Found in California: The Visionary Music of ‘Lost Coast’

A new compilation of spiritual and home-recorded music from the 1970s to 1990s, unearthed by Zully Adler, shimmers with quiet intensity. We talk to him about Goaty Tapes, House Rules and his curatorial work

In Northern California, the most beguiling tapes aren’t found at record stores. You chase them through yard sales, flea markets, and the fog. Lost Coast: Some Visionary Music From California is a new compilation assembled by Zully Adler, founder of Goaty Tapes and House Rules. Issued on LP, it documents a hidden strain of personal, often homemade spiritual music recorded across the state between the 1970s and 1990s.

Sourced from private collections, estate sales in Eureka, and near the Humboldt County Airport, the songs on Lost Coast reflect a quiet regional counterculture rooted in solitude, experimentation, and metaphysical exploration. One track came from a mescaline dealer in Humboldt who was selling a few old tapes at a yard sale. Others were originally composed for yoga classes, ceramics studios, or no audience at all.

Founded in 2007 when Adler was still a teenager, Goaty Tapes has built a catalog that feels both eclectic and oddly cohesive: home-recorded transmissions, outsider experiments, bedroom compositions that hum with purpose. Though the label has its roots in the noise and lo-fi scenes, its reach is wide: early releases from circuit-fried weirdos like Providence’s Russian Tsarlag and the Savage Young Taterbug sit alongside works by Australian duo Drunk Elk and “Detroit nark boys” Traag.

Adler has gathered brilliant unsung work from the Zurich experimental artist Christian Pfluger, who has been combining visual art, writing, and sound through an imaginary trio called Die Welttraumforscher for nearly 35 years. Even Thurston Moore has released a tape on Goaty: A self-titled split with Kommissar Hjuler and Mama Baer. What connects the catalog is a kind of intimacy. It’s music made close to home, on its own terms, without asking permission or chasing fame.

Adler’s curatorial approach extends beyond sound. Through House Rules, he has published books and folios that explore adjacent corners of outsider culture, including a 2020 collaborative history of the mid-2000s underground (Casual Junk) and a monograph on the visionary California artist and instrument-builder Charlie Nothing (State of the Ding). 

At the end of 2024, Adler curated Ariel, Part I & II, an exhibition of rarely seen works by Ariel Reynolds Parkinson, a visionary Bay Area artist whose quietly radical practice traced its own course through decades of bohemian culture.

Lost Coast follows in that lineage, a two-sided trip through a mystical secret society borne of California. The state’s informal channels have long carried music that circulated outside commercial systems, passed hand to hand, shelved alongside crystals, self-published poetry, and mimeographed meditations. Lost Coast preserves these recordings as they are. Recontextualized, they seem to whisper as one missive, drifting, dissolving, and persisting, seemingly against all odds.

We got on the phone with Adler to talk about his work. What follows has been edited for length and clarity.

Randall Roberts: Talk to me about Goaty Tapes and House Rules and the guiding impulse behind it when you started it. You're a curator by profession?

Zully Adler: I worked as a curator before, yeah. These days I run an arts initiative in the Bay Area called Further Triennial. In a weird way, this whole professional arc resulted from running a tape label. It took me a while to get that perspective on it.  I started working on the first release when I was 16 — that’s 20 years ago. I was driving into downtown LA to see these floorcore noise gigs, and I was in the thrall of all of these unusual, freaky, amazing looking people. Doing stuff that just seemed so… like, if you can do this, you’re allowed to do anything basically. I wanted to be involved somehow.

The first release I ever did was with Robedoor. When I asked the band, Britt and Alex Brown, my heart was probably thumping. They would have been 26, ten years older than me. They seemed just so grown and so cool. And by some absolute miracle, they said yes. I think they had a sense that I had a better idea of what I was doing than I really did. I didn’t know what I was getting into. Britt ended up very graciously showing me the ropes as I stumbled my way through production. He’s become one of my absolute best friends.

Britt seems like a good guide.

And it’s a testament to him as someone who genuinely takes younger people under his wing. When I was 26, the idea of collaborating with some 16-year-old kid — I wouldn’t have had the self-confidence to nurture someone in that way. My gratitude there is endless.

