![]() With his legendary “Hearts of Space” radio show on Berkeley’s KPFA, Stephen Hill helped draw together many amorphous strands of electronic music under the umbrella of “space music,” giving the subgenre local momentum and global reach. Mystic jammers like Iasos made transcendental sonic leaps while channeling angelic beings, while university-trained composers like the late Joanna Brouk worked within the avant-garde tradition that had unspooled from the San Francisco Tape Music Center and visionaries like Terry Riley. ![]() Given all this consciousness hacking, the emergence of a vibrant local New Age music scene was almost inevitable. In those years, the Bay represented the confluence of a number of powerful cultural currents: a restless quest for new spiritualities, a DIY enthusiasm for technological experiment, and a predilection for making-and packaging-art that satisfied the hunger for visionary experience. But California, and especially the San Francisco Bay Area, plays an outsized role in the tale, particularly during the music’s golden age in the seventies and eighties. The broad genre of New Age music draws from many times and places: Berlin, London, even Pune, India. The following profile of the great experimental electronic artist Pauline Anna Strom appeared in The Wire, November 2017: ![]()
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