Audiopile Review: Incredible new comp from House Rules, a rarely used sub-label of the long-running Goaty Tapes, a carefully curated set of new age and adjacent rarities hand-picked by label-head, experimental musician, visual artist and tireless digger Zully Adler. Comprised of impossibly rare tracks culled largely from cassettes privately issued across California through the 1980s and into the early ‘90s, Lost Coast is a snapshot of an idyllic, post-hippie era where non-professional musical creation was more of an attempt at spiritual transcendence and new age enlightenment over commercial success. Outside a pair of artists here—Lee Underwood had his legendary guitar soli cassette, California Sigh, reissued via Drag City last year; and Daniel DeVore, member of psych/avant legends Pygmy Unit, had a cassette of archival work issued via Goaty—Lost Coast has brought to light a set of hyper-local musicians that could have been completely lost to time and, likely, were scarcely even heard to start with. Featuring the full range of new age invention, tracks here flip from shamanic psych-folk, placid ambient tone poems, Eastern-tinged psych-pop, exotica-fuelled fourth world and heavenly synth minimalism, with a sun-soaked vibe emanating across Lost Coast, indicative of the Golden State where it was birthed. Though the DIY new age boom can be traced back to the middle of the 20th century, Lost Coast is the final exhalation of it before devolving into faceless, corporatized muzak and background spa music towards the turn of the century. File this one next to Light In The Attic’s I Am The Center boxset, Seance Centre’s Tri​á​ngulos De Luz Y…, and Smiling C’s America Dream Reserve.

***

Lost Coast: Some Visionary Music from California (1980-1992) assembles little-known sounds from California’s metaphysical underground. Each recording is stylistically different—dream pop, guitar soli, fourth world, avant-electronic—but they are held together by a regional ethos of the “visionary.” This is music that sees through the mind’s eye and conjures new worlds.

Some people say that California is where “the nuts stop rolling”—where those too eccentric to fit in elsewhere often find themselves. What was meant pejoratively is easily reclaimed as a celebration of the free-thinking and the freely-freaking. Until the turn of the millennium, all manner of seekers rolled westward until they hit the pacific. Stationed along this edge, music was a way to roll still further, imagining territories unencountered and wavelengths as yet unheard.

Lost Coast is a commemoration of the people who made these journeys and a resurrection of recordings they made little effort to broadcast. While some pieces were originally released with modest distribution, others were only shared among friends or never shared at all. All tracks were found on cassettes in flea markets, barn sales, rural thrift stores, and even stranger places—outside a gem and mineral shop, for example, and on the ranch of a retired mescaline dealer.

Regardless of their obscurity, these recordings are eminently listenable. California, after all, is a place where the strange and the pleasurable are frequent bedfellows.