new age

Virginia Astley: A Summer Long Since Passed (1983)

2015/02/06

Here’s to another unheralded and quite forgotten one. In the summer of 1983, a humble, charming bit of pastoral neo-folk music was released. Mixing field recordings, piano, guitar, flute, and, very sparingly, voice, a young woman presented a breathtaking idea of how a certain English feeling can reveal itself to you. Back then, Virginia opened…
Steve Hillage: Garden of Paradise (1979)

2015/01/19

Miquette Giraudy and Steve Hillage Soundtracking a true visual experience of sorts, “Garden of Paradise” from Steve Hillage’s Rainbow Dome Musick stirred many a visitor’s brains when it debuted looping at London’s massive proto-New Age Mind- Spirit-Body Festival. Listeners who just wandered through booths filled with info from vegetarian, vegan, yoga, shamanic, and lords knows what…
Sally Oldfield: The Sun in My Eyes (1979)

2015/01/14

Sally Oldfield – 1979 Something that struck me the first time I encountered Sally Oldfield’s Water Bearer was its brilliant album cover. By combining something real, a staged photoshoot of Sally idling next to a waterfall in some forgotten Irish glen, with an altered color scheme that blends objects and edges to mimic some kind…
Mike Oldfield: Ommadawn (1975)

2014/12/12

Mike Oldfield – 1974 “The end of the first side of Ommadawn is the sound of me exploding from my mother’s vagina.” — Mike Oldfield. Although said with tongue planted firmly in cheek, no truer words have been spoken to describe a sound such as found at the end of Ommadawn, than the words spoken/written…
Mike Oldfield: Hergest Ridge (1974)

2014/12/11

Mike Oldfield The exploration and deconstruction of English folk music seemed to be the path needed to be taken by new neo-folk artists. One unlikely champion of this became one that you’d least expect to be one. Now known as one of New Age and World music’s pioneers with albums like Tubular Bells, Incantations, and…