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An audiovisual journey into the visionary heart of New Age music
Today, with Spotify “Relaxation” playlists and 24-hour YouTube ambient streams, New Age music feels ubiquitous and familiar. But its roots are stranger than is commonly known, tracing back to the spiritual exploration of the 1970s, when a cohort of musicians created cosmic soundscapes sparkling with the afterglow of ecstatic spiritual revelations, psychedelic experiences, near-death encounters, and meditative practices.
In Bridge to an Unseen Shore, Jacob Smith argues that early New Age musicians formed a distinct artistic movement, a school of visionary art expressed through recorded sound. Their music sought to dissolve boundaries between mind and body, self and cosmos, offering listeners sonic pathways to heightened awareness and holistic experience. This was a multimedia movement as well as a spiritual one, and New Age music was paired with painting, planetarium shows, laser light shows, experimental films, and television soundtracks. Drawing on extensive interviews with the genre’s pioneers, Smith delivers the first comprehensive cultural history of New Age music, from its countercultural origins in the 1970s to its 1980s cassette underground and mainstream crossover to its lasting influence today. Engaging and richly researched, this book reframes New Age music as a vital chapter in the history of spiritual and sonic culture.
Jacob Smith is cofounder of the Master of Arts in Sound Arts and Industries at Northwestern University, and professor there in the Department of Radio/Television/Film.
“This superb work of cultural history is the first comprehensive account of New Age music, art, and culture in its golden age. Sympathetic yet nuanced, Jacob Smith's illuminating book masterfully blends accessible historical journalism and scholarly mapmaking into a definitive study that will be well received among scholars and New Age lovers alike.”—Erik Davis, author of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
"A disarmingly definitive defense of an oft-maligned music, distinguished above all by the author's labor in making New Age music visible as a movement and field. Traveling to unexpected spaces of creation and listening, interviewing numerous key figures, and disclosing an enormous discography, Smith enthusiastically reintroduces us to the New Age in this deeply researched yet strikingly intimate book."—Jeremy Braddock, author of Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as Told on Nine Comedy Albums