The Valley Of The Sun audio catalogue ranges across a spectrum of West Coast meditation enhancements: guided trance monologues, longform synthesizer improvisations, solo piano vignettes, field recordings, hushed folk, progressive coastal rock, etc. Even so, what unites the company’s body of work is its insular and impressionistic approach to sound, as each cassette – and, later, CD – functioned as a catalyst for relaxation and reflection, rather than a statement of aesthetic purpose. Below is a selection of Valley Of The Sun’s modes, moods, and outer reaches.

Upper Astral "Manifestation"
from Manifestation, 1981
Valley Of The Sun founder Dick Sutphen created Upper Astral in 1981 to serve as the label’s house band, exploring particular themes and atmospheres related to his research into hypnotism, altered states and subliminal messaging. His vision for Manifestation, the project’s second release, concerned the return of ancient divine beings to earth to assist mankind’s transition into the new age. Although music director David Naegele claims he didn’t connect with Sutphen’s prompt, his recordings are shadowy and evocative – tiered synthesizers and otherworldly voices drift through a seething, stained glass haze, veering between minor key malevolence and candlelit rapture.

David Naegele "Eternal Sanctuary"
from Temple In The Forest, 1982
David Naegele’s tenure as music director at Valley Of The Sun spanned 1980–83, during which he produced five solo efforts and performed or contributed to five Upper Astral titles. Of these, Temple In The Forest remains the most widely beloved in new age circles – and the bestselling – due to the beauty, simplicity and restraint of its execution. The B side “Eternal Sanctuary” conjures an effective oasis of calm, despite the ubiquity of its elements: slow motion electric piano, bells, subliminal synthesizer and assorted environmental textures.

David Naegele "Untitled (Side A)"
from Journeys Out Of Body, 1983
This is one of three cassettes credited to David Naegele but created by his neighbour and collaborator David Storrs during a ten day recording binge in February of 1983. The duo had been scheming an array of new cassette ideas inspired by Naegele’s acquisition of a Rhodes Chroma synthesizer when Los Angeles was besieged by a torrential rainstorm, driving him to hibernate in his garage studio, where he began experimenting on his own. These recordings so impressed Naegele that he decided his presence was unnecessary and left Valley Of The Sun a month later. Although this is an admittedly grainy transfer, the A side of Journeys Out Of Body achieves a vivid sense of disembodied fantasy, with resonant electronic tones echoing mysteriously against an eerie, spectral expanse.

David Storrs “Untitled”
from Channel For The Light, 1984
After David Naegele’s departure, David Storrs had little connection with Valley Of The Sun, as replacement music director Robert Slap’s sensibilities skewed more towards the commercial, progressive end of the new age market. Nevertheless, Storrs released three solo titles on the label from 1984–86, each of which demonstrated his stylistic versatility and conceptual ambition. The first of these, Channel For The Light, whose A side is presented here, is an engaging tapestry of Berlin School synthesizer worship, rich with sleek, sci-fi noir arpeggios and ghostly lulls into pitch-shifted keys, lapping waves, and negative space. Channel For The Light also earns the distinction of being one of the label’s first music cassette to incorporate subliminal messages, which would later become common practice.

Steven Cooper "Untitled"
from Crystal Garden, 1986
Multi-instrumentalist Steven Cooper connected with Valley Of The Sun via Dick Sutphen’s bestselling 1976 book about reincarnation and romance, You Were Born Again To Be Together. Cooper signed up for the company’s newsletter and attended several of Sutphen’s hypnotism seminars. On a whim, in late 1983 he submitted some recent instrumental recordings, which caught the ear of Sutphen’s son Scott and led to Cooper releasing five titles on VOS between 1985–90. Crystal Garden, his second collection, is notable both for its diversity of tonality and its depth of emotion, swooning from crystalline hallucination to cinematic lament.

Karl Schaffner "Being There"
from Many Lives Ago, 1987
German guitarist Karl Schaffner is one of Valley Of The Sun’s more storied late signings, having spent the 1970s caravanning back and forth from Western Europe to Kathmandu in a converted school bus with “35 stoned freaks of every nationality you can imagine”, before moving to Hawaii, living in a Japanese house on a mountaintop, and rediscovering Brian Eno and Paul Horn. This led to several releases on Suzanne Doucet’s fledgling Isis imprint (later called Beyond), followed by a string of albums for Valley Of The Sun. The first of these, Many Lives Ago, became a surprise hit for the label, selling steadily into the 90s. The album’s muted final track, “Being There,” embodies Schaffner’s philosophy of stillness as transcendence: “There comes a point where everything feels a little bit noisy, and we need something to still the mind rather than excite it. Because we all get overstimulated anyway – by life, by the world. Music can take you to a different place. A higher consciousness.”

More Valley Of The Sun recordings and publications can be found at dicksutphen.org. Subscribers to The Wire can read Britt Brown’s feature on the label in The Wire 389.