Now new age music has a bad reputation for a reason. Its cultural purpose in the West, and the United States, in particular, is that it allowed people who fancied themselves cultural elites and/or materially comfortable dilettantes, a mode of cultural escapism that permitted them an unearned sense of spiritual, and by extension, moral superiority to the proles who toiled beneath them. The genre of new age, along with colonialist commodification of third world identities that occurred through the formerly academically inclined category of world music in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, became a greased vector through which capitalist cultural triumphalism declared its ultimate victory over the autonomous struggles of the peoples of the world in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. It was not only the end of history and the end of ideology, but also the end of simple pleasures like being able to listen to pop-music in the waiting room of your dentist’s office while you waited to get your molars capped. At least for a while.
The backlash against this stuff in the late ‘90s hit pretty hard. There are a bunch of reasons for this, chief among them was the fact that new age and world music were so closely aligned with commercialism and a kind of smug, over-culture, browbeating, that people either grew bored with, and then intensely hostile towards, both modes of expression almost immediately. The backlash was swift enough that it felt like a lot of those Pure Mood knock off comps were released directly to bargain bins and second-hand retailers across the mid-west as a kind of layover on their way to a municipal landfills.
Tengger kind of skewers this unfortunate legacy in at least one important way. Instead of being a cultural expression, strained out of its context and standardized for consumption, they problematize the commodification of the Western notion of otherness by, taking the pastiche of appropriated forms and reintegrating them into the fabric of their source. In other words, Tengger returns the otherness to world music, that its ‘90s counterpart carefully extracted to sell soda and shampoo.
Beyond a kind of rehabilitation of psychologically mutilated cultural forms, Tengger’s music is, in fact about travel. The movement from place to place and the interactions with peoples of different backgrounds and origins is what gives their music flight. It is their motivating concept. The breath that causes the pebble to begin rolling down the hill. On their latest album Nomad, the sense of constant motion is conveyed to the listener through rhythmic straits and channels through which a bubbling course of acoustic synths playfully lapping and bantering below a freely flowing mist of vocal vapors. There is a deliberately calibrated motorik momentum to these tracks, an element that is certainly present on all of Tengger's releases, but when found here, has an undeniable naturalistic presence, that makes the direction of these songs feel both swift and inevitable. The specific character of this tranquil thrall is best encapsulated on the closing track “Flow,” the mouth of the album’s river you could say. The track has a light, ambient quality to its tug like a grain of sand in the current of a river. Its refreshing melody carrying you as if you were as light as a long exhale. The songs ceaseless drifting, reminding the listener of the way that water moves through and on top of land, renewing and shaping it, eventually flowing out to sea and then back again after an ion in absentia. The world is actually a connected place after all. It is a place where barriers and borders and other artifices can wrench it apart but temporarily. It is a single, unified whole, divided only by the diseases of the mind. Let Tengger help you pierce the illusions of separability and help you accept the pull that the ever-moving currents of the world have on you and every other living being on Earth.
