Valet and White Rainbow
When I was Web manager at Warner Bros. Records, I got to the point where the only music I could tolerate was New Age. Seriously. I was inundated with so much bad overproduced crap and stress from angry managers and bosses, that the only thing I could do when I got home was to put on the new age cable music channel, turn off the lights and try to clear my head of the reality and day-to-day stress of a declining and failing industry.
Laugh if you want, but I still LOVE New Age. Yeah, you may get the image of post-hippy Marin long-hairs sipping wine or a visit to a shiatsu massage/day spa, but there is a certain underlining eeriness to New Age in a Sonic Youth/David Lynch way that I've always dug, albeit only in an occasional manner.
Recently, Tivo mysteriously downloaded a couple of video clips from a magazine I was unfamiliar with, XLR8R. The clips featured interviews by Portland, OR artists, Valet (Honey Owens) and White Rainbow (Adam Forkner), both a couple with their separate projects. Both clips were framed as "day-in-the-life-of", following Honey and Adam around for a day in their respective jobs. Adam's segment was especially fun seeing various places in Portland where we used to hang when we were there.
The music? It's fantastic and a total breath of fresh air. Think ambient, neo-hippy post-post-punk new age. Trippy with lots of echos and delays, more sound sculptures than songs. I picked up Blood Is Clean and Naked Acid by Valet, and Prism of Eternal Now and Sky Drips Drifts by White Rainbow and love 'em all.
Of course, being total late to the party, I come to discover there is a whole scene up there in Stumptown of this type of sound. Other groups include Grouper and the now-defunct Yellow Swans.
Screw rock, long live the Neo Age!
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