A recent release by the US label Important of new age spiritualist Meredith L Young-Sowers’s seven disc box set Agartha: Personal Meditation Music (1985) signals some kind of apogee in the culture of electronic music over the last decade. Not necessarily on its own – it’s only one sign in a cumulative many. Neither has it been uncommon for long out of print new age curios to be unearthed in recent years. Agartha could be seen as consistent with reissues of Mort Garson’s Mother Earth’s Plantasia (designed to be listened to by plants) and the Environments series by polymath field recordist and spiritual father of the modern day white noise app, Irv Teibel.

But the fact that Agartha is construed as meaningfully aligned with the likes of Pauline Oliveros and Éliane Radigue puckishly throws down a gauntlet to the cognoscenti; a double-dare to scoff at the gall of its quackery. If we’ve seldom seen something so transparently couched in the terms of an antiquated, arguably exploitative self-help mania, there have been myriad ‘at the intersection of’ projects pitching holistic sensory experience in increasingly therapeutic terms.

This turn, with its attendant PR lexicon, has a long prehistory and an already noticeable purchase in the immediately pre-pandemic cultural landscape. Aside from the aforementioned new age boom, long before the turn of the millennium the healing properties of immersive vibrational sound have been touted in regard to various forms, ranging from gamelan percussion through spiritual jazz to crusty psytrance. Since then, auxiliary themes addressing at least the idea of a collective desire to be hugged by sound have been cropping up in sundry electronic musics.

The addition of autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) recordings to the near ambient, club-adjacentronica toolkit gave rise to a minor vogue that had arguably begun to plateau, if not necessarily taper off, by the late 2010s. More native to YouTube broadcasts than albums, ASMR employed basic binaural recording techniques to create the intensely vivid impression of physical closeness between the viewer/listener and broadcaster mimicking soothing actions like slowly, methodically brushing their hair and whispering reassuring words in their ear. Enthusiasts swear by it as a sleep aid and it’s been said to take the edge off episodes of anxiety and depression.

Reputedly, its first appearance on a commercial music recording was on Holly Herndon’s Platform (2015). But, like numerous direct or oblique iterations since (Helm, Laurel Halo, Eartheater) it seemed largely in keeping with post-internet art’s proclivity for performing the discrete strangeness of online vernaculars offline. Similarly, field recording, once largely regarded as a documentation method either of ethnographic and bioacoustic data, or for Foley-cum-sound design, expanded significantly as a supplement to the post millennial digital audio inventory. It has been used conceptually and diaristically but, for the most part, impressionistically, speaking to a seemingly contradictory, agoraphobic/agoraphiliac yearning to be enveloped in an impenetrable sonic enclosure that opens us up to an expansive world beyond the borders of personal space.

Five years ago, neither of those tendencies would have been significant enough to constitute a zeitgeist. In and of themselves, maybe they still don’t, but contexts have changed. As lockdowns and social distancing guidance redrew maps of the public and private spheres, unlocking world historical levels of anxiety, the outline of an individually atomised, if collectively traumatised new audience profile began to cohere. Now our hypothetical listener is one shellshocked from the throes of an acute (and still ongoing) reckoning with space: personal, public, domestic and audio sensory; a listener at once cut off from and agonisingly present in their environs, alert to their distance from those with whom they desire closeness and their proximity to those with whom they don’t.

Monetising this situation became urgent as the long promised recommencement of live programming in public venues drew near. It would no longer suffice for music and art events to be merely fun or interesting; they must be restorative, transformative, even (or especially) healing. The international PR lingua franca, post-pandemic, called for “experiment(s) in world-building” and “collective imagineering of the type of society we could cultivate if there was freedom to diverge from default reality” (Waking Life Festival, Crato, Portugal); or events from which attendees “...will leave with a new sense of consciousness, free to be different people and lead new lives” (24 Hour Drone, Basilica Hudson, New York). There may not be anything especially malign about individual projects honing their pitch this way to resonate with audiences, but the volume of similar press copy spooling out has come to mark a gong-bathification of discourse.

Inasmuch as distinctions between mainstream and leftfield entertainment remain meaningful in this environment, a mass market near corollary can be identified in tech-driven immersive audiovisual “experience creation” or leisure “at the cross-over between art and wellness”, to cite the blurb for ORIGIN, a ”deep listening art installation” produced by artists affiliated with UK immersive theatre magnates Punchdrunk and hosted by this year’s London Design Festival.

By invoking the dubious paradigm of wellness – or what has been described in other programmes as accompanying “wellbeing strands” – a risk, familiar from the new age heyday, of crossing the line between the merely tacky and the actually irresponsible can potentially arise. Maybe that’s alarmist, but it’s striking that this trend toward mollification hasn’t provoked more critical discontent; maybe it’s because the phenomenon remains diffuse. If not dangerous per se, the hybridisation of loose terminologies of immersive art, care and healing can at least be cloying, paternalistic, in some cases technocratic and eminently untrustworthy, especially when mandated by a quasi-corporate cultural apparatus.

Something about it presupposes a certain docility and lack of agency. It remains for more DIY, artist-led or countercultural networks to decide how closely they want to follow suit.

This essay appears in The Wire 491/492 along with many more critical reflections on 2024. To read them, pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.