Bomb! * includes digital download upon release date * Slowly, over the last two decades, there’s been an unexpected critical shift regarding New Age music. This global movement, which began during the late 1960s and reached its height during the '80s, remained maligned and misunderstood almost from its duration and for many years following, being viewed by a great many as a self-indulgent last gasp of the dying hippie dream. Due to a dedicated reappraisal instigated by record collectors who freed themselves from the biases and stigmas of history, and numerous labels that have delivered incredible reissues and archival releases by artists like Arial Kalma, Joanna Brouk, JD Emmanuel, Pauline-Anna Strom, Laraaji, Iasos, Randall McClellan, and numerous others, this music has begun to be accurately understood as as one the inheritors of the legacies of musical minimalism, building on the groundwork of figures like Terry Riley, Jon Hassell, and La Monte Young. With a catalog that has long supported artist like Eliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros, and JD Emmanuel with similar regard, Important Records has been a crucial platform through which these important connection have been discerned. Now the label returns with an incredible 7 CD boxed set, “Agartha: Personal Meditation Music”, originally released on cassette in 1986, at the height of New Age music’s popularity, created as an aid for meditation and alignment. An astounding body of long-tones and ripping harmonics, glacially unfolding across twelve distinct pieces, the release of “Agartha: Personal Meditation Music” contributes yet another important piece to the historical puzzle, and is quite frankly ridiculously good. Housed in a heavy duty clamshell box, with each disc contained in sleeves that perfectly replicate the originals, accompanied by liner notes that provide extensive instructions for use from the original text and an essay by library music scholar David Hollander, the beauty of the object perfectly resonates with that of the sounds it contains.

The music gathered across “Agartha: Personal Meditation Music” is shrouded in relative mystery. Connected to the teachings of Meredith Young-Sowers, cofounder of the Stillpoint Foundation, a global spiritual community and school located in Walpole, New Hampshire, little information was provided across seven cassettes issued by Stillpoint Publishing in 1986 beyond the fact that they were an extension of the teaching found in Young-Sowers’s book, “Agartha: A Journey to the Stars”, which recounts the author's communication with “Mentor”, an angelic advisor who offered divine wisdom relating to the meaning of love, the Conscious and Superconscious mind, and the correction of the Earth's imbalances, that formed a foundation for her curriculum oriented around spiritual healing. The music is credited to an otherwise unknown artist named Frank Smith, and offers no specifics regarding how it was made.

Each of the discs contained within the “Agartha: Personal Meditation Music” box, in keeping with the original cassettes, is constructed around specific sequences of sounds - harmonic triads - conceived and arranged with the intent of intensifying the listener’s meditation experience, and focusing energy onto their specific healing needs. The individual notes of each Harmonic Triad progress are in a fashion that is neither improvisational nor chance-based, nor is it generative. Instead, the music flows outward as if being transmitted - or channeled - from a place outside human consciousness.

For those less spiritually concerned, engagement with the ideas and intentions through which this music was originally conceived is far from necessary for it to have a palpable effect. Simply put, it stands on its own and amounts to some of the most engaging arrangements of sonority as yet to have excavated and reissued from the New Age movement: flowing long-tones and drones, rising overtones, and floating frequencies coast within washes of sine-waves, intervals, and modulations. While varied in their manifestations, these works resonate deeply with the efforts of Eliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Brian Eno, and La Monte Young, intertwining the ideas of minimalism and experimental music with moments of lighter, more effervescent structures more familiar to Ambient and New Age music, producing sounds that are simultaneously creatively engrossing and imbued with an inexplicable depth, provoking palpable waves of emotion and somatic responses, produced by the subtle differences of each unique Triad.

Containing the entire twelve compositions issued with the “Agartha: Personal Meditation Music” series during the mid 1980s, Important Records’ release of this stunning 7 CD collection - housed in a heavy duty clamshell box, with each disc contained in sleeves that perfectly replicate the originals, accompanied by liner notes that provide extensive instructions for use from the original text and an essay by library music scholar David Hollander - blows the lid off of nearly every preconception relating to the music of the New Age movement and drenches the ear in a truly engrossing, nearly entirely lost body of visionary sounds. Absolutely amazing, a complete revelation, and not to be missed by any fan of Ambient music, Minimalism, Drone, or New Age music at large. Whoever Frank Smith is or was, we can only hope there’s more to be unearthed.