“I Am the Center,” a 3-album set of new age music recorded in the United States, sits between vinyl releases by Bob Dylan and Mick Turner at Academy Records in Brooklyn, NY. Cory Fierman, a store manager, estimated that Academy had sold at least ten copies, which he called an unusually high number for a box set. (Photo by Philippe Theise)
The story of “I Am the Center,” the 3-LP, 2-CD set spanning forty years of American new age music, started with a conversation between two independent label heads in Los Angeles.
At first, the idea did not effect a meeting of the minds.
“As he puts it, I might as well have said that we should do a polka compilation, because he just didn’t have any idea what I was talking about,” said Douglas Mcgowan of Yoga Records, who broached the idea to Matt Sullivan of Light in the Attic in 2009.
But Sullivan eventually came around. Listening to obscure cassettes of the soothing, instrumental music at Mcgowan’s apartment, he realized that new age had a lot in common with Brian Eno’s series of ambient records, which he already loved.
In early 2011, Mcgowan gave a paper entitled “Flogging a Dead Genre? Resuscitating New Age” at the Experience Music Project Pop Conference at the University of California at Los Angeles. Sullivan also spoke at the event, and a few months later, he encouraged Mcgowan to begin work on the set. Early last year, Mcgowan began assembling what would become a twenty-track compilation.
But Mcgowan, a dedicated record collector, had already started preparing for the task by building relationships with a bevy of new age artists.
In the liner notes to “I Am the Center,” he describes a 2005 road trip from California to Wyoming and Texas, when he found hundreds of unopened copies of albums by a musician named James Daniel Emmanuel in a Dallas discount store.
He bought fifty, sold them to influential music lovers in LA, and contacted Emmanuel. The artist eventually helped Mcgowan with the remastering of some of the first Yoga releases; Mcgowan, in turn, helped Emmanuel issue more of his material.
In the next few years, Mcgowan reached out to other new age artists whose records and cassettes he found, but he didn’t feel the timing was right to promise anything. He described his initial interaction with harpist Joel Andrews, whose skittering, reflective 1977 piece, “Seraphic Borealis,” anchors the middle of disc one of “I Am the Center,” as typical.
“I said the same thing I said to a lot of the musicians I talked to … in 2007 and 2008, which is ‘I want to work with you on something someday, but the world’s not ready for it yet,’” he said.
In the meantime, music writers and record collectors continued to turn on to new age. In his EMP talk, Mcgowan cited the formation of Waxidermy, a blog devoted to rare vinyl records, as an engine for dialogue about the genre.
Once Sullivan—whose label has a five-person staff in LA and recently opened a retail store in Seattle—gave him the go-ahead, Mcgowan informed the artists he already knew and initiated contact with several more.
Altogether, they included Constance Demby, whose hypnotic piece, “Om Mani Padme Hum,” comes from a 1978 cassette called “Skies above Skies”; Don Slepian, who used a synthesizer at Bell Telephone Labs to create the twinkling soundscape on “Awakening,” a track on his 1980 cassette “Open Spaces”; and Judith Tripp, whose sober flute tones on “Li Sun” form part of a 1983 cassette called “Windscape.”
On the phone or over email, Mcgowan tried to convey his knowledge and appreciation of the artists’ work.
“I try to follow the campsite rule. Leave everything better than you found it,” he said. “So, never call somebody up and stress them out or make them wish you hadn’t contacted them. Always try to tell them that you have a genuine love for their music and go from there.”
Several musicians said they appreciated Mcgowan’s approach. Slepian, who still records in his home studio in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, was happy to hear Mcgowan’s interest in a thirty-three year old release.
“I was impressed because he actually knew the music,” Slepian said.
Tripp, a practicing psychotherapist in Marin County, California, felt similarly.
“Doug was very clear in his commitment and I could sense his enthusiasm for this kind of music,” she said.
Once the musicians agreed to work with Mcgowan, Light in the Attic handled licensing their material. According to Sullivan, who opted not to share particular stories from the project, it was a sensitive step.
“Most of the time with reissues, [the records were] financial failures back in the day,” he said. “We come in the picture, we’re up against thirty or forty years of ghosts.”
Alongside compiling the music, Mcgowan found art for the outer and inner packaging of the set. The CD gatefold opens to reveal Gilbert Williams’s shimmering bird of paradise rising above a sea of light-emitting volcanoes, and the sleeves feature Janaia Donaldson’s silver spirals, stars, and eyes.
“It’s very important [that] the packaging flows with the sound,” Sullivan said.
Mcgowan also wrote liner notes intended to introduce the musicians without giving too much away. Slepian praised Mcgowan’s edit of a long description of his work with the Bell synthesizer; Tripp, who plays flute in workshops she leads called Dream Quests, expressed disappointment that more of her story didn’t make it in.
Since its release last October 29, “I Am the Center” has spent eight weeks in the top ten of Billboard Magazine’s new age chart, peaking at number eight. Pitchfork awarded it best new reissue status, and even Rolling Stone gave it three and a half stars.
Meanwhile, Mcgowan and Sullivan have already discussed future releases covering new age music from abroad. Slepian hinted at the volume of material that may await.
“If you go outside this country, it’s called spa music,” he said.