Although it claims an international audience, the genre loosely known as new age has a special home in San Francisco. Cloaked in fog that cascades majestically over palm-dotted hills, the city’s microclimates, rolling landscape, and edge-of-the-continent setting make it an aptly evocative home for fringe dreamers, schemers, and seekers. Even prior to 1967’s headline-grabbing Summer of Love, the Bay Area had become a magnet for some of the avant garde’s most utopian voices: Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros both taught at Mills College, while Morton Subotnick’s San Francisco Tape Music Center helped develop the groundbreaking Buchla synthesizer. Organizations like the Esalen Institute and Synanon set up shop along the coast and pioneered the pursuit of alternative lifestyles, while the city’s strong anti-war, free speech, women’s rights, and gay rights movements flourished.
It was in this heady context that Pauline Anna Strom began making music. Blind since birth and a self-described “hell-raising flower child,” she arrived in San Francisco following her husband’s assignment at the Presidio military base with no plans of pursuing a career in the arts. But exposure to pioneering albums by Tangerine Dream, Kitaro, and other electronic artists from overseas soon led her to purchase a small complement of synthesizers and to set up a makeshift studio at home. Dubbing herself the Trans-Millenia Consort, Strom dove into her work, mapping an inner world of imagined pasts, possible futures, and alternate realities. Trans-Millenia Music is a survey of the most striking music she released throughout the 1980s. Variously ethereal, playful, and brooding, but always confident, the album captures the fervent experimentalism of Strom’s West Coast milieu and focuses attention on an artist who might otherwise have been relegated to history’s footnotes.
Of Strom’s seven albums released between 1982 and 1988, six are represented on Trans-Millenia Music. Rather than working chronologically, the team at RVNG has chosen to jump around freely, sequencing for flow and drama while leaning heavily on Strom’s mature phase, nodding to a few early highlights but keeping its eyes on the prize.
The album kicks off with “Freedom at the 45th Floor” and “Virgin Ice,” both taken from Spectre, her third album. Immediately engaging, the music’s mellow surface betrays a palpable urgency lurking beneath. There’s an audible connection to Cluster and Brian Eno’s 1977 collaboration, especially in Strom’s gentle vamping. Both exude a comforting coziness tinged with something more ambiguous. It’s hard to imagine it’s a coincidence: “Spatial Spectre,” taken from the same album, could pass for an outtake from Eno’s Ambient 4: On Land, released two years prior. As strong as anything from that record, “Spatial Spectre” answers Eno’s vaporous audio environments with a more muscular, overtly creepy workout that hovers and undulates while maintaining momentum.
Other songs veer, both for better and for worse, into tone-poem romanticism. “Rain on Ancient Quays,” a lightly overdriven work for electric piano and effects, is one of the anthology’s most arresting tracks. Unabashedly moody and grim, it evokes the lurking danger of a chintzy TV movie in the best way; I was particularly reminded of V.C. Andrews’ gothic fever dream Flowers in the Attic. “Warriors of the Sun,” on the other hand, indulges in kitschy exoticism, with synthetic flutes playing a sort of general-purpose spiritual melody before moving into a quasi-Japanese pentatonic march. “Bonsai Terrace” covers some of the same ground, although it benefits from a lurching, unsettling arrangement. Two of her earliest pieces, “The Unveiling” and “Gossamer Silk,” are perfectly lovely but would fit too comfortably in a massage parlor to make a serious impression.
Some of the very best tracks are from 1988’s Mach 3.04, a self-released cassette that Strom has yet to follow up: “In Flight Suspension” and “Cruising Altitude 36,000 Feet” glow with an exploratory power and depth that belie their modest initial release. There’s an uninhibited forcefulness to her arpeggios that takes these pieces beyond the confines of new age. In recent years, the genre has drifted back into style, though it is often viewed through the lens of semi-ironic detachment. That critical distance is understandable when approaching music that could be so grandiose in its proclamations. The liner notes to Strom’s debut album spoke in soaring terms of spiritual transcendence—bold claims, and possibly not what music actually does. But Trans-Millenia Music captures an artist expressing herself freely and without fear or hesitation, and it makes good on its title. Work like this may fade into obscurity, but it remains fresh to all who seek it out, still vibrant and pulsing with energy in any age—new or otherwise.
