Two of my favorite musical discoveries from last year combined new age mysticism with a fixation on dolphins. One predates my birth, the other came out in early 2009.

Dolphins Into the Future, the ambient project of Belgian Lieven Martens, sounds exactly like you’d expect it to—squiggly lo-fi synthesizers and oceanic samples ride gently-ascending melodies at a steady, laidback pace, like the neon-and-pastel explosion of a Lisa Frank pencil case brought to slow-motion musical life.

The album, not unlike Candy Claws' terrific In the Dream of the Sea Life, is based upon an aquatic-themed book, On Sea-Faring Isolation, a memoir by (the also appropriately-named) Joan Ocean. Ocean’s book apparently details her twenty-year “spiritual journey” with the dolphins of the Pacific. Here’s some more on that from Ocean’s website:

When a California Gray whale came close to the island shores of British Columbia, and looked directly into her eyes, Ms Ocean experienced a communication between herself and the whale that changed her life forever. She understood that cetaceans around the world are trying to communicate with us. She experiences the gentle communication of the dolphins and whales as sound holography, a language that intensifies physical senses, bypasses rational-cognitive paradigms, resonates directly with our cellular intelligence, and awakens multiple levels of perception and consciousness.

More dolphin-centric music talk after the jump.

It would be easy to assume that the now-sold-out Dolphins Into the Future record, released via the taste-making Not Not Fun record label, was crafted with an ironic stance. But after spending a lot of time with the album’s mellow tunes, I have to admit that there doesn’t seem to be any trace of irony in Martens’ compositions. They could convincingly pass for legit, vintage new age songs. Maybe Martens’ creative impulses derive from the same sensation one gets when trying to look past the tackiness of a Jeffrey Michael Wilkie painting, in an attempt to objectively enjoy its treacle surrealism.

It’s also remotely possible that Martens was inspired by a 1987 soft-rock/new age tour-de-force called Dolphin Smiles. I came across Dolphin Smiles in August of 2009—a vinyl copy of the record leapt out at me from the dollar bin of Santa Rosa’s The Last Record Store (co-owned by the poppa of one-half of Portland ass-kickers Total Bros). I wasn’t sure how it would sound, but I anticipated great things based on the haiku-esque blurbs for each of the album’s tracks, like this one, for “The Dolphin Suite,” a majestic three-song tribute to our undersea friends:

Like an Ancient Sage in an
Ageless Ocean, the Dolphin
plays and dreams in harmony
with the deep.

Dolphin Smiles turned out to be the stuff of new age legend, and to date my most cherished crate-digging deep sea retrieval. While much of the record dwells on the interplay between Steve Kindler’s violin and Teja Bell’s jazz guitar, there are some truly far out moments, such as “Sounding”: eight minutes of weird, submerged ambient, featuring “dolphin voices” from Marine Land of the Pacific, autoharp, and gorgeous Vangelis synth swells.

There are a couple obvious parallels to Martens’ Dolphins Into the Future stuff—the song length, the vibe, the dolphin-ness—but what these records really share is a deeply-felt lack of cynicism (something I think we could all use a good dosing of now and then). Martens doesn’t pass judgement on goofy Joan Ocean; rather, he appears inspired by her life’s “work.” It makes me wonder: is the New New Age going to be as technically brilliant and un-ironically (albeit vaguely) mystical as its late 80’s forebears?