That experience got me going. I had no program, no specific kind of music in mind. You can look at the releases and see the bewildering evolution. What I found most compelling was the sense of nearness you get from some underground music — the propinquity, for lack of a better word. You just felt so close to the people who make it. That resonated with me.

I think that’s what eventually led me to what was, for a long time, a focus on lo-fi recorded music.

I was an indie buyer in the 1990s in the Midwest. I fell in love with Shrimper tapes and their whole aesthetic and vibe.

Yeah, that’s exactly it. I came up on the tail end of that. I came out of a scene that still had meaningful links to the don’t-sell-out-at-any-cost 90s underground. Like, “the fewer people who show up to your show, the more legit you are” mentality. I think I was riding the last wave of that.

Yes. 2007, 2008. Something like that.

This would have been 2005, 2006. 

So you moved from tapes and being obsessed with sound into curation, studying it? Studying art archives?

I was just a history person, not even an art history person. I liked making art on the side. I didn’t realize that there was a track that combined those until well into my twenties. Eventually I smushed it all together. It was at that moment, almost ten years into running the label, when I stepped back, just a few feet, and realized curatorial work was what I’d been doing in the context of music. Music for me has always been more than sound. It was also literary and visual. I can be lured in by a band name and a graphic as much as what I hear. It was a much more integrated art to me. And the bridge to visual art with a capital V and a capital A was not that hard to make.

When did you start collecting tapes?

Collecting?

Yeah. Do you consider yourself a collector?

I have that malady for sure. It’s something that I pushed against for a while, but it endured despite myself. After so many years of flea marks, thrift stores, etcetera, there just came a point when I realized I had a repository of unusual sounds. I wasn’t guided as much by genre as the sense that a specific bit of recorded media was some very personal relic. The more homespun it seemed, the more patched together it looked, the more I was eager to hear it.

California has always been one of the great epicenters of spiritual music. New Age, metaphysical, esoteric. We have a few in the country, right? Another would be New Mexico, maybe. So by virtue of circumstance, that’s a lot of the stuff I kept finding. I just looked at my racks one day and noticed I had accumulated an obscure archive of this very specific strain. I have friends like Izaac Schlossman who would always be like, “Man, you should put things up on YouTube.” I couldn’t be bothered. But I realized eventually that if I spent enough time spinning these things in the tape player in my truck — I take a lot of long drives — the best pieces would present themselves. The selection process came by way of being out in the middle of nowhere, finding something cool, and then having the time while I cruised to let it take me wherever it did. Zone out when I was uninterested and zone back in when it sounded cool.

I have some other secret projects in the works — other California stuff — because there are other native varieties of music. Acid folk, Americana… we’ll see where that takes me.

Let’s talk about Lost Coast. Can you talk about compiling that? I mean, having listened to it so much, I know the aesthetic and I know the vibe, but can you talk about the process of singling out those?

Yeah, well, some of it came organically from the music that I spent a lot of time with. The Martin and Scott tape, for example. In my truck I have one of those little wooden racks that holds 10 or 12 tapes. Things get shuffled in and out of there for listening, and I found that the Martin and Scott tape was in there a lot. I just thought, this one really lingers, it’s clearly one I care about.

But the impetus was to think more broadly about what constitutes devotional music from this period. We all know what New Age is at this point. It’s this sort of spiritually inflected, floaty, open sound — synths and bowls and flutes. I felt like there was a lot of music that was contiguous. It doesn’t fall into the generic New Age idiom. And the musicians who make it would not identify with the idea of the New Age, or any kind of Aquarian belief system.

I landed on this term “visionary,” which actually comes from visual art. There’s a maligned genre of painting and drawing — pictures of celestial domains and interplanetary fantasies and things like that. It’s called “visionary” art. There was an exhibition of visionary art held at the Hall of Flowers in San Francisco, maybe the late ’70s, with paintings by a lot of people I’d never heard of. But I also found a catalogue for the exhibition that included a list of musicians involved in the opening reception. Ether Ship, Schawkie Roth, and even Terry Riley. God knows Terry Riley is not New Age, you know? But “visionary” felt appropriate and more accommodating. It allows for more elective affinities across music.

