A Mind-Bending Journey with Peter Davison, the Mystic Master of New Age Music

New Age rehabilitation stories have run in The New Yorker, The New York Times, NPR, and The Guardian, so the narrative isn’t exactly new. But it certainly got a major signal boost during the pandemic, when being home-bound meant experimenting with new ways to soundtrack the quiet moments of our lives. Spotify’s Ambient Essentials playlist includes tracks from Aphex Twin and Brian Eno, along with Laraaji and acclaimed New Age artist Iasos. 

In 2020, the improvisational vocalist Julianna Barwick (also featured on that Spotify playlist) released three extended tracks from her most recent album on the Calm app for meditation and sleep, which was then said to be adding 100,000 new users per day. Just as the pandemic brought her typically busy and lucrative touring schedule to a halt, the app sparked a new opportunity: a sudden mass interest in mental health practices and appropriately soothing music to go with them. “There’s this kind of chuckle factor,” Barwick told me, “where it’s like, ‘do you lose coolness points for one of your songs getting millions of plays because it’s in a yoga playlist?’ Or doing an extended track for the Calm app because it’s the pandemic and you’re hustling to get some cash in any way because your tour got canceled for the second time? I think of it that way.” 

Barwick’s gloriously beautiful, looping electronic tracks feel like they’re in conversation with historic New Age music, and album titles like 2020’s Healing Is A Miracle make the connection seem even more acute. (The New York Times once called her “the new Enya.”) But while New Age seeks to induce a definable state in its audience, Barwick says her music is pure emotion and self expression: “For me, there’s no intentionality in my music making. I’m not thinking about where it’s going or how it’s going to affect who.” 

The celebrated ambient composer Tim Hecker put a sharper point on it in a recent interview with The New York Times. “What is the function of music?” he asked. “Is it to serve as a background for a WeWork, efficiency world, for someone who just wants to code? Or is it for driving down a foggy road at night, wanting that experience amplified?”

Davison spends just about every day in a small studio behind his home making music. He smokes a pipe while he works, and when he gave me a tour of the space, toward the end of our afternoon together, the smell of tobacco was intense. By the door hung his Wall of Fame, a floor-to-ceiling display for all of the CDs he’s ever released. “I really got into the discipline,” he said. “That’s what I do. I wake up, I eat breakfast, and I go write music. Or the other guy says, ‘I wake up, I eat breakfast, and I go milk the cows.’ It’s the same thing.” 

What New Age offers is, at the very least, a bit of peace, and the possibility of something—whether emotional or spiritual—that will make your life a little better. Peter Davison’s music may be far more sophisticated than your average wind chime in the breeze, but the experience it brings listeners is just as familiar. I asked Davison what it was that made a piece of music relaxing. What was the alchemy of melody and tempo and tone and whatever else that takes us there? 

Davison thought for a while. He removed a wooden board on his desk that covers a keyboard and started to search his computer for the right sound from a library that appeared to contain millions. 

“I believe that in music there are certain things that are simply relaxing,” he said. “For instance, here…”

Then he placed both hands on the keyboard, closed his eyes, and played a few seconds of music. His hands hardly moved, and somehow it was like he used his whole body to play. Maybe any competent pianist could have played what Davison just played, but I’m not sure how many could have played it like him. The sound filled the room, then lingered, and we sat in silence for a few moments. I felt my shoulders lower away from my ears just a bit.

“Relaxing like that,” he said, finally. “That just sounds beautiful.”

Noah Johnson is GQ’s global style director.