The dream had burned down and a hallucination was stirring in the ashes. America faced its bicentennial through a fog of paranoia, disillusioned and fearful. The president was a crook, the War had been for nothing, and, if you seemed anxious about any of it, the doctor would get you hooked on Valium. It was time to look elsewhere. “We live in a strange time,” the mystic philosopher David Spangler wrote in Revelation: The Birth of a New Age. “A new consciousness of reality, a new image of humanity and of the universe is taking shape in our midst.” We were entering a New Age.

Nobody could have expected the debut album from William Ackerman, a 26-year-old Palo Alto carpenter, to have a hand in ushering in this new consciousness. In Search of the Turtle’s Navel had been recorded on a whim and pressed in a limited run. It was an impressionistic, instrumental folk record, inspired by the fingerstyle guitarists John Fahey and Robbie Basho, and the turn-of-the-century French minimalist composer Erik Satie. He had ordered three hundred copies from the pressing plant because that was their minimum order, and he quite reasonably expected to have two-thirds of them in his closet forever.

Instead, In Search of the Turtle’s Navel lit the long fuse of the new age music explosion and cleared a path for Ackerman’s own wildly successful record label, Windham Hill. Over the next decade, Windham Hill would grow so large that it would effectively become its own genre, with a sprawling roster of artists and an air of invincibility reinforced by millions of dollars in sales every year.

Its gently evocative and wordless albums, technically perfect and always engineered in high fidelity, had their own section at some Tower Records locations. The label spent a fraction of what the majors did on advertising, because their albums basically sold themselves. George Winston’s Autumn, released in 1980, did for Windham Hill what Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert had done for the German jazz label ECM five years before, selling millions of copies and spawning an army of devotees who sought out the label instead of individual artists. To its myriad critics, it was “yuppie Muzak,” artless and passionless and formless, “the perfect music for washing one’s BMW,” crowed a piece in Time Magazine. But that didn’t slow sales.

With his blue jeans, thick cotton shirts, and unkempt ash-blond hair, Ackerman looked less like a businessman and more like the cool youth minister at your local Unitarian church—an image enhanced by the acoustic guitar that accompanied him in most press shots. He had grown up on the outskirts of the Age of Aquarius, adopted as a baby by a professor at Stanford who lived next to campus. As a kid, he fell in love with the enormous folk-revival band the Kingston Trio, who practiced nearby and let him hang out in their rehearsal space. His babysitter was a beatnik who smuggled him into bohemian cafes to absorb the zeitgeist, and a next-door neighbor taught him the basics of the guitar—enough to play rhythm in a covers band.

When he was 12, his adoptive mother, who had struggled with bipolar disorder and depression, took her own life. After William found her body in the shower, he went into the garden and worked for three days straight, treating the toil as his salvation. He was soon sent off to prep school in western Massachusetts.

He needed someplace that felt like home, and he stumbled into it one weekend towards the end of his time at school. He and his girlfriend had hitchhiked up to West Townsend and into a small hotel, where the owners allowed them to stay for free as long as they worked shifts in the restaurant. The owners became close friends and the space became a sanctuary. He felt safe at the Windham Hill Inn, and he’d go back as often as he could.

He returned to Stanford in his late teens to study English and History and follow his father into academia, but he dropped out a few credits short. “All my words which had always come so easily stopped coming entirely,” he would write two decades later in the liner notes to A Windham Hill Retrospective. He apprenticed with a Norwegian boatbuilder before starting his own contracting business.

So, that’s where Ackerman found himself in the middle of the “Me” Decade, as the New Age dawned on humanity: traveling around the Bay Area in his green Ford pickup doing carpentry work. He’d spend his free time in a reverberative little corner at Stanford, an out-of-the-way spot with flawless acoustics and minimal foot traffic, inventing open tunings as he went. He wasn’t playing for anyone else, but he soon noticed that the same people were coming back to watch him. And there were more people every week. Armed with $300 raised entirely in five-buck donations, he booked three two-hour sessions at nearby Mantra Studios to record a handful of songs he’d been working on for the past five years.

