compilation (which
touched upon in Herb 118), that paired dollops of synthy New Age alongside Enya and other bits to form a quasi-spiritual stew aimed at X-Files-addled Americans.
While New Age music has come back into vogue in headier circles, tenants of New Age thought have baked much deeper into our everyday lives, from little things like the mainstreaming of Dr. Bronner’s, the normalizing of crystals and other woo health concerns, and an interest in alternative medicines and resurgence in psychedelics, the results of which are yet to be seen fully.
Sticking to music, the blessings of New Age sounds are finally back in real focus, As Simon Reynolds (Herb 32) cannily observed in his decade-ending piece on Ambient and New Age for Resident Advisor:
Reissue labels and album-sharing blogs have reactivated dormant concepts like Fourth World and Exotica, and placed New Age, Japanese "interior music" and library records into the canon of essential listening for young inquiring ears. This influence pool is already shaping an emerging generation of musicians, changing their value-set so that "soporific" is not an insult but an ideal—an artistic objective, even.
New Age is very much here, even if we don’t use the term as frequently. André 3000’s album just gathered three 2025 Grammy nominations, including Best Album for a heady instrumental record, as proof. Whether you rate the album or not doesn’t matter; the fact that the album exists and is quite good is a miracle. I loved the construct as it reminded me that major label artists would lean into trends (think Bowie into electronics (Via Eno), or even Blondie into Disco) like this in the past; the conceit is a throwback to a more adventurous and maybe even more ruthless era in pop experimentalism and shape-shifting, perhaps braver than just “pivoting” to Country.
André told Jon Caramanica upon hearing about the noms: “I’m in Virginia today, we’re playing tonight. I was just waking up and I heard that the nominations came in. We were trying to be nominated in some type of way for alternative jazz or ambient, possibly. But I was totally surprised by this. So yeah, it was super, super, super duper cool.”
While New Age and its seemingly more erudite cousin, Ambient, have shared a room, one with two beds, Ambient has taken tremendous goodwill in the last decades. The irony is that New Age is the genre in which Americans helped pioneer and excelled early and did not just respond to European trends. In recent years reissue labels took note: Light In The Attic released a tryptic of New Age box sets (American, European, Japanese), and Numero Group released important titles from Laraaji, Iasos, and more.
As he mentions below, Eric Demby, a mentor for many years, popped up in Herb 54, when I was writing about Piotr Orlov and the group of Gen X journalist friends, just a hair older than me, who helped embrace Ghostly and myself in the early years. I vaguely knew of Eric’s familial relation to the legend Constance Demby. Still, I didn’t know he was behind the recent Dorothy Carter Troubador reissue on Drag City, which garnered a Pitchfork Best New Music accolade this year, a repeat award following last year’s Waillee Waillee reissue on the venerable Palto Flats, who also reissued one of my New Age adjacent faves, Woo.
This is a fabulous dive into a deeper side of the New Age Canon, one truly spiritually rich, including its inputs that will leave you speechless. So why now for New Age? As Peter Holsin wrote for the LARB:
“ The heaviness of our times, the looming specters of sickness and dying, the obsolescence of classic rockist assumptions in the critical sphere—these are all things that seem to have forced a reckoning in American critical taste. My own reappraisal of New Age has revealed a surprising truth about the magic a listener can find on these seemingly meaningless sonic wanderings.”
Eric Demby on New Age
A brief bio for Eric: Bed-Stuy-based Eric Demby was born into a community of Maine back-to-the-landers. Demby co-founded Brooklyn Flea and Smorgasburg in 2008, which followed a career as an electronic music and hip-hop journalist and then political speechwriter. In 1999 he co-founded Legalize Dancing NYC, launching a movement that eventually overturned the Cabaret Law, which impeded nightlife culture since 1926. He produced the reissue of hammer-dulcimerist Dorothy Carter’s 1976 debut LP, Troubadour, in 2024, and is currently at work on a screenplay centered around Carter, Constance Demby, and Bob Rutman’s pioneering avant-garde New Age community.
“After emailing with Sam a bit back in 1999/2000—when I was a music journalist and he was like 19—about Matthew Dear and Ghostly’s Disco Nouveau comp, he and I met IRL at the inaugural Detroit Electronic Music Festival in Hart Plaza and stayed friends as he grew his label and ideas and I shifted gears to open flea and food markets. Now we’re both fathers and it feels cool to come full circle and connect through this project, and of course music.
Since late 2020 I’ve been working to reissue Troubadour (on Drag City) by hammered-dulcimer player Dorothy Carter, who was a friend of my father’s growing up in rural Central Maine and Cambridge, Mass., in the ‘70s. While researching the record, I realized there was a bigger story around its origin, starting with the intentional community in Maine where Dorothy lived off and on—and where I was born, in 1972. So in addition to the LP, which is awesome, I’m writing a fictional screenplay about that time, which this playlist is a sort of musical mood board for.
During Covid I’d stay up late watching hazy, trippy clips from the early ‘70s of Central Maine Power (CMP), the far-out audio-visual collective named for the local electric company, with Dorothy, her friend Bob Rutman, and my dad’s first wife Constance Demby at its core. Although musically interesting, I was more curious about what the point of the cacophony they were creating was.
