When it comes to chilling out in Los Angeles, you can't do much better than the Central Garden of the Getty Center museum. Its sloping lawn, winding stream and waterfall were originally landscaped to be a living artwork by Robert Irwin, a Californian artist whose immersive site-specific installations were associated with the Light And Space movement. The Getty garden is unusually halcyon this particular September Saturday: serene synth melodies emerge from the foliage, as part of a celebration for the reissue of Mort Garson's 1976 album Plantasia. Back in the '70s the record was only available from a hippie horticulture hang-out on Melrose Avenue called Mother Earth Plant Boutique, which included a copy of the LP with every purchase of a potted houseplant. Garson's mellow Moog was meant to work as sonic fertilizer.

As with much of the past decade's hipster embrace of New Age sounds, the Getty event hovers in a blurry zone between ironic and earnest. Sideshows include a macramé workshop, a demonstration of plant-aura Kirlian photography and the opportunity to coax sounds out of a Moog yourself. But there's also a series of performances from serious ambient musicians who've been given the brief to make sounds to nurture plant life. Playing on a stage flanked with shrubs, Gregg Kowalsky's jittery pulses seem more likely to make vegetation slither back into the soil. But when Emily A. Sprague—a member of the aptly named group Florist—takes a solo turn, you can practically see the foliage quivering with pleasure at the shimmery sounds she caresses from her synth.

Ambient and nature have long been entwined. On Land, the most innovative and amorphously eerie of Brian Eno's ambient albums, was inspired by memories of the "empty landscapes" of his childhood in Suffolk, England. The association has not always been considered positive: one American On Land reviewer sneered, "I'll bet plants love it." The implication is that tranquility is soporific and safe, a middle-aged retreat from the urban edge and restless energy of true youth music.

But this past decade has seen increasing numbers of young listeners turning on, tuning in and dropping off to the sounds of ambient and New Age. The pastoral motif resurfaces frequently, with a discernible note of desperation in the hankering for some kind of restorative sanctuary of sound. For instance, Huerco S.—one of this decade's leading ambient producers—told The Fader that although he records his albums in his Brooklyn apartment, "It's me wanting to make these sounds for myself that gives me an escape into the nature." This bucolic impulse has featured outside the bounds of ambient music too: early in 2019, Solange Knowles released the inward-looking When I Get Home, an album influenced by The Secret Life Of Plants, Stevie Wonder's synth-laced soundtrack for a 1978 documentary based on a New Age book about "the physical, emotional and spiritual relations between plants and man."

The connection between ambient and the rustic outdoors goes deeper than the longings that inspire the artists or the kind of imagery they use to title tracks and albums. The slowly and subtly shifting patterns in the music itself have a kinship with natural phenomena: drifting cloud-shapes, the way a breeze ruffles leaves and sways trees, the trickles and flickers of moving water. "Soft fascinations" like these have been proposed by some therapists as a brain-massaging remedy, a respite from the frantic pace and fixated attention of our digitally overstimulated lifestyles.

In this moment of social media churn and political news overload, the idea of a soniferous panacea that filters and purifies the atmosphere of our living environment as effectively as a potted plant has renewed appeal. So too does the idea of music that induces in the listener a kind of vegetative bliss, that slows down your metabolism and deepens your breathing. Across town from the Getty, in LA hipster haven Highland Park, Leaving Records—a bastion of the nu-New Age—hosts regular gatherings called Listen To Music Outside In The Daylight Under A Tree. The free, informal events—held in an "art park" by the 110 freeway—began as an intimate series focused on live ambient performances. The last couple Saturday afternoon shows have drawn hundreds to the terraced, tree-shaded community space. As Leaving cofounder and ambient musician Matthewdavid says, "being present and deep listening is very much needed now."

At first glance, the dominant story in electronic music this past decade is digital maximalism. The 2010s started with EDM in the ascendant: festival headliners like Skrillex and Deadmau5 blitzed audiences with ultra-brite, buzzed-up noise closely synced to retina-scorching CGI-animations. Cooler versions of the same absurdly awake sound came from Rustie with the hyperreal euphoria of Glass Swords and PC Music with their Top 40 simulation pop. From Iglooghost's kawaii fantasia to Flume's baroque intricacies, there was a common aesthetic of overworked production and overkill effects designed to grab your attention.