The ad hoc nature of the recording sessions added a texture to In Search of the Turtle’s Navel that Windham Hill releases would lack at the label’s commercial peak. Even on “The Pink Chiffon Tricycle Queen,” with its shafts of light bouncing off bending strings like sunshine off plate glass, there are little imperfections. The microphones peak when Ackerman speeds up, the rhythm and lead clattering into each other. There’s a quiet melancholy to some of his melodies, gentle blue notes. If it seems facile to describe his music as a form of impressionism, it’s worth pointing out that “Ely,” which makes the most creative use of Ackerman’s open tunings, is an explicit attempt to express through song a watercolor postcard of an ancient English cathedral city. At points, he is unreservedly whimsical, which is good because no song called “The Second Great Tortion Bar Overland Of West Townshend, Vermont, Jose Pepsi Attending” should take itself too seriously.

What’s really striking about In Search of the Turtle’s Navel is how fleeting these moments can feel—particularly up against much of Windham Hill’s best-selling albums of the ’80s. Those shafts of light are just as quickly engulfed by a blackness, touch-thick clouds of melancholy. “Processional” is elusive and lyrical, a string of motifs and codas that repeat often enough to bring Basho’s American ragas to mind. “Barbara’s Song” makes its home in minor chords, reaching upwards over and over in steps and half steps before being knocked back down, like some Sisyphean music box.

Most striking is “Dance for the Death of a Bird.” It is foreboding and anxious, teetering on the edge of dissonance. Its pace picks up like a cold wind and falls again just as fast, a clash of harmonics and quivers crumpling back into a funereal motif. It self-consciously echoes the sound of the koto, the zither-like Japanese instrument, which Ackerman acknowledged in the awkwardly offbeat liner notes to the original release. “A kotoesque ballad of death and anger,” he wrote of the song. “The thought ‘life is an endless vista of toil’ may be supplied by the individual listener as harmony.” Just as he had in his garden in Palo Alto as a child, Ackerman saw graft as a counterbalance to grief.

In Search of the Turtle’s Navel sold out in a hurry and quickly found an audience beyond the quad. The few copies that were sent to radio stations across the country ended up in heavy rotation. By the time he’d met Winston and convinced him to record Autumn on the piano for Windham Hill in ‘79, Ackerman’s business card covered both the contracting business and the label. Autumn ensured Ackerman would never need to pound a nail again, selling over a million copies over the next decade. And it wasn’t even Winston’s best-selling album on Windham Hill—that would be 1982’s Christmas album December.

But the label’s success was at least partly an accident. Ackerman and his wife, Anne Robinson—who founded the label alongside him when the two were dating and ushered in its boom years as president—ran the operations as best they could. They were among the first labels to embrace fully digital recording techniques, and the vinyl they pressed was of audiophile quality. Steven Miller, who produced the best-selling Winston album and worked with almost the whole Windham Hill roster through the ’80s, was an audiophile pioneer, testing the limits of the new compact disc technology and setting early standards on the format. That sort of pioneering work was expensive. There’s a reason none of the major labels were taking the same chance. On top of which, Ackerman wanted to keep the place friendly, so he tried to keep things running on one-album handshake deals. This was not built to scale.

Perhaps that’s why Ackerman hated the term “new age” being so casually attached to his music, as if it was some thoughtless enterprise. He’d distributed early Windham Hill releases to health-food stores and small bookshops at first, but they’d outgrown that. He repeated the same line, with a chuckle, a few times in interviews: “If I ever catch the guy who invented the term ‘New Age,’ I’ll nail his forehead to the wall.” The industry of mass-produced spa music and identikit relaxation sounds that flourished in his shadow was a pale imitation of his grassroots operation. The wrong people were making money off his ideas. He softened on the idea over time; winning a Grammy for Best New Age Album in 2004 for Returning certainly helped. But it must have been irritating to field correspondence for years from misguided fans asking where the Windham Hill commune was, and how outsiders could gain entry.

It must have been doubly frustrating for Ackerman because the genre tag was grafted onto his music post hoc. New age music had existed in some sense for years. The American clarinetist Tony Scott released Music for Zen Meditation in 1964. Four years later, the flautist Paul Horn traveled to India with the Beatles to study transcendental meditation, and returned shortly after to make Inside, a one-take live album recorded inside the Taj Mahal. A year before In Search of the Turtle’s Navel was released, Steven Halpern’s Spectrum Suite encouraged people to “tune up” the “human instrument,” using the Fender Rhodes to activate and heal the listener’s chakras one by one.

But none of those albums were tagged as new age at the time. The New Age movement, which had put down roots in the counterculture of the ’60s, only really boomed towards the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s. Books like Spangler’s Revelation and Marilyn Ferguson’s bestseller The Aquarian Conspiracy made Eastern mysticism seem accessible and stripped New Age thinking of its hippyish connotations. But even then it would be a few years before its tenets seeped into the mainstream and—as Windham Hill would quickly discover—become a powerful sales tool.

