Forget everything you know, or think you know, about new age, a genre that has become one of the defining musical-archaeological explorations of the past decade.

I Am The Center: Private Issue New Age In America, 1950-1990 is the first major anthology to survey the golden age of new age and reveal the unbelievable truth about the genre.

For new age, at its best, is a reverberation of psychedelic music, and great by any standard. This is analog, handmade music communicating soul and spirit, often done on limited means and without commercial potential, self-published and self-distributed. Before it became big business and devolved into the spaced out elevator music we know and loathe today, this was the real thing.

I Am The Center is a knowing, but never cynical overview that invites listeners at last to the mainspring of a misunderstood genre’s greatest lights. Many of the biggest names are present — Iasos, inter-dimentional channeler of “paradise music”; Laraaji, discovered by Brian Eno playing for spare change in Washington Square Park; and the recently famous JD Emmanuel, icon to a new generation of drone, ambient, noise musicians. Call it what you will — before it was anything else, it was new age.

• 3xLP housed in slipcase w/ 3 tip-on jackets, and a 20-page book
• Notes by Douglas Mcgowan featuring interviews with artists and includes rare archive photos
• Artwork by Gilbert Williams and Janaia Donaldson
• 2 unreleased tracks, 7 others previously only on cassette
• Vinyl cut by John Golden. Pressed at RTI
• Remastered from original sources at 24 bit/ 96 kHz
• Also available on yellow vinyl