Ten Journeys through New Age Aotearoa

Aotearoa New Zealand has produced a steady stream of New Age music releases over the years, with several artists of international stature hailing from these shores. It’s a musical genre suited to a land renowned for its natural landscapes, flora and fauna. Local artists have, in turn, given New Age Aotearoa some distinctive characteristics. Native birdsong and aspects of Māori culture are regularly incorporated into the music, and several well-travelled practitioners have brought worldly experience to bear in their New Age productions.

New Age music ascended into global consciousness during the 1980s with the work of artists such as Steven Halpern, George Winston, and Kitarō. Within a few years, New Age music sales in the United States had reached the same level as that of Classical. Recognising this success, the Grammy Awards established a Best New Age Recording category in 1987.

New Age has always been a musically capacious genre. Encompassing synthesiser voyages through outer and inner space, neoclassical, folk and jazz excursions, and field recordings of natural ambience and wildlife, New Age compositions tend to be expansive and open-ended in structure, often with consonant harmonies and a contemplative tone. Such qualities reflect the genre’s alignment with the wider New Age movement’s focus on alternative healing, ecological consciousness, and spirituality. Often the music’s intended function is stated up front (“music for meditation,” “sound health,” “relaxation music,” or something similar), but at other times the goals seem more aesthetic or conceptual in nature. New Age can thus overlap into other musical categories, including ambient, electronic music, jazz fusion, and worldbeat.

Early on, New Age sometimes got a bad rap: “Hot tub music” and “yuppie Muzak” were among the epithets that sceptics bandied around, and some artists consequently came to dislike their work being described as “New Age.” Nonetheless, this style of music has held onto a large worldwide market and, as the wheel of the generations has turned, is gaining new followers.

A landmark reappraisal was US label Light in the Attic’s 2013 compilation I Am the Center: Private Issue New Age Music in America, 1950-1990. Artists working in contemporary genres have also been attracted to New Age as a kind of parallel musical universe, ripe for rediscovery, a trend culminating in hit albums such as rapper André 3000’s New Blue Sun (2023). New Age’s emphasis on fostering wellbeing and mindful listening has also, in our anxious times, struck a soothing chord with audiences.

New Age in Aotearoa

The first New Zealand label dedicated to New Age was established in 1980. The Auckland-based Sun Energy put out around 10 cassette releases, distributed locally and overseas. The label was overseen by a trust whose underlying goals included:

to teach the ideals and assist the effort of our fellow peoples to establish, uphold, promulgate, and advance spiritual education, alternative technologies, music, films, publications, foods, humanitarian teaching of spiritual communion, [and] economic cooperation ...

Over the next 45 years, many more New Age recordings would emanate from Aotearoa. As an area that's largely uncharted by discographers and music writers, it's not simple to gauge the extent of this territory. Searching for “new age” in the National Library of New Zealand’s collection of New Zealand releases yields around 250 albums, while similar search-terms such as “ambient” bring yet more candidates to the surface. To select only 10 examples thus poses a challenge, though made somewhat more manageable by limiting the options to current online examples. Keep in mind that the selections here represent just a few of the journeys one might take through New Age Aotearoa.

1. David Parsons – Sounds of Mothership

Sounds of Mothership (1980)

David Parsons is a good contender for being New Zealand’s first New Age artist. Originally a jazz drummer, he acquired an early interest in Indian music and took up the sitar in the mid-1960s, which he played with psychrock band 40 Watt Banana and on Terence O’Neill Joyce’s The Cosmic Vision (1974).

Then, in 1975, while studying the instrument in India, Parsons encountered Wendy Carlos’s Sonic Seasonings and began experimenting with home-recorded combinations of synthesiser, natural sounds, and sitar. The stunning results were issued in 1980 as Sounds of Mothership, Sun Energy’s inaugural cassette release. Slow, dark, and delicately layered, the album culminates in an expansive evocation of devaloka, a Sanskrit term for the plane of existence that is home to the gods. With its impression of celestial vastness, Mothership stands as a pioneering New Age contribution to the broader category of Space Music.

In 1982, the US label Fortuna reissued the album in an edited-down form as Sounds of the Mothership, the version presented below. Parsons went on to compose Tibetan Plateau (1982), Himalaya (1987), and numerous other albums, often with an Asian influence. He is recognised internationally as one of the original New Age masters. David Parsons passed away in Wellington in February 2025

2. Andrew White – Conversations

Pastoral excursions on acoustic instruments such as piano and guitar are a New Age staple, associated especially with labels like Windham Hill. Guitarist Andrew White made an early and significant contribution in this vein with Conversations, recorded at Harlequin Studios in Auckland and released by Sun Energy in 1984.