The idea of new age music as an identifiable genre in the mainstream can be traced back to Jon Pareles of the New York Times. He was the first major critic to write about the sound of new age and the first to lump Windham Hill in with it. That was September 1985, and two years later he would twist the knife. “New-age music is spreading like kudzu, and for good reason,” he wrote. “It eliminates the most complex, time-consuming, mentally draining part of the musical experience: paying attention.” He settles on the idea that there could, in theory, be a good new-age album, but it’s more likely to be a field recording than a Windham Hill release: “At least the birds and crickets and waves don’t pretend to be sensitive artists.”

It’s easy to see why critics like Pareles (and he really was not alone) rounded on Windham Hill. His argument in that piece was not just that new age music was bad because it could exist in the background—Brian Eno’s intention to make ambient music “as ignorable as it is interesting” was nothing new. But Pareles rankled at the idea that the industry had diluted better music—particularly psych rock, jazz fusion, and minimalist classical. They spat them back out, he wrote, in “softer, smoother, less assertive forms.” A year later, at The Los Angeles Times, Gregg Wager said the same thing more kindly. “There is something about the adaptability of new-age music to different sensibilities,” he said, “that makes it a force to be reckoned with.”

In short, new age was a marketing tactic on the one hand and an insult on the other. In Search of The Turtle’s Navel and Music for Zen Meditation share very little sonically. Ackerman had far more in common stylistically with Fahey and Basho—the latter of whom openly engaged with Eastern mysticism and named himself after an Edo-era poet. But neither of them was thrown in with the new age milieu. Their music hadn’t been packaged up and sold as part of the New Age explosion, and nobody was going to denigrate it as part of the backlash.

Windham Hill was just the lightning rod, the easily identifiable target for the proliferation of a weak aesthetic. And in truth, it had lost its way by the mid-’80s, sprawling out from Ackerman’s living room to become a 50-person operation. They signed a distribution deal with A&M, turning over millions of dollars every year without borrowing a cent, and Ackerman couldn’t pay the same attention to the music as he had when it launched. It was a corporation. This was not the extent of intentional, left-field, new age music in the era; Light in the Attic’s compilation of private issue new age music shows that there were serenely beautiful, even brilliantly innovative things happening on the periphery of this new consciousness, both before and after Windham Hill’s rise. But Windham Hill, which began as a private press itself, had become a part of the machine.

Years later, Ackerman would compare those ’80s boom years to a Twilight Zone episode in which a criminal gambler dies and wakes up in an afterlife where he only ever wins—and soon realizes he’s in hell. He and Anne were divorced in 1982, their relationship at least in part a victim of the workload. The business kept growing and Ackerman felt sick constantly. He saw doctors wherever he went, all of whom agreed that he was unwell, that his blood pressure was too high, that he would die within six months if he didn’t do something drastic. But none of them could figure out quite what was wrong with him. As a last resort, he visited a psychiatrist, who told him he was depressed. Ackerman was incredulous. He was living the dream. He drove a Mercedes. He had a big house in affluent Mill Valley. There was no way he could be depressed.

But nothing else was working and the vital signs were bad, so he went back to where he felt safe. He bought a plot of land in Vermont. And then went into the garden—acres and acres of it. He started raking leaves, first for three minutes a day, then five, then seven. Eventually he was gardening, then sawing wood. In 1984, with Windham Hill at its peak, he stepped down as CEO of the company and resolved to focus on music at the expense of business, and he’d spend the next few years selling off his shares until he got out of the game entirely in 1992. Ackerman still lives on that plot in Vermont now. On a clear day, over the edge of his piano and through the window of his studio, he can see the West River, which would carry him a few miles upstream to the Windham Hill Inn.

Half a century on, Windham Hill still lingers on the fringes. You can hear Ackerman’s fingerstyle guitar echoing through William Tyler and Yasmin Williams, and the studio techniques pioneered by Miller and championed by Ackerman set a high standard for later ambient classics. But Windham Hill itself ceased to exist, bought out by BMG in 1996 before being passed around the major labels and eventually shuttered in 2007. Almost by accident, Windham Hill became big enough to consume itself. In that context, In Search of the Turtle’s Navel feels like a relic, its microphones peaking, light bouncing off its strings, teetering on the edge of dissonance, a finely carved artifact from a moment before the dawn of the New Age.