New Age Pioneer Peter Davison Is Here to Help You Relax

The specter of New Age is all around us. You see it in the sweat-wicking fabric of our yoga shorts, the froth of our adaptogenic mushroom coffee, the graphics on our $80 artisanal streetwear t-shirts, the healing crystals that adorn our mantles. And you hear it: in the ambient pop of Caroline Polachek and the eerie electronica of Oneohtrix Point Never, the experimental composer behind the Safdie brothers’ film scores. Enya has been identified as an inspiration for everyone from Nicki Minaj to Grimes. 

While chatbots and image generators are racing to remodel the world in their artificial image, we humans are clinging to the pseudo-spirituality that was made mainstream by the hippies, persisted through the societal strife of the Reagan years, and was used like a psychological crutch through the digital age. In the 1980s and ’90s, as New Age music became a booming business for major record labels, there were ads for New Age CDs on television and entire radio stations devoted to the genre. But while Enya’s sales were skyrocketing, so too was an emergent maligning of the music, which was becoming synonymous with outdated hippie mysticism and banal yuppie taste. Though it never went away, for years the words “New Age” were utterly unserious. But now, thanks to some freakishly devoted archivists and rare music obsessives, a golden age of New Age has been rediscovered, and with it, some of the genre’s most brilliant early artists. 

And that is how I discovered a little known composer named Peter Davison. A friend sent me a link to his 1981 album Glide, which floored me, and scratched an itch I’ve long had for ethereal, looping instrumental music. I played it on repeat for months, falling down a rabbit hole of New Age music discovery. What I found was a surprisingly rich and fascinating subculture, one that subverted all my preconceived notions. It wasn’t all merely hippie-dippie nonsense and crass commercialism. As a genre, it contained an entire universe of charged imagery and ideas, one that shared an ethos with the fringe scenes that shaped my identity—the worlds of punk and hardcore, skateboarding and streetwear. And Davison wasn’t just a master practitioner; he was the through line for the genre’s entire fascinating history, from its folksy early days to its commercial boom, from its subsequent demise to the revitalization happening right now. 

If you’ve ever done yoga or been to a health food store or metaphysical supply shop or a day spa, you’ve probably heard Davison’s music. His songs have been streamed over 100 million times. He’s released 43 albums, with another one on the way this month, and has composed more than 1,500 scores for film and television, working for the History Channel, Bravo, A&E, PBS, Disney, and many others. 

One New Age music expert I spoke with, the record producer Douglas Mcgowan, argues that New Age, like hip-hop and heavy metal, is an important American folk art—they’re all “essentially defined by the underground, defined by the handmade person with no budget,” he says. And according to Nikos San, founder of The Fact of Being, an Austria-based ambient and New Age label that has rereleased Davison’s first two albums, Davison is one of its most important and pure practitioners. He’s a “top-notch professional musician and composer,” says San, who calls his music “a gate to a silent inner space, just for being here and now.” 

Despite the astounding prevalence and power of Peter Davison’s music, he’s kept a relatively low profile. Perhaps because New Age music has always been powered by a DIY ethos and independent channels of promotion and distribution, there simply hasn’t been much written about him, aside from what he’s self-published. I found bits and pieces on his (very primitive) website and brief Wikipedia page—he apparently lived at the edge of a forest in the California mountains, near the town of Idyllwild—but I couldn’t make much sense of his discography, and his incredibly prolific but entirely under-the-radar career. Who was this man I’d never heard of whose music I couldn’t escape? I thought I might pay him a visit.