And yet you could just as easily construct a counter-narrative of the 2010s in which a completely opposite set of minimalist values—reduction, uneventfulness, calm, whatever the opposite of "in your face" is—have been ascendant. Wander the internet and you'll find dozens of flavours and substyles of ambient music. Idyllic and glinting in the classic lineage that runs back through '90s chillout to Eno, Harold Budd and Steve Hillage. Space music in the Steve Roach and Sky Records tradition. Back-to-analogue modular synth wooze. Dark drone with an eldritch pagan feel. Work that feels vaguely liturgical and pre-Modern, with devotional vocals and acoustic instrumental textures. And that's before you even drift into adjacent genres that share ambient or easy-listening qualities (vaporwave, hauntology, nu-shoegaze) or that encompass ambient subgenres (post-metal).

Alongside this sprawling array of contemporary exponents, ambient's foundational legends have been newly active as legacy artists: Eno's run of releases for Warp; The Orb, with a string of albums including including C.O.W. (Chill Out World); Ryuichi Sakamoto's acclaimed Async. There's also been an archival drive that made heroes of forgotten figures like Laraaji, K. Leimer, Midori Takada, Suzanne Ciani and Ariel Kalma. Reissue labels and album-sharing blogs have reactivated dormant concepts like Fourth World and Exotica, and placed New Age, Japanese "interior music" and library records into the canon of essential listening for young inquiring ears. This influence pool is already shaping an emerging generation of musicians, changing their value-set so that "soporific" is not an insult but an ideal—an artistic objective, even.

One of the most appealing and endearing aspects of ambient and New Age is that much of it simply wants to pleasure the listener. These musicians aren't afraid of pleasantness and prettiness. The audio palette encompasses soft-focus sounds, gentle pulses and chiming textures that carry an idyllic childhood aura (via music boxes, ice cream trucks, and so forth). It's a radically different conception of what music is for than the lineage of punk, industrial, noise and the harder kinds of techno, where, as William Thomas of the New Age archival blog and label Sounds Of The Dawn puts it, "there is a strong tendency to see what is soft, beautiful or soothing as not artistic, authentic or 'real.'"

Although New Age was in some ways the ultimate do-it-yourself music—made by individuals in home studios, distributed through networks outside the record industry—it had no truck with what we generally think of as a DIY aesthetic: rough-hewn, lo-fi, dirty, distorted. On the contrary, the production aspired to be limpid and luxuriant. This decade's rehabilitation of New Age chimes with an across-the-board shift in underground music that started with chillwave's simultaneously ironic-yet-sincere appreciation for yacht rock and has carried on with vaporwave. Words like "smooth" or "slick" no longer have a negative charge; the polished patina of professionalism in mainstream pop-rock of the '80s is an aspirational ideal rather than something to kick against. Spencer Doran, who compiled 2019's celebrated Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980–1990 and makes a modern version of that sound in the group Visible Cloaks, pursues "high quality sonics" and says that the equation of lo-fidelity sound with "authenticity or grit… has always felt really disingenuous and phony, like a pair of pre-ripped jeans."

Designed to work as a form of exquisite audio-decor, Japanese interior music caught Doran's ear around a decade ago, resulting in a pair of celebrated online mixes titled Fairlights, Mallets & Bamboo. He also started the imprint Empire Of Signs (the title comes from a Roland Barthes book about Japanese culture) to not so much reissue as make available outside Japan for the first time albums like Hiroshi Yoshimura's Music For Nine Post Cards. Alongside the Kankyō Ongaku compilation, the culmination of Doran's Japanophile ardour came with last year's serenitatem, a collaboration between Visible Cloaks and veteran musicians Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano.

Serenitatem is Latin for serenity. The title emerged when Ojima and Doran discussed the hard-to-translate Japanese concept shizukesa. "It can mean tranquility, stillness or even silence," explains Doran. "I have this pet-theory that there is this shizukesa-like essence in early European pre-classical music forms, that then fell away in the Baroque era as things became more bombastic and grand." But in the 20th century, composers like Erik Satie and Arvo Pärt discovered Medieval forms of monastic music like plainchant. Doran believes that in the late 20th century both Western and Eastern music started separately "circling back to this hidden, underlying sense of stillness or serenity encoded deep within our traditions"—an escape from the pressures of modernity itself.

