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The 70s New Age Record That Went Viral on SoundCloud

Jordan De La Sierra's 'Gymnosphere' is nearly two hours of single-piano music.
Image courtesy Numero Group

​Ever since Hall & Oates's hipster revival, I've started just assuming that everything I once thought was lame as hell will eventually be praised for its brilliance. It's a big tent, this here internet. I've already come around to love me some free jazz and jazz fusion, and just this week it occurred to me that not only do I NOT hate "New Age" music, as I've long assumed, but, to the contrary, I think I actually like New Age music quite a bit.

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This humbling revelation came courtesy of another ​Numero Group reissue, this one of the semi-lost New Age masterpiece by Jordan De La Sierra called Gymnosphere: Song of the Rose, which got little attention when it was first released on Unity Records in 1977, but seems to be catching on in the internet's new age revival.

The Gymnosphere is nearly two hours of single-piano music. De La Sierra recorded the piano in a small studio in Berkeley, California, and then recorded that recording while it played in San Francisco's Grace Cathedral, to capture the cathedral's reverb. The results are more expansive than a piano and more organic sounding than a synthesizer. Long notes pulse themselves into overtones.

If De La Sierra's work is at all indicative of New Age music as a whole, I've apparently liked New Age for a long time under the moniker "ambient music." Douglas Mcgowan, a record collector who also runs Yoga Records in Eugene, Oregon, told The New York Times that ambient music was "basically new age with the metaphysical spiritual stuff taken out."

Indeed, released a year before Brian Eno's "Ambient 1: Music for Airports," De La Sierra's Gymnosphere reminds me much more of Eno than, say, Yanni or Jean Michel Jarre. Both Eno and De La Sierra share a lineage they trace back to the French pianist and composer of the Gymnopedies, Erik Satie, w​ho has b​een credited as one of ambient music's forebears.

Numero Group has been leading the New Age revival charge, reissuing the electric flute player Iasos's "Celestial Soul Portrait" in addition to De La Sierra's work, but the Gymnosphere recordings are an old record that's catching on through a new channel. For a while, the track "The Temple of Aesthetic Action" was accounting for 80 percent of Numero Group's traffic ​on Soundcloud.

According to Numero Group, the metrics indicated the Soundcloud hits came directly from people browsing on the site, possibly just surfing the tag "#Piano."

"So it was a viral hit purely among the community of the social aspect of that site," a label representative told me. "Apparently it resonated because it garnered far more plays than any of the other Soundcloud tracks that número has uploaded over the years."

I'm not alone in realizing that there's room in my music diet for New Age, which has a lot less to do with crystals or candles or incense, and more to do with texture and using sound to block the more abrasive sounds of daily life. It's a big tent, my musical tastes. I still think Hall & Oates suck though.