At first glance, the dominant story in electronic music this past decade is digital maximalism. The 2010s started with EDM in the ascendant: festival headliners like Skrillex and Deadmau5 blitzed audiences with ultra-brite, buzzed-up noise closely synced to retina-scorching CGI-animations. Cooler versions of the same absurdly awake sound came from Rustie with the hyperreal euphoria ofand PC Music with their Top 40 simulation pop. From Iglooghost's kawaii fantasia to Flume's baroque intricacies, there was a common aesthetic of overworked production and overkill effects designed to grab your attention.And yet you could just as easily construct a counter-narrative of the 2010s in which a completely opposite set of minimalist values—reduction, uneventfulness, calm, whatever the opposite of "in your face" is—have been ascendant. Wander the internet and you'll find dozens of flavours and substyles of ambient music. Idyllic and glinting in the classic lineage that runs back through '90s chillout to Eno, Harold Budd and Steve Hillage. Space music in the Steve Roach and Sky Records tradition. Back-to-analogue modular synth wooze. Dark drone with an eldritch pagan feel. Work that feels vaguely liturgical and pre-Modern, with devotional vocals and acoustic instrumental textures. And that's before you even drift into adjacent genres that share ambient or easy-listening qualities (vaporwave, hauntology, nu-shoegaze) or that encompass ambient subgenres (post-metal).Alongside this sprawling array of contemporary exponents, ambient's foundational legends have been newly active as legacy artists: Eno's run of releases for Warp; The Orb, with a string of albums including including; Ryuichi Sakamoto's acclaimed. There's also been an archival drive that made heroes of forgotten figures like Laraaji, K. Leimer, Midori Takada, Suzanne Ciani and Ariel Kalma. Reissue labels and album-sharing blogs have reactivated dormant concepts like Fourth World and Exotica, and placed New Age, Japanese "interior music" and library records into the canon of essential listening for young inquiring ears. This influence pool is already shaping an emerging generation of musicians, changing their value-set so that "soporific" is not an insult but an ideal—an artistic objective, even.One of the most appealing and endearing aspects of ambient and New Age is that much of it simply wants to pleasure the listener. These musicians aren't afraid of pleasantness and prettiness. The audio palette encompasses soft-focus sounds, gentle pulses and chiming textures that carry an idyllic childhood aura (via music boxes, ice cream trucks, and so forth). It's a radically different conception of what music is for than the lineage of punk, industrial, noise and the harder kinds of techno, where, as William Thomas of the New Age archival blog and label Sounds Of The Dawn puts it, "there is a strong tendency to see what is soft, beautiful or soothing as not artistic, authentic or 'real.'"Although New Age was in some ways the ultimate do-it-yourself music—made by individuals in home studios, distributed through networks outside the record industry—it had no truck with what we generally think of as a DIY aesthetic: rough-hewn, lo-fi, dirty, distorted. On the contrary, the production aspired to be limpid and luxuriant. This decade's rehabilitation of New Age chimes with an across-the-board shift in underground music that started with chillwave's simultaneously ironic-yet-sincere appreciation for yacht rock and has carried on with vaporwave. Words like "smooth" or "slick" no longer have a negative charge; the polished patina of professionalism in mainstream pop-rock of the '80s is an aspirational ideal rather than something to kick against. Spencer Doran, who compiled 2019's celebrated Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980–1990 and makes a modern version of that sound in the group Visible Cloaks, pursues "high quality sonics" and says that the equation of lo-fidelity sound with "authenticity or grit… has always felt really disingenuous and phony, like a pair of pre-ripped jeans."Designed to work as a form of exquisite audio-decor, Japanese interior music caught Doran's ear around a decade ago, resulting in a pair of celebrated online mixes titled. He also started the imprint Empire Of Signs (the title comes from a Roland Barthes book about Japanese culture) to not so much reissue as make available outside Japan for the first time albums like Hiroshi Yoshimura's Music For Nine