New Age's rehabilitation actually started a little over a decade ago in the late 2000s, within that spectrum of DIY sounds variously dubbed hypnagogic pop and chillwave. James Ferraro, hypnagogic pioneer and vaporwave godfather, named his cassette label New Age Tapes. Kindred spirits like Spencer Clark, Emeralds, Dolphins Into The Future and Oneohtrix Point Never drew on the wafting synthesizer sounds of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream, as well as Krautrock artists like Manuel Göttsching, whose rippling, effects-laden guitar patterns were by the late '70s verging on the New Age zone. Early in the 2010s, blogs like Crystal Vibrations emerged that were specifically dedicated to archival New Age and made long-lost and virtually unfindable recordings available to curious ears.

Alongside these unofficial excavations came a series of landmark double-disc compilations from the Seattle reissue label Lights In The Attic: 2013's I Am The Center: Private Issue New Age Music in America 1950-1990; its 2016 Europe-focused sequel The Microcosm; and the Spencer Doran-compiled project Kankyō Ongaku. Numero Group, another leading archival label, pulled off a conceptual coup by reissuing the entire series of Environments albums (originally released by Irv Teibel and his Syntonic Research imprint from the late 1960s onwards) as an app that allowed you to immerse yourself in Teibel's pristinely recorded natural soundscapes via your phone. The Environments app wasn't ambient music so much as the ambiences of real-world spaces and weather conditions—a spring afternoon in an English meadow, dusk in a Georgia swamp, a thunderstorm in a pine forest—and it chimed with an uptick in interest in field recordings, nature sounds and even avian music, such as Sub Rosa's reissue of Jean C. Roche's Birds Of Venezuela. Numero Group's repackaging-without-any-packaging of Environments pulled off a double whammy: at once environmentally sound (no carbon footprint from production or transportation) and a canny circumvention of the increasingly fraught business of selling box sets and lavish vinyl reissues.

One of the major New Age archival blogs, William Thomas's Sounds Of The Dawn has evolved into a record label, but it's not in the reissue business. The imprint instead releases new music in the dulcimer-chiming, flute-infused tradition, by artists like Hybrid Palms, a Russian producer whose glinting Pacific Image is one of the ambient highlights of the past decade. In addition to fostering contemporary exponents, Sounds Of The Dawn also indirectly contributed to spawning the London chill-out club New Atlantis. Cofounder India Jordan describes the blog as "a huge inspiration" that sparked their interest in the genre. The club and label's name comes from a cassette they found on Sounds Of The Dawn: New Atlantis, a 1984 cassette of meditational music by the English musician Frank Perry based around chimes from Tibetan singing bowls, gongs and bells. Perry himself took the name from Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, his 1626 novel about an island utopia—mostly likely because of the famous passage about "sound-houses" in which sounds and harmonies are generated that are "sweeter than any you have, together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet."

New Atlantis the club is itself a mini-utopia in the heart of South London. Taking place on Sunday afternoons at the Peckham record store Rye Wax, it's a place to recover from the stresses of the working week and the excesses of Saturday night alike. "There's sofas, a rug on the floor," says Jordan. "They serve food. People go there to chill, not to get deafened. I actually prefer it not too busy, because if it's rammed you can't hear the music and people start shouting over each other, and then you lose the intimacy and it often drowns out the live acts." The live performers and DJs mostly play beatless music ("we do very occasionally let a BPM into the party!" laughs Jordan) and the mixing approach emphasizes "smooth transitions, blends and effects." Jordan might take their own club-oriented 140 BPM tracks and play them at 30 BPM, "using effects like reverb and reverse to make new sounds." Accompanying the emollient music are beatific projections of images that Jordan has collected over the last few years, themed into seasonal sets like spring or winter. There's a lot of whales (their lifelong favorite animal, but also New Age aligned via the '70s fad for whale-song recordings) along with imagery sourced in '70s film animations or from the website of Iasos, creator of the 1975 New Age landmark Inter-Dimensional Music.

The approach to sound and visuals at New Atlantis and at similar ambient events springing up all over recalls the original chillout culture of the '90s: nomadic events like Telepathic Fish's ambient tea parties, or the Big Chill, which started out at a North London church but quickly evolved into a huge summer outdoor festival. The first-wave chillout scene flirted with New Age and hippie ideas in a tongue-in-cheek way, reflected in titles like The Orb's "Back Side Of The Moon," at once a confession of secret Pink Floyd love (then still an embarrassment for the post-punk generation) and a deflation of any cosmic mystic tendencies. You can see a similar sort of playfulness on New Atlantis's first compilation, with track titles like "Gran's Orgasm" by Pre-Emptress and "Dianetics Over MIDI" by L'Ron.