Conversations centres on White’s finger-picked arrangements in a baroque folk style, intricate, melodic, and delicately ornamented. Additional musicians add their own touches, guitar taking up dialogues with piano, trumpet, viola, voices, and other instruments, while “crysonic” sound effects and environmental recordings of breaking surf, birds, and streams help “create a restful feeling,” as the liner notes state.

The album was picked up internationally by Sona Gaia Productions, who reissued it in 1986 in the US, Germany, and Canada. White next collaborated with American artist David Arkenstone on the hit album Island (1989), which reached no.6 on the US New Age Album charts. He has since issued many other recordings in folk, blues, and Celtic styles.

3. Ao Rangi – Light of the Universe

Light of the Universe (1986)

Ao Rangi was a recording project involving ten artists from Auckland and Hokianga who’d been inspired by the Off the Deep End improvised music festival (Wellington, 1983-1984). They later convened at Ahipara in the far north to workshop ideas. Many had worked together before. “It was a magical, highly creative and fluid time,” Sun Energy house producer Garth Whitcombe recalls. “As a group of musicians, we flowed through each other’s projects.” Others attending included Bruce Robertson and Alison East of Origins Dance Theatre, jazz pianist Richard DeGray, and cellist Pamela Gray, an early Braille Collective member.

Light of the Universe (1986) was then recorded at Harlequin Studios “in a midnight to dawn session,” the album unfurling its improvisations around quietly catchy melodies, several times soaring high with the soulful vocalizing of Leone Thoms. Many tracks have Māori titles, these indigenous connections made by guitarist and Sun Energy art director Cliff Royal. The collective’s name Ao Rangi, meanwhile, was gifted by Huhanna Oneroa of Te Arohanui Marae in Mangataipa near Ahipara.

Whitcombe also recorded his own album for Sun Energy, Spirit Voyage (1987), and currently resides in Nashville where he and his wife run a music healing service.

4. Jeff Clarkson – ‘Atlantis’ from Infinite Grace

Jeff Clarkson (now known as Jeffree) first came to national attention in the late 1970s fronting the new wave group Flight X-7. The stresses of the rock lifestyle led to him changing direction in the mid-80s. He began practicing meditation and composing New Age music as an accompaniment, the first release being Butterfly (1986) on his own Evergreen label. “Within a short while,” Jeffree later told podcaster M. Curtis McCoy, “people were using that for all sorts of purposes… [in] hospitals… Tai Chi, yoga, and natural birthing.”

Jeff Clarkson - Botanica

Many more albums followed, typically featuring long tracks combining synthesisers with recordings of natural environments. A personal favourite is the ocean-themed Infinite Grace (1990), including ‘Atlantis’, which takes the listener on a 24-minute voyage through submarine worlds evoked with keyboard pads, flutes, guitars, and other patches, surfacing at the end with gently breaking waves.

Clarkson’s other releases include Breathing Space (2002), where he introduced the “Breathasizer” into his instrumental rig, a keyboard breath controller he now regularly employs to impart extra sensitivity and dynamics. Through his website Jeffree offers an extensive range of meditation resources, music, videos, and texts.

5. Jon Mark – The Standing Stones of Callanish

Jon Mark was a veteran of the 1960s British rock scene who moved to New Zealand in 1985 and began releasing New Age music soon afterwards. His debut in this genre was the gorgeous Standing Stones of Callanish (1988), recorded at the National Film Unit in Lower Hutt and released on the German Kuckuck label.

Named for a neolithic monument on the remote Scottish Isle of Lewis, Standing Stones sits within New Age’s popular Celtic-themed subgenre. Mark’s music is largely synthesiser based, and here he uses the Roland D-50 and other keyboards to add atmospheric veils and layers to traditional-sounding pentatonic melodies and hymnlike cadences.

Mark subsequently released many other Celtic or other World music-influenced albums. Most came out on White Cloud, a label he and his wife Thelma Burchell established in 1993 with backing from German industry-heavyweight Klaus Heymann (founder/owner of the Naxos label). As the second main New Zealand imprint in the New Age field, White Cloud built up a large catalogue of local recordings over the next 20 years. Mark was himself awarded the 2004 Traditional World Music Grammy for a recording of Tibetan chant. He passed away in Rotorua in 2021.

6. David Antony Clark – Terra Inhabitata

Among the first tranche of White Cloud releases was David Antony Clark’s debut album Terra Inhabitata (1993). Dunedin-born, Clark had spent much of his twenties travelling widely throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas, hearing, playing and teaching music. Meeting up with Jon Mark upon his return, Clark ended up recording six albums for the label.

As the liner notes state, Terra Inhabitata “is set at the end of the last ice age, ten thousand years ago,” in a primordial landscape, “a vast natural aviary for exotic and unique bird species.” Across eight tracks, Clark pays homage to Aotearoa’s ancient natural heritage, combining brooding synthesiser chords and keening melodies with a touch of gentle groove and the cries of birds extant (ruru, kea, kākāpō) and extinct (moa, Haast’s eagle). A notable guest on opening track ‘Gondwana’s Ark’ is taonga puoro pioneer Hirini Melbourne, playing kōauau, pūtatara, and Vanuatu flute.

