Come Hear Chill Waves of Relaxing and Inspiring New Age Music
Are you feeling stressed out, or just need a moment of relaxation? Well, look no further, because I have just the thing for you. Come join me at my favorite place to unwind, The Ocean Sound Lounge! With its cool blue color scheme and relaxing decorations and paintings, it’s the perfect place to forget about all your problems and tune in to some awesome new age music. If you’re not sure what new age music is, that’s okay! It’s really a genre that you’ll have to experience live in order to understand. These artists use all kinds of amazing instruments, including the harp and didgeridoo.
Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a new age music concert in downtown Los Angeles. I was very excited to see that the genre has made its way from New Age cassette tapes sold at Whole Foods to the red-hot center of the Los Angeles music scene.
The venue was a small room in the Ace Hotel, a lovely place with one of my favorite views in the city. The room itself was small but elegant: about the size of a large walk-in closet, with wood walls and dim lighting. A perfectly sized space for Chill Waves of Relaxing and Inspiring New Age Music.
I arrived early to get a good seat near the front. I counted only 25 or 30 people as they trickled in, which surprised me; given the popularity of ambient electronic music today, I had expected a full house. But after a few minutes, it became apparent that many more than 30 people would be attending the concert; we were just early. More and more people came into the room and sat down on chairs facing the stage until there was barely any space left to stand at all! It turned out that this tiny venue had drawn more than 100 people – one of the largest audiences for ambient electronic music in recent memory.
The event began with some announcements
The performance will feature an array of electronic musical instruments, as well as a few ambient acoustic instruments that you might be surprised to hear. As the name implies, new age music has its roots in electronic sounds, or “chill waves” as we like to call them. You can expect to hear sounds from nature, such as birds chirping and the sound of water flowing down a river.
This concert is an experience that you won’t want to miss! The new age music genre is one that is still evolving. It will be interesting to see where it goes from here.
New Age Music: An Introduction
This weekend I attended a show at the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara, California. It was a concert featuring many ambient electronic musicians, primarily Steve Roach and Robert Rich. Both of these musicians are very well known for their ambient electronic music compositions and have been part of the genre since its inception in the late 1970s. The concert was called “The Long Conversation” and it had an interesting premise: one musician would play for about 20 minutes or so, then another would take over for about the same amount of time, and after some period of time they would begin playing together. The whole thing was improvised, with no pre-planned cues or structures.
It was a very relaxing experience. I don’t know if it would interest everyone – it’s definitely not something that everyone is going to enjoy – but if you are interested in experiencing a new way to listen to music then I highly recommend checking out some of these artists’ work.
If you love electronic music and have been waiting for the opportunity to enjoy a live concert, then you are in luck. The ambient electronic music duo A Winged Victory for the Sullen will be kicking off their North American tour this week with shows on both coasts. The tour also includes a stop at Coachella in early April.
Comprised of pianist Adam Wiltzie and guitarist Dustin O’Halloran, the band has just released their second album, titled Atomos. This is their follow-up to their acclaimed 2011 self-titled debut. For those who are unfamiliar with their work, they create ambient classical pieces that use piano, strings and electronics to build waves of soothing sounds that can also be quite uplifting at times.
I kept meeting interesting people interested in the same things I was. People were connecting with other people, and then sharing what they’d learned. It wasn’t just a bunch of people sitting around talking about their favorite new music; there were connections being made between the musicians, too. The performers knew they were going to meet the people who liked their music, and they could make connections with other musicians. For example, one musician played a set of “ambient electronic music”. He had written it as a soundtrack for a play he had written called \”Ambient Electronic Music\”. After the concert, he met some other ambient electronic musicians and invited them to play in his next play, \”Ambient Electronic Music 2\”.
This is one of many ways in which I see less-interests as having great potential for building community.
In 1955, a young composer made an early electronic music composition called “An Aural Hypothesis” on a large analog synthesizer at Columbia University’s Computer Music Center. It was the first piece of music to use magnetic tape for processing sound. The piece was performed on a telephone in Moscow by the Bolshoi Opera Troupe and broadcast via the Voice of America radio station. The piece would be followed by many other groundbreaking works, including “Fidelio” by John Cage and “Variations II” by Morton Subotnick. But it wasn’t until 1975 that the term “ambient” had been coined, in reference to music that was “intentionally not for listening.”
Ambient music is defined as “a genre of music that is created by musicians who have limited or no knowledge of what they are doing.” Ambient artists such as Brian Eno and Robert Fripp pioneered the use of electronic instruments in their compositions and created the concept of “ambience,” which refers to a state of mind in which one can hear ambient sounds. Ambience is created when sound waves are produced so they mix with one another and create a new sound wave that is indistinguishable from background noise.
The term ambient has come to refer to any form of ambient music,