"There's definitely some humour in it," says Jordan. "It's important we don't take this too seriously, as it can become quite exclusionary." Yet Jordan combines '90s-redolent irony with earnest spiritual leanings. Immediately before getting into New Age, they had been exploring meditation and the therapeutic properties of sound baths. "It's very much a part of New Atlantis. Most people who are involved in it meditate or are spiritually creative in other ways."

Leaving's Matthewdavid likewise is a seeker who's explored the full spectrum of esoteric thought: Robert Anton Wilson, Alan Watts, Aleister Crowley, Gurdjieff and the theosophist movement. When I first saw that he'd titled an EP Ashram, I assumed it was a joke, but the record was literally recorded at an ashram in Indonesia. "When we were living there, we had access to this meditation cave and I would play flute in the cave and record."

Where New Atlantis's roster is all contemporary producers inspired by the original New Age, Leaving puts out releases by first-wave artists as well as their modern descendants. SunPath's Dream Music is a replica edition of cassettes originally released by Jeff Berry in 1980 and 1984: self-described "Alternative Realities" music recorded in New Mexico and blending together Prophet synth and field recordings of streams and snowstorms. Leaving has also put out exquisite repackagings of self-released 1980s tapes by the prolific New Age composer Laraaji. Creator of Day Of Radiance, one of the original four Ambient Series LPs produced by Eno, Laraaji is also renowned for his laughter meditation workshops. He's become a friend and mentor to Matthewdavid, who in turn has promoted Laraaji concerts at Highland Park venues such as the Lodge Room. It's quite a trip to see the 75-year-old performer and his partner Arji OceAnanda stroking rippling chimes from their array of zithers and other metallophonic instruments, while hundreds of young people sit reverently on the hall's floor.

Matthewdavid initially moved to LA to participate in the Low End Theory beat-scene of artists like Flying Lotus. But crate-digging in bargain basements led him to pick up prerecorded New Age cassettes from the '70s and '80s, lured by both their off-the-map obscurity and their garish artwork. He found himself falling for even the most kitsch subgenres of the music: "Pan flute music, Celtic Harp music, Spa Music." Although he made (and still makes) beat-based and glitchy music, he created an alter-ego—Matthewdavid's Mindflight—for his ambient releases like Trust The Guide And Glide. The goal was, he says, to "really hone in on New Age as an identity and try to reinvent or update what that could mean now." Leaving has become an outlet for similarly aligned figures in the LA area like the devotional-vocal artist Ana Roxanne, whose recent and wonderful ~~~ contains songs with titles like "I'm Every Sparkly Woman" and "It's A Rainy Day On The Cosmic Shore."

Although people are tuning into the nu-New Age vibration all over America, Los Angeles does seem to be a hub. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, for instance, lives in Glendale, and early last year did her own event at the Getty's Central Garden: a performance of Tides: Music For Meditation And Yoga ("bring your own mat" urged the invitation), a work written for Smith's mother that weaves together electronics and field-recorded nature sounds. Ancestral figures live around the city, too, like Harold Budd, famed for his soft-focus Satie-style piano as heard most famously on the Eno collaboration The Plateaux Of Mirror, and Jon Hassell, conceptualist of Fourth World Music and another Eno accomplice.

California is the historical well-spring for New Age thought, the focus for most of the experimentation with consciousness, spiritual research and esoteric therapy that Theodore Roszak characterized as "the Aquarian Frontier" in his 1975 book Unfinished Animal. That same year saw the publication of Ecotopia, Ernest Callenbach's science fiction near-future vision of a West Coast that's broken away from the rest of America to form a green-conscious, non-competitive society. These are the same states who currently form a rebel alliance against Trump's attempts to roll back environmental protections and open up Federal lands for the extraction and logging industries.

Yet California is also associated with a dot-com libertarian ethos spawned out of Silicon Valley. Promulgated from the early '90s onwards in magazines like Wired and Mondo 2000, it's been called the Californian Ideology: an evangelical mania for the exciting new frontier of maverick individualism that information technology would open up. It's as though the counterculture split in two, with one strand going down the disruptor path and the other toward the contemplative withdrawal and self-healing of New Age.