I was thinking openly about what constitutes a category — I have a sort of quiet fascination with the theory of categories. There are a couple of great books on this. They ask a basic question: what is a category? For a long time, a category of things was assumed to have a shared attribute. All mammals give live birth, or something like that. But there are all sorts of other categories that don’t share attributes and have a “family resemblance.” Like games — what do all games have in common? You would think they all have winners and losers, but then there are games like Ring Around the Rosie. Who wins in that? Maybe all games have multiple players — but then there’s Tetris. So what constitutes a game? It’s a family resemblance. 

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So I saw that list of musicians at this visionary art exhibition and thought: They belong to this more flexible kind of category. The motivation for the release was, basically, let’s flesh out all the other dimensions of this music. Surprise people with things that, once you listen closely, you realize actually belong together — despite their differences.

Can you talk about the Planetary Peace track?

That’s probably one of the best-known artists on the compilation — and also one that defies the New Age category. What is that track? It’s almost a pop song. Planetary Peace came out to California to make this album on Mount Shasta, which is a major point of convergence for all sorts of seekers — the ground zero for one of the big Aquarian spiritual movements, the “I AM” movement, who think the ghost of some saint wanders the sides of the mountain. Planetary Peace travelled there to record this album Magic Mantric Mountain Music. To me, listening to that tape was a perfect example of the ears perking up when that song came on and going, “Oh my god. This is a consummate recording that is perfectly realized.”

What about Darrell DeVore? Did he self-release that song, or did it come out through a label?

DeVore is a great example of something never heard before. He barely released anything. There were tiny cassette and CD runs of a few albums. But I think I’ve found more than 60 albums of Darrell’s music. The vast majority are just home-recorded tapes. That one had never seen the light of day before, as far as I’m aware.

Amazing.

And the Clay Play track — also never released. Recorded on a single tape to be played in a ceramic studio in Marin County. It was just background music for people when they were throwing pots. 

I really want to know more about the mescaline dealer you bought a tape from.

That was a yard sale north of McKinleyville in Humboldt County. There was a guy with a horse ranch — classic California cowboy, thick handlebar mustache, overalls. I asked him, “What’s your deal, man? You’re so cool, what’s going on?” We started chatting. I was up there doing research for my doctorate about an artist who lived in Eureka, Martin Wong. He liked hanging out at a local dive, the Driftwood Tavern. I mentioned Wong and this cowboy said, “I knew Martin. I was a mescaline dealer for the Driftwood.” As it happens, at his yard sale he had a bunch of random cassettes lying around. Among them was the tape that yielded the first track on the compilation. “It’s Raining” by Tim Gray. 

Gray is a great example of somebody who was not doctrinaire about a specific genre. The same tape has a fried rendition of a Jimi Hendrix song. It has all sorts of random stuff. And then, halfway in, there’s this crystalline, perfect, pointillistic synthesizer. It’s the only thing on the album that sounds remotely like that. It’s an unlikely song on an unlikely release by an unlikely person. 

So how did you go about shaping the compilation? Was this an intuitive thing, or a conceptual sequencing?

The whole selection process was about listenability. I wanted this thing to be compelling to the uninitiated and also to those who consider themselves connoisseurs. But in terms of the sequencing, when I took time to listen back, I realized the first side sounds more like standalone songs, one after the next. Then the B-side is very fluid. Everything melts into each other.

Tell me about the cover art for Lost Coast.

I drew it. The flowers are based — very loosely — on a specific kind of the trillium that grows under redwoods. 

Do you do most of the art yourself?

I do all the art [laughs].

It’s really striking.

That’s baked into the label. There was a time in my life when I wanted to be an artist. My parents said, “That’s so great that you love making art. We can’t wait to see all the amazing art you make on the side while you still have a normal job.” A little parental soft power. Looks like I ended up listening to them. 

There never was and still isn’t a prescribed visual style. I’m not worried about consistency or continuity. The look is allowed to change. We live in a world of over-branding. In the professional world, you have to abide by some branding logic that makes you consistently legible. It’s tiring. My label is my refuge from restraints. I let it be its own freaky chameleon.

But it's obvious you care.

Oh yeah, definitely. But nothing is forced. Nothing is rushed. If it takes more time than it should, it takes more time than it should. I really do my best to never feel under pressure or stressed out about it. This is a hobby. Life is stressful enough. The cover of this album took me an inordinate amount of time. My girlfriend mocked me relentlessly for how long it took. It was done in stages, then redrawn, shifted around, printed off, remade. But for me, it just takes the time it takes. I just let it play out.

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