Wine Label: Please tell me you're joking

"What do you get when you play new age music backward? New age music!"

This story starts 21 years ago. At the time, I was listening to a lot of "new age" music, or stuff that was getting onto the New Age bandwangon in the hopes of finding a marketable niche. A lot of what ended up under the "New Age" rubric was actually a bit avante garde: Philip Glass and Tangerine Dream were sold as New Age, and even Laurie Anderson ended up in that bin. Most of it was oversold swill, of course, which is why most everyone today pronounce "newage" the same way one pronounces "sewage".

These days, the genres are all fractured and messy: trance and ambient electronica continue to have similar beats and themes and even similar audiences, even (I imagine) with similar drug habits. But there were a few that stood out among the crap that came with New Age's first wave. In 1986 a collection by Coda/NewAge records came out called "Standing Stones," in which various artists in their stable contributed marketable samples of the work. It was the first appearance of Rick Wakeman's "Waterfalls," an early hands-off synth version of the Brandenburg Concerto, Claire Hamill's "Lark Rise" from her innovative album "Voices," and Tom Newman's "Fur Traders Descending the Mississippi," the last of which has some of the best slide-guitar work I've ever heard.

But the piece that generated the most attention (and sales) was Stephen Caudel's "Symphony with solo guitar" The Wine Dark Sea. It's mostly Caudel's work on the guitar, with a lot of backup, and it is, for its genre, definitely noteworthy music. Lush and lovely in two simple tracks, "The Outward Journey" and "The Homeward Journey," each about 20 minutes long, it is music worth listening to in its own right rather than as the sonic wallpaper that is most New Age. And that's how it was sold: in big letters across the top it read "NEW AGE"

The other day, omaha stumbled upon Caudel's work once more. Twenty years after his last release, Caudel has released another album. Okay, maybe he had other things to do.

But that's not the funny part. No, what's freaking hilarious is that Caudel owns progressive-rock.com and is selling The Wine Dark Sea as prog rock!

No, sorry. Dream Theater is progressive rock. Flowing Tears, Ayreon, IQ, Porcupine Tree, Rocket Scientists, Frost, Office of Special Investigations, and Threshhold are progressive rock. Yes, Electric Light Orchestra, Pink Floyd and the Moody Blues are the foundation of progressive rock.

There is absolutely zero "rock" in The Wine Dark Sea. Yes, there are a few places where he maintains a 4/4 beat. But that doesn't save it from being New Age. I mean, download any excerpt you like from The Wine Dark Sea and tell me that it qualifies as anything other than New Age.

It's funny that he's come back and tried to upsell his material as a "new" genre now that the old one has become so thoroughly mocked. But there was always a Marcel Marseau, who made mime worth watching. And Caudel should have stuck to his original label and proclaimed that he could make even new age worth hearing.