Post Cards . Alongside thecompilation, the culmination of Doran's Japanophile ardour came with last year's, a collaboration between Visible Cloaks and veteran musicians Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano.is Latin for serenity. The title emerged when Ojima and Doran discussed the hard-to-translate Japanese concept shizukesa. "It can mean tranquility, stillness or even silence," explains Doran. "I have this pet-theory that there is this shizukesa-like essence in early European pre-classical music forms, that then fell away in the Baroque era as things became more bombastic and grand." But in the 20th century, composers like Erik Satie and Arvo Pärt discovered Medieval forms of monastic music like plainchant. Doran believes that in the late 20th century both Western and Eastern music started separately "circling back to this hidden, underlying sense of stillness or serenity encoded deep within our traditions"—an escape from the pressures of modernity itself.New Age's rehabilitation actually started a little over a decade ago in the late 2000s, within that spectrum of DIY sounds variously dubbed hypnagogic pop and chillwave. James Ferraro, hypnagogic pioneer and vaporwave godfather, named his cassette label New Age Tapes. Kindred spirits like Spencer Clark, Emeralds, Dolphins Into The Future and Oneohtrix Point Never drew on the wafting synthesizer sounds of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream, as well as Krautrock artists like Manuel Göttsching, whose rippling, effects-laden guitar patterns were by the late '70s verging on the New Age zone. Early in the 2010s, blogs likeemerged that were specifically dedicated to archival New Age and made long-lost and virtually unfindable recordings available to curious ears.Alongside these unofficial excavations came a series of landmark double-disc compilations from the Seattle reissue label Lights In The Attic: 2013's; its 2016 Europe-focused sequel; and the Spencer Doran-compiled project. Numero Group, another leading archival label, pulled off a conceptual coup by reissuing the entire series ofalbums (originally released by Irv Teibel and his Syntonic Research imprint from the late 1960s onwards) as an app that allowed you to immerse yourself in Teibel's pristinely recorded natural soundscapes via your phone. Theapp wasn't ambient music so much as the ambiences of real-world spaces and weather conditions—a spring afternoon in an English meadow, dusk in a Georgia swamp, a thunderstorm in a pine forest—and it chimed with an uptick in interest in field recordings , nature sounds and even avian music, such as Sub Rosa's reissue of Jean C. Roche's. Numero Group's repackaging-without-any-packaging ofpulled off a double whammy: at once environmentally sound (no carbon footprint from production or transportation) and a canny circumvention of the increasingly fraught business of selling box sets and lavish vinyl reissues.One of the major New Age archival blogs, William Thomas'shas evolved into a record label, but it's not in the reissue business. The imprint instead releases new music in the dulcimer-chiming, flute-infused tradition, by artists like Hybrid Palms, a Russian producer whose glintingis one of the ambient highlights of the past decade. In addition to fostering contemporary exponents,also indirectly contributed to spawning the London chill-out club New Atlantis. Cofounder India Jordan describes the blog as "a huge inspiration" that sparked their interest in the genre. The club and label's name comes from a cassette they found on, a 1984 cassette of meditational music by the English musician Frank Perry based around chimes from Tibetan singing bowls, gongs and bells. Perry himself took the name from Francis Bacon's, his 1626 novel about an island utopia—mostly likely because of the famous passage about "sound-houses" in which sounds and harmonies are generated that are "sweeter than any you have, together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet."New Atlantis the club is itself a mini-utopia in the heart of South London. Taking place on Sunday afternoons at the Peckham record store Rye Wax, it's a place to recover from the stresses of the working week and the excesses of Saturday night alike. "There's sofas, a rug on the floor," says Jordan. "They serve food. People go there to chill, not to get deafened. I actually prefer it not too busy, because if it's rammed you can't hear the music and people start shouting over each other, and then