The critical recuperation of new age music is an old story by now, but six years on, we still find ourselves in the midst of it. What began as a somewhat ironic gesture, a postmodern reclamation of the disposable kitsch of a previous generation, has evolved into a serious preoccupation. A raft of cassette and digital labels have cropped up in the past few years following the template established by James Ferraro’s New Age Tapes label in 2006. Synthesizer-based ambient music, especially that which is filtered through the time-distorting haze of 4-track tape hiss, is more visible now than ever, with many of the most advanced practitioners making the jump to larger indie labels.
It took a while, but this renaissance has begun manifesting in reissues of important works from the original wave of new age. First was the Rotifer Cassettes facsimile edition of the groundbreaking Inter-Dimensional Music Through Iasos. Then came Jürgen Müller’s Science of the Sea, which made considerable waves (heh) in the blogosphere last year, finding its way onto many year-end lists. (That the Müller album is a most likely a hoax, the work of a contemporary artist masquerading as an unearthed rarity, is just more evidence that listeners have become highly responsive to the idea of arcane new age from the past.) This year, reissues of work by Suzanne Ciani and J.D. Emmanuel demonstrate that the trend is showing no sign of dissipation. Blogs such as Crystal Vibrations (run by Greg Davis) have become popular destinations for avid consumers of first wave new age.
As a longtime fan of synth-based music and a collector, this has been a mixed blessing. For years, vintage new age was well under the radar; cassettes and LPs could be snatched up for bargain bin prices, most record resellers only too happy to be rid of them. New age was a secret world for the advanced music nerd: while a first pressing of a desirable Tangerine Dream or Ashra record could be prohibitively expensive, you could snatch up an equally amazing Steven Halpern or Emerald Web LP for practically nothing. The fact that the term “new age” was most often employed by critics as an insult made it especially thrilling to be part of a cognoscenti that understood its allure. That is starting to change now, and just like the krautrock resurgence of the 1990s, it’s a double-edged sword: bargains and new discoveries are increasingly difficult to come by, but the steady stream of reissues and renewed critical interest is undoubtedly a cause for celebration.
That is why it is such a treat to discover a completely untapped phenomenon like Awakening Productions. Operating from 1977 to 1984, Awakening Productions was the California-based vanity label of Robert James Bearns and Ron Dexter, a pair of burly, mustachioed spiritual brethren who developed their own hermetic world of wide-eyed metaphysical expression across a series of obscure LPs collectively entitled The Golden Voyage, releasing five volumes over a seven year period. The project had its genesis in a self-published book of mystical poetry by Bearns entitled The Awakening Electromagnetic Spectrum (1974), in which he explored an intuitive symbolism based on the light spectrum for a series of drippy musings on life, love, and the eternal now. The book is most notable for its illustrations, also by Bearns, which incorporate butterflies and hummingbirds into complex hexagrams that echo the forms of sacred geometry. Bearns’ unique drawings also appear on the beautifully hand-drawn album sleeves and j-cards for the Golden Voyage series, which was what caught my eye in the first place.
Perhaps the most admirable aspect of the new age movement in all its forms is a glorious resistance to formal dogma. New age practitioners are encouraged to become their own gurus, collecting bits and pieces of metaphysical speculation and pseudo-scientific nonsense from a myriad of post-theosophical systems, tying it together with a feel-good brand of self-empowering humanism that does not insist on objective reality, preferring instead to focus on supernatural energies as visualizations for meditation. Bearns and Dexter exemplify this trait in the most charming possible way. Their delightful disregard for prescriptive spirituality carries over into their music, which evinces a unique indifference to pop structure, combining environmental field recordings with scattered percussion and amateurish neoclassical keyboard doodles, weaving it together conceptually with crankish ideas about “celestial harmonics” and “isotonic sound.”
It helps to remember that this comes well before the new age formula was established. Like Iasos before them, Bearns & Dexter were intuitively creating a musical accompaniment for their beatific world of Rainbow Light Ships and Electromagnetic Hexagrams. New age had not yet become a niche category with its own set of clichés, so the duo were drawing only from their own imagination. As time went on, the music became more compositionally sophisticated, arrangements more complex, but an irreducible naïveté remained. Part of this naïve atmosphere is undoubtedly due to the production style, which is primitive but always texturally interesting, yet another example of the way in which the “excess” of outsider music is often more appealing than the music itself.
By the time the final volume was released in 1984, the duo had developed their own unique brand of idiosyncratic, spaced-out pop schmaltz. The fifth volume, subtitled The Heralding, features a striking black and white sleeve and a suite of mawkishly sentimental love songs, topped off by the swan song “Being Here With You.” The album, with its relentless positivity and cockeyed futurism, has the feel of an unreleased EPCOT ride soundtrack (EPCOT being perhaps the only American equivalent to the vintage British pop-futurism that informs the hauntological audio of Ghost Box and fellow travelers). The album is an outsider classic by any measure.
Due to the romantic content of the lyrics, their San Francisco origins, and the 70s gay porn mustaches, there has been speculation that Bearns and Dexter were a couple. Their sudden cessation of activity in 1984 has led to further conjecture that they were early victims of the AIDS epidemic. Though there is no reliable information to support these rumors, it is interesting how the vacuum of information leads to this kind of blind speculation. While interesting, I find it preferable to allow the mystery to remain, focusing one’s attention on the content rather than the margins.
A distribution deal with classical label Moss Music Group meant that the Golden Voyage LPs ended up in shops across the country, and they are still quite easy to find in cutout bins and flea markets. I found an autographed copy of the book online for only 75 cents, and it has since become a prized possession. In the final analysis, Bearns & Dexter is one of those record collecting phenomena that is difficult to defend purely on merit, even though the duo produced admirable work with relatively limited means. Like a lot of crate-digging finds, it’s at least partially about the sensation of having discovered it for oneself — rather than through a blog or a reissue — and that sensation is impossible to duplicate, and increasingly rare.