I heard skeletons of songs that became Troubadour (which came out in 1976, with help from both Rutman and Connie), but I also glimpsed ghosts of the community-driven music we’ve seen explode since the pandemic. (My old DJ partner and Herb friend Piotr Orlov’s Dada Strain newsletter embodies this sprawling tree’s New York branch.) So I reached out to family friends and people from the time and started connecting some dots, between these quirky artists’ musical lives but also to this weirdo time we’re now living in.
After the trio’s experimental happenings didn’t quite take root in ’60s downtown New York, Dorothy, Rutman, and Connie somehow decided to drop out and move to South Solon, Maine, where Connie and my dad bought 100 acres for $5000 in 1966, near some other “back-to-the-landers.” The decade that followed was not entirely unpredictable: raising cows, pigs, and chickens—and babies—building geodesic-dome homes, making maple syrup and smoking bacon, plenty of hallucinogens and homegrown weed, lots of free love (and ensuing unconventional family structures).
What no one at the time expected was that both of Dorothy’s albums, Troubadour and Waillee Waillee (1978)—the latter heavily features Rutman on the steel cello and was reissued by Palto Flats in 2023—would find critical acclaim 50 years later (an 8.7 in Pitchfork); that Rutman would return to his native Berlin in 1989 as a sort of godfather of acoustic industrial music, through his solo work and his U.S. Steel Cello Ensemble (their 2011 drone here features Faust co-founder Hans-Joachim Irmler); and maybe most surprisingly that Connie would emerge in the ‘80s as a star of Marin County’s burgeoning New Age scene, with her Novus Magnificat: Through the Stargate (1986) selling over 200,000 copies and establishing the genre’s musical legitimacy. (Her earlier self-released records are my personal faves: Skies Above Skies (‘78) and Sacred Space Music (‘82); the former’s “Om Mani Padme Hum” was featured on Light in the Attic’s seminal I Am The Center compilation.)
Even crazier, in the early ‘90s Dorothy—a quiet soul partial to street busking—crossed paths one day in Berlin with Katharine Blake of Miranda Sex Garden (!), and the unlikely pair formed the Mediæval Bæbes, a sort of early-music choral ensemble that toured global arenas with Dorothy on hammered dulcimer and hurdy gurdy. A song from Troubadour, “Binnorie,” even reappears on the Bæbes 1997 debut, Salva Nos, their only LP with her.
At some point while tracing these breadcrumbs from Greenwich Village to Maine to Harvard Square to Mount Tamalpais and the pyramids of Egypt (where Connie played) and Berlin, I had to ask the question: Did New Age start in the late ‘70s with all those celestial album covers from the west coast—or were these kooky friends of my dad’s on a farm in middle-of-nowhere Maine creating its roots, in a cultural vacuum? They built their own instruments—or in Dorothy’s case, discovered them—out of sheet metal and saw blades, innovated live video triggered by sonics, created immersive musical experiences with no discernable beginning or end, never pressed a single record or composed a single song, and wore long flowy robes while performing in planetariums. This was 1971.
Digging deeper, I wondered: When they were cavorting around the East Village in the mid-’60s going to Warhol’s happenings on St. Mark’s Place with the Velvets as the house band, or Sun Ra’s Monday residency at Slugs’ Saloon on E. 3rd St. between B+C (‘66), or listening to Steve Reich’s Drumming when it came out in ‘71, or reading Be Here Now, or performing as CMP at the under-construction World Trade Center to communicate with the supposedly earth-threatening Comet Kohoutek in ‘73, or hearing Popol Vuh’s soundtrack to Werner Herzog’s Aguirre at Cambridge’s Brattle Cinema in ‘72, or Dorothy randomly meeting a young Laraaji in Tompkins Square Park in ‘77—were they also synthesizing sights and sounds into a ground-shifting vision that provided a means of transport to another realm, a deeper level of understanding, a pathway to a new age?
So this playlist is a starting point for a journey into discovering these New Age outsiders who traveled their own path to connecting musically with the terrestrial and firmament realms, and their various influences and comrades along the way. Also it’s a new way of thinking about New Age, which so many of us have integrated into our daily lives; but before it was a lifestyle it was just people coping with their struggles and searching for a way forward free from conformity and religion and the trappings of America’s past. In today’s spirit of discovering new lanes for moving forward, perhaps these folks can be something of a guide.” - ED
Bonus Beats: New Age Addendum - sv4
My fave canonical New Age record is Michael Stearns’ Planetary Unfolding (1981). I took a risk on it at Academy Records because of the bonkers art work and I purchase it whenever I see it. Thank you Amanda Colbenson (Brooklyn Flea Record Fair hero to connect to Mr Demby above) for gifting my recent pressing copy BACK to me. An excerpt appears on one of the aforementioned LITA comps, but it has to be heard as a whole. It’s not subtle, but that last movement always grips me.
the LA Review of Books posted this lovely piece by Peter Holsin (h/t Rebecca Goldberg), as mentioned above.
Back-to-back weeks for Numero Group shoutouts, as they have a deft hand for private press New Age, their new compilation (and Environments Tee) are key.
PS I Love You
Ghostly’s annual (10th? 11th year? who’s counting) Blue Mondaysale rages on util middle of this week. 30% off our site and bandcamp (code: sale2024 at checkout) including the deep CDs and 12” singles too.
just what the doctor ordered
Cina never misses. He over-delivered on this one.