Nature New Age

Nature new age is the strain of new age music that fuses field recordings of natural environments with gentle instrumental accompaniment, designed for relaxation, meditation, sleep and the masking of everyday noise. Its template was set by *Dan Gibson's* Solitudes series, launched in Canada in 1981, which first issued pure environmental recordings and from the later 1980s layered piano, flute, guitar and synthesizer over surf, streams, rain and loons. Labels such as #Narada# and #Windham Hill# carried the format to a mass market, and its unbroken, deliberately uneventful soundscapes remain a staple of spas, bookshops and sleep playlists.