you lose the intimacy and it often drowns out the live acts." The live performers and DJs mostly play beatless music ("we do very occasionally let a BPM into the party!" laughs Jordan) and the mixing approach emphasizes "smooth transitions, blends and effects." Jordan might take their own club-oriented 140 BPM tracks and play them at 30 BPM, "using effects like reverb and reverse to make new sounds." Accompanying the emollient music are beatific projections of images that Jordan has collected over the last few years, themed into seasonal sets like spring or winter. There's a lot of whales (their lifelong favorite animal, but also New Age aligned via the '70s fad for whale-song recordings) along with imagery sourced in '70s film animations or from the website of Iasos, creator of the 1975 New Age landmarkThe approach to sound and visuals at New Atlantis and at similar ambient events springing up all over recalls the original chillout culture of the '90s: nomadic events like Telepathic Fish's ambient tea parties, or the Big Chill, which started out at a North London church but quickly evolved into a huge summer outdoor festival. The first-wave chillout scene flirted with New Age and hippie ideas in a tongue-in-cheek way, reflected in titles like The Orb's "Back Side Of The Moon," at once a confession of secret Pink Floyd love (then still an embarrassment for the post-punk generation) and a deflation of any cosmic mystic tendencies. You can see a similar sort of playfulness on New Atlantis's first compilation, with track titles like "Gran's Orgasm" by Pre-Emptress and "Dianetics Over MIDI" by L'Ron."There's definitely some humour in it," says Jordan. "It's important we don't take this too seriously, as it can become quite exclusionary." Yet Jordan combines '90s-redolent irony with earnest spiritual leanings. Immediately before getting into New Age, they had been exploring meditation and the therapeutic properties of sound baths. "It's very much a part of New Atlantis. Most people who are involved in it meditate or are spiritually creative in other ways."Leaving's Matthewdavid likewise is a seeker who's explored the full spectrum of esoteric thought: Robert Anton Wilson, Alan Watts, Aleister Crowley, Gurdjieff and the theosophist movement. When I first saw that he'd titled an EP, I assumed it was a joke, but the record was literally recorded at an ashram in Indonesia. "When we were living there, we had access to this meditation cave and I would play flute in the cave and record."Where New Atlantis's roster is all contemporary producers inspired by the original New Age, Leaving puts out releases by first-wave artists as well as their modern descendants. SunPath'sis a replica edition of cassettes originally released by Jeff Berry in 1980 and 1984: self-described "Alternative Realities" music recorded in New Mexico and blending together Prophet synth and field recordings of streams and snowstorms. Leaving has also put out exquisite repackagings of self-released 1980s tapes by the prolific New Age composer Laraaji. Creator of, one of the original four Ambient Series LPs produced by Eno, Laraaji is also renowned for his laughter meditation workshops. He's become a friend and mentor to Matthewdavid, who in turn has promoted Laraaji concerts at Highland Park venues such as the Lodge Room. It's quite a trip to see the 75-year-old performer and his partner Arji OceAnanda stroking rippling chimes from their array of zithers and other metallophonic instruments, while hundreds of young people sit reverently on the hall's floor.Matthewdavid initially moved to LA to participate in the Low End Theory beat-scene of artists like Flying Lotus. But crate-digging in bargain basements led him to pick up prerecorded New Age cassettes from the '70s and '80s, lured by both their off-the-map obscurity and their garish artwork. He found himself falling for even the most kitsch subgenres of the music: "Pan flute music, Celtic Harp music, Spa Music." Although he made (and still makes) beat-based and glitchy music, he created an alter-ego—Matthewdavid's Mindflight—for his ambient releases like. The goal was, he says, to "really hone in on New Age as an identity and try to reinvent or update what that could mean now." Leaving has become an outlet for similarly aligned figures in the LA area like the devotional-vocal artist Ana Roxanne, whose recent and wonderful ~~~ contains songs with titles like "I'm Every Sparkly Woman" and "It's A Rainy Day On The Cosmic Shore."