Looking at the modern world, you might almost say that the stresses and psychic toll resulting from the global triumph of the first set of impulses requires the solace and recuperation of the second strand.

"I feel uneasy about the wellness movement broadly, as it's inherently linked to individualistic ways of healing under capitalism," says India Jordan. "The idea that a £5-a-month Headspace subscription"—they're referring to a smartphone app that offers guided meditations—"will cure the overbearing pressure we feel trying to survive under a non-sustainable and destructive system, it feels like a bit of a plaster over a bigger issue." For his part, Matthewdavid rejects the notion that New Age music or meditation is a mere escape, preferring to see it as a necessary coping mechanism. "It's remedial because it helps me find my center, so that I can manage my stress and proceed in the world without anxiety. This music helps facilitate that state from which I'm able to feel better about interacting in this current world."

Whether the impetus is entirely personal or a semi-conscious response to the runaway train of geopolitical instability, many people involved in ambient and New Age see the music as something close to self-medication. Sounds Of The Dawn's Thomas says his New Age conversion coincided with "a stressful time in my life. I came upon Constance Demby's Sunborne tape at a Salvation Army resale shop …. It helped calm me down and put me in a better place mentally. So after that I just started looking for anything like that." M. Geddes Gengras quipped on Twitter that "I make ambient music because I was too scared to go to therapy for 20 years & synthesizers seemed cheaper." Framing his Optimo label's Fourth World compilation Miracle Steps, JD Twitch spoke of escaping into "musical dreamworlds" as a necessary response to "completely messed up times." Last year ambient veteran K. Leimer released Irrational Overcast, an album explicitly framed as a remedial response to the toxic "clouds of baseless beliefs and simplistic ideologies" choking our culture and straining nervous systems to snapping point.

The rise of streaming in the 2010s turned almost everything into background sound. You are generally listening to a streaming service on a device (a computer or smartphone) that practically forces you to multi-task, making it irresistibly tempting to plug into parallel culture-streams or obsessively follow the newsfeed. There is an inbuilt tendency towards partial attention and distracted listening, which in turn subtly encourages you to avoid things that demand full-on engagement. Last year saw a spate of investigative pieces in magazines exploring the partnership between Warner Bros and the German company Endel to create customized soundtracks to everyday life, or discussing the implications of Spotify's mood-based playlists. Some of these playlists are overtly characterized as "chill" modes for relaxation or as an aid to sleep, while others promise enhanced focus in the work situation or a peppy soundtrack to activity. The rise of what Liz Pelly called a personalized form of "emotional wallpaper" certainly has an unsettling and insidious aspect to it, seeming to represent a new kind of Muzak that is not imposed by bosses looking to increase productivity but actively embraced by the individual in the name of self-optimization.

Yet, in a way, we've always used music to drug ourselves—to alter our moods, to transform the vibe in a social setting, to accompany activities like driving or housework or (since at least the invention of the portable music-player) exercise, and to dull the ache of solitude. The Scottish post-punk group Fire Engines released a mini-LP of "background beat for active people" titled Lubricate Your Living Room way back in 1981, a high-energy punky riposte to Eno's ambient series.

Still, there is something unnerving about the idea of ambient and New Age music uncoupled from any higher purposes and applied to the task of self-repair. Like power yoga or microdosing, it is taking an agent of change that was originally part of a culture of liberation and discovery, and putting it in service of the status quo. As David Toop, author of ambient bible Ocean Of Sound, wrote recently, "if ambient music only serves as an app to incentivise or a backdrop to productivity, networking and self-realisation, then it has no story of its own, no story worth hearing."

There are already signs of a backlash against this therapeutic notion of ambient, or at least, a redefinition that enlarges the scope of what ambient can encompass. In a recent RA Podcast, Huerco S. declared his intent to "push back" against the idea of ambient as "some sort of cure-all," by making the music "darker, more unpleasant, less forgiving, less holistic." sold, in their own RA Podcast, argued that "sometimes ambient isn't about self-care, sometimes it's about self-obliteration." This shift echoes a similar turn that took place within the '90s ambient scene. Reacting against an overload of blissed-out beatific soundscapes from labels like FAX, artists moved into zones of eerie emptiness that the producer Kevin Martin (now best known as The Bug) dubbed "isolationism." The paradigm example of this evolution was the leap between Aphex Twin’s first Selected Ambient Works album in 1992, with its idyllic melodies and fluffy textures, and the shivery sound-vapors of its 1994 sequel, Selected Ambient Works Volume II.

