Pauline Anna Strom

The broad genre of New Age music draws from many times and places: Berlin, London, even Pune, India. But California, and especially the San Francisco Bay Area, plays an outsized role in the tale, particularly during the music’s golden age in the seventies and eighties. In those years, the Bay represented the confluence of a number of powerful cultural currents: a restless quest for new spiritualities, a DIY enthusiasm for technological experiment, and a predilection for making—and packaging—art that satisfied...