In his book Hotel California, Barney Hoskyns describes Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, in the 1970s as “A funky Shangri-La for the laid-back and longhaired, who perched in cabins with awesome views of LA’s sprawling basin.” A short drive away is Sunset Strip, where Hoskyns’ cast of singer-songwriters could visit clubs and score drugs before heading back to their apparently bucolic idyll. The Canyon style, Hoskyns quoted film director Lisa Chodolenko, was “kind of lazy and kind of dirty and kind of earthy and sort of reckless.” Some four decades later, the debut solo album from Jonathan Wilson feeds on this local mythology with such gusto that, at first, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a conceptual art project on the idea of Laurel Canyon. Or, perhaps, a satire on the mellow, hippyish music associated with the place. For 13 long tracks, Wilson and the friends who drop by to play on "Gentle Spirit" at least sound like they are phenomenally stoned. Crosby, Stills and Young are studiously invoked, Graham Nash less so: too straight, presumably. There are songs called “Canyon In The Rain”, “Natural Rhapsody”, “Rolling Universe”, “Magic Everywhere”. Lyrics, correspondingly, achieve a sort of beatific wooliness: “Natural world she needs our energy,” Wilson sings on “Waters Down”, though his singing voice is more of a dry, awed whisper. “‘Valley Of The Silver Moon’ is a song about the modern music world not understanding what I have to offer as an artist,” he complains, with what one assumes is languid indignation, in the accompanying press release. Wilson, who owns his own LA studio, actually appears to have done reasonably well from the music world thus far. As an associate member of the country-rock band Dawes, he has recently backed Robbie Robertson, a credit to put alongside work with Erykah Badu, Elvis Costello and Jackson Browne on his CV. Friends who contribute to "Gentle Spirit" include Chris Robinson and Adam McDougal from The Black Crowes, Gary Louris from The Jayhawks, Vetiver’s Andy Cabic and Otto Hauser, plus a bunch of session vets (Barry Goldberg, Gerald Johnson, Gary Mallaber) with a shared past in the Steve Miller Band. All-star jams are not always appealing, but if there’s a single precedent for much of Gentle Spirit, it is one of the best of them: David Crosby’s cosmically befuddled "If I Could Only Remember My Name". Wilson not only recreates the woody reverie of that album, he also synthesises Crosby’s air of vague, dissolute guilt. “Can We Really Party Today” finds the singer being stirred from his wilderness socials with a nagging suspicion his energies should be directed elsewhere, “with all that’s going on”. It’s not a protest song, as such, but a mildly neurotic apology from Wilson for not writing one. Fortunately, it’s also ravishing (a contemporary analogue would be Devendra Banhart’s underrated – and similarly baked - "Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon"). “Valley Of The Silver Moon”, meanwhile, drifts along for a good ten minutes, anchored by a riff that, in a past life, may well have served time with Danny Whitten on “Cowgirl In The Sand”. And on the outstanding “Desert Raven”, Wilson does his best to complete the set, with a run of luxuriantly keening solos that would have done Stephen Stills proud. Wilson is quite the guitar virtuoso when roused, and a propulsive freakout through Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Way I Feel” suggests his finest work may be produced in less horizontal moods. Mostly, though, a strung-out folksiness dominates, even when Wilson’s muse spins away from the canyons and into more ethereal realms on “Natural Rhapsody” (a nod to “Echoes”-era Pink Floyd) and “Woe Is Me” (a blues dirge in the vein of Spiritualized’s “Take Your Time”). Reference-spotters, it more or less goes without saying, are going to have a high old time with "Gentle Spirit". The cumulative effect of all this historically-redolent data, though, is surprisingly transcendent. Wilson would doubtless attribute his album’s excellence to the ancient spirit and natural vibes of Laurel Canyon itself. But his debut illustrates a more prosaic act of creation, in which fastidious study is transformed into compelling new music: sometimes as homage; occasionally as inadvertent stoner comedy; mostly as an entirely satisfying late entry in the Canyon tradition.

I’ve been playing a lot of music by Alex Gray, a guy from Oxnard, California, who tends to work under the name of Deep Magic. Gray favours New Age jargon to describe his sound – “Deep Magic is mystical music. Listen to it in a dark room and align yr chakras,” for instance – although it’s not entirely clear how seriously he buys into his own rhetoric. That said, if you actually were looking for music to play while aligning your chakras, then any number of Deep Magic releases would probably work just fine. Ostensibly, Gray deals in a particularly meditative kind of ambient music; gracefully dawdling epics of bells, drone, echo and endlessly rippling guitars. There are plenty of underground artists working this beat at the moment, stretching from assiduous students of 1970s German kosmische music, through to the hipper, ‘80s-obsessed types that are often described by bloggers as hypnagogic pop. For all the heat-hazed aesthetics and lo-fi warp, though, Deep Magic is closer to the German style - Gray’s albums like "Lucid Thought" have a sort of calm and organic grandeur that recalls Popol Vuh. Gray’s music is tranquil and addictive, too, but it’s also caused me to ask a mildly profound question: how much do you need to own an album that barely exists? My interest in Deep Magic was prompted a few weeks ago by the arrival of "Lucid Thought", on CD, from the Preservation label in Australia. The disc, it transpired, was part of a limited run of 300, so before writing about it, I made sure that it was also available digitally (It is). A few days spent peering into the nooks and crannies of Gray’s deeptapes.com have revealed, however, that a run of 300 CDs constitutes something of a major corporate push in Deep Magic’s world. Gray plays alongside Cameron Stallones in the live incarnation of Sun Araw, but he has also found time to create a bewildering number of his own releases in the last year or so, mostly on cassette, mostly in editions of 50 or less: I can recommend "Sky Haze", "Ancestor Worship" and "Ocean Breaths" in particular. The most beatifically ambient I’ve come across, "Illuminated Offerings", was limited to 25 copies, on microcassettes, packaged inside aromatherapy candles. From the pictures online, these are plainly lovely artefacts. But at the same time, the collaged cassette boxes and so on feel a little like the fetish objects of a lost Amazonian tribe. Many of us might still cling to concrete manifestations of recorded music, jewel cases and all, in the face of unavoidable digital realities. Nevertheless, the allure of Deep Magic seems uncommonly divorced from such material concerns. If ambient music thrives on the ethereal, on a concept of weightlessness, then surely the last thing it needs is a tangible physical form to anchor it? I am as guilty as anyone of hoarding CDs, records, even microcassettes in candles, given the chance. But still, it feels like I don’t need any Deep Magic cassettes: these “archaic spirit hymns”, as Gray describes them, seem much more at home in the virtual world.