Among Clark’s more recent works is a collaboration with Rāwiri Toia, Tribal Blood—Māori Heartbeat (2010), released on German label Singing Frog.

7. Ana and Norval Williamson – Beautiful Relaxing Music

Perhaps the most prolific local New Age artists, Auckland-based couple Ana and Norval Williamson self-released upwards of 40 albums between 1990 and the mid-2000s. As their KMP Music website shows, these fall into various categories (Relaxing Music, Scenic, Piano, Meditation, Healing, Nature Sounds), with Norval mainly responsible for composition and field recordings, and Ana for arrangements, performance, and studio engineering.

Their characteristic approach is to combine synthesiser arrangements—typically electric organ, piano, and string patches, with occasional portamento effects—and New Zealand birdsong and environmental sounds. Norval’s self-described “symmetrical melodies” are a distinctive aspect, featuring sumptuous cadences occasionally reminiscent of Angelo Badalamenti.

Beautiful Relaxing Music (1994) is one of several Williamson co-releases with the Canadian label Banff Music; it was also released in New Zealand as Sanctuary. By 2004, the Williamsons were estimated to have made over $5 million of sales worldwide.

8. Peter Blake – Private Dawn

Private Dawn (1994)

Contemplative electronic jazz excursions are an accessible strand of New Age, with artists such as Mark Isham using modern timbres to explore themes of restfulness and distance. Peter Blake’s Private Dawn (1994), another early White Cloud classic, is a brilliant New Zealand example of this introspective style.

Peter Blake had a long and successful music career behind him prior to recording Private Dawn, playing keyboards in classic New Zealand groups such as The Quincy Conserve and the Rodger Fox Big Band, before becoming a prolific television composer. Such experiences made him a skilled operator of synthesisers, the primary ingredient of this, his only solo album.

Blake’s soulful piano parts are often to the fore on Private Dawn’s 10 tracks, surrounded by an array of digital patches and frequently accompanied with fretless bass. Highlights include the bubbling guitar-mutes of ‘Pictures from a Park’, the slightly ominous arpeggios and digital shakuhachi of ‘Green Light’, and the lyrical melodicism of ‘The Light of Day’, but all the tracks are supremely crafted.

9. Pukaha – Songs from the Forest

While some New Age artists interweave music with environmental ambience, others focus on unadulterated nature sounds, whether for the purpose of meditation or ecological contemplation. As it happens, New Zealand albums featuring calls and songs of Aotearoa’s many native bird species were being released as early as 1964, well before New Age was a thing. An outstanding recent example is Pukaha: Songs from the Forest (2002), produced to raise funds for Pūkaha National Wildlife Centre in the Wairarapa.

Structured around three long tracks, ‘The Awakening’, ‘Playtime’, and ‘The Night Shift’, Pukaha artfully delineates the calls of numerous species across the narrative of a day and night. Midway through is ‘Waiata Manu Huia’, written by Mike Kawana and performed by members of the Rangitāne o Wairarapa, which pays homage to the huia, last seen in the nearby Tararua Range in 1907 and now extinct.

As a conjunction of nature recording and waiata Māori, Pukaha has a rejuvenating quality. Without slotting neatly into overseas New Age categories, it represents a unique Aotearoa response to indigenous soundscapes under threat, a vision of harmony between nature and humanity.

10. Kraus – Seahorse Wedding (Music for Float Tanks)

As New Age music entered the twenty-first century, a new wave of musicians arose, strongly influenced by the genre’s experimental aesthetics or purpose of enhancing well-being but without necessarily identifying with the “New Age” label. New Zealand examples include Trillion, whose Perfect Freq project incorporates vibrational healing and Chakra concepts, and Crystal Magic vaporwave musicians such as Daif and Eyeliner.

Seahorse Wedding (Music for Float Tanks) (2023) by psychedelic indie artist Pat Kraus is another case. The album was composed under commission from the Pyramid Club venue for Float Well in Wellington, where customers can request it be played during isolation tank sessions. Kraus’s own experience with a chronic pain condition and use of water therapy informed his approach. “I’ve had a growing desire to create music that’s soothing and comforting,” he told The Wire’s Kiran Dass in 2023.

The resulting aquatic electronica is a gentle joy. Drips and droplets echo, dolphins chirp, and underwater marimbas ripple, as the album traverses the ritual stages of the titular wedding. With inspirations that range from 1980s Space Music pioneers such as Emerald Web and contemporary peers such as Monopoly Child Star Searchers, Seahorse Wedding is a happy marriage of New Age’s past, present, and future potential.