It’s becoming easier and easier to look back at the 2010s and see a decade, with all the era-specific kitsch that implies. For example: the era’s New Age music revival, which seemed innocuous enough when Bushwick beer-sippers started flocking to Iasos sets circa the dawn of the Obama administration—though it’s since become a meme, from Plantasia T-shirts to “Keep Honking! I’m Listening to Alice Coltrane’s 1971 Meteoric Sensation Universal Consciousness” bumper stickers. That this revival has slipped out of the indie reissue culture and back into the wellness mainstream hasn’t done much for the genre’s dignity, not least with André 3000 having supposedly got started on his recent flute album after bumping into percussionist Carlos Niño at Erewhon.
I’ve now been to four “Reflections” events, in which Grace Cathedral shows off its impressive acoustics and sound system in tandem with ambient greats like William Basinski, Suzanne Ciani, Daniel Lanois, and Steve Roach. It was only at the most recent, starring Sam Prekop and Laraaji, that I realized how codified and institutionalized the language of the new age revival has become.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It happens in the life cycle of any genre, typically being a harbinger of its impending death or fall from relevancy.
Getting drinks at the Tonga Room prior to the set, I played a game with myself of guessing who would attend the show based on the font of the T-shirt they wore. But more on-the-nose were the name tags worn by the actual event staff, which were either designed by retro-fetishizing eye-gouger Robert Beatty or someone doing a damn good job of approximating his style.
Yet the music reminded me why so many people, including myself, flocked to this stuff in the first place. Prekop, to be fair, carries himself with reserve; he’s the mastermind behind ‘90s post-rock band the Sea & Cake, who were getting raves from Pitchfork before anyone even read that publication. He’s kept himself busy with modular synth records as of late, peaking on the excellent Sons Of with Tortoise’s John McEntire.
Perkop’s music swells and pulses, occasionally landing on gorgeous intervals that he’ll ride for a while, like the uplifting build of some trance epic—though the occasion wasn’t ripe for anything liable to make anyone so much as dance. The sounds he coaxes out of his synths sometimes approximate the fake marimbas and budget-bin Hammond presents you find on ‘80s private press new age albums, though not enough to impart any of the daffiness of that era.
Laraaji, on the other hand, has been making new age music since before it was termed such, and it’s impossible to pretend the genre is anything it’s not while watching him. Between mighty scrapes of the phased-out zither and dulcimer that comprise the core of the sound, the 82-year-old free-associated on everything from Buddhist mantras to descriptions of open skies and peace gardens to the thunderous Santa Claus-like guffaw he can’t resist but let loose when he has access to a microphone (he’s long led meditation workshops focusing on the “healing power of laughter”).
Bearded and dressed in the orange robes he’s worn consistently since 1979 on advice of a spiritual mentor, he stands as a living rebuke to the stiffness and self-consciousness by which the indie culture long distinguished itself from the spandex-pantsed rock stars on the radio. And his music is astonishing, like swimming through a tunnel of gold.
But it was when the two locked in with each other that the evening really started to take off.
It’s usually hard to see the performers at Grace Cathedral—they’re not necessarily the visual focus, given the church’s consistently amazing projection-mapped light shows, which turn the venue into an underwater edifice or a tunnel of glow worms. So it was hard to notice Prekop was even present until his rhythm began to gradually emerged from the depths of Laraaji’s phaser clouds. Laraaji rarely uses drums in his music, but when he does, magic tends to happen; check out “Astral Jam” from his excellent collaboration with Blues Control.
I hope for a record from these two sometime soon. New age may have passed its point of peak cultural cachet, but as long as its vets are still pushing forward into new places, I’ll go see them any time.