It's another sunny Saturday in LA and Leaving Records are holding one of their Listen To Music Outside In The Daylight Under A Tree parties. The location is a charming little public garden on the edge of Highland Park called La Tierra De La Culebra. Sure enough, the soundsystem and performance space are directly underneath an enormous canopy of dense leaves. Listeners gather on blankets under the branches or nestle in the hillside alcoves of mosaic stone. Birdsong from inside the trees blends beautifully with the purring and chirruping sounds coming out of the speakers. Leaving Records T-shirts are suspended from a low-hanging branch, available for purchase. A "psychedelicatessen" offers vegan dhosas and tea laced with powdered medicinal mushrooms that supply "mental clarity" but leave a bitter tang in the mouth.

The vibes and sounds at these gatherings trigger a sense of déjà vu as I flash back to chillout afternoons and illbient nights I attended in the 1990s. I get a similar atemporal feeling listening to this decade's ambient and nu-New Age. The juxtaposition of so much high-quality reissued material with the prolific outpour of contemporary exponents exacerbates this sensation: it's often hard to tell whether a record was made in the 1970s, or the 1990s, or the 2010s. Take Celer's 2018 Coral Sea, a gorgeous record, one of the decade's best, but in its texture and mood, not necessarily a huge advance on Eno's Discreet Music from 1975, even though its mode of construction is probably quite different.

"There's a good Eno quote, 'I guess I want music to do the same thing to me, but to do it in a different way,'" says Droid, who co-hosts the Dublin-based net-radio show No Place Like Drone. When the fundamental function of the music is abiding, the most effective ways of achieving those ends get discovered quite early and settle into place as relatively invariant features: a palette of textures and atmospheres that includes tuned-percussion chimes, piano shrouded in a halo of pedal echo, lambent synth pads, billowing drone-tones, dainty daubs of texture like Japanese calligraphy, reverberant space and shimmering horizons.

Droid regards the 2010s as a boom time for ambient and its sonic relatives, both in quantity and quality. He estimates that 40 percent of all the ambient ever made was recorded during the 2010s. Digital technology—from distribution platforms like Bandcamp to laptop-producer-friendly programs like soft synths—have eliminated many of the obstacles and production costs that might have deterred earlier aspiring ambient composers, resulting in a DIY explosion. But amid the overload and redundancy, Droid also detects a bustle of invention and fresh maneuvers. Notable developments include an increased visibility of women (including Grouper, Ekin Fil, Julianna Barwick, Aine O'Dwyer, Sarah Davachi, to name only a few) making this music, many using their vocals prominently. There's also "power ambient," as purveyed by the likes of Ben Frost—"tunes that start quiet and get really noisy and distorted, or have a heavy emphasis on over-the-top sound design." But Droid is not sure that either of those trends, or others like the boom for modular synth hardware, constitute progression as such. "It's more like an amalgamation or an accretion."

Given that a fundamental impulse within this whole area of music is to suspend time, it kind of makes sense that the genre wouldn't evolve in any discernibly linear fashion. Rather, it would logically work through cycles that recur inexactly, resulting in incremental changes and gradual growth. "Maybe the function of the music itself is mirrored by an amorphousness in how the genre develops: stasis in form, function and content," says Droid. Each ambient piece in its edge-of-motionlessness is a microcosm of the slow movement of the genre as a whole.

The "new" in New Age was always something of a misnomer, given that it proposed a flight from modernity, the rediscovery of lost spiritual wisdom, the recovery of a way of living at once grounded yet tuned into the transcendent. In the '70s, New Age music offered listeners, trapped in the urban rat-race, audio capsules of pastoral peace to transform their homes into havens. Today the Internet and social media form a kind of post-geographic urban space, an immaterial city of information whose hustle 'n bustle is even more wearing and deleterious to our equilibrium.

As Laurel Canyon denizen Joni Mitchell once sang, "we've got to get ourselves back to the garden." In the meantime, a potted plant, an edible and a hammered dulcimer LP will have to do.