The Californian ensemble has long occupied a peculiar position in contemporary music: too commercially successful to be dismissed as mere spa soundtrack fodder, yet too resolutely uncommercial in ambition to achieve the crossover cachet of, say, Enya or Vangelis. *The Wishing Well* finds them mining familiar territory — celestial harmonies, rippling harps, flutes that evoke imagined meadows — but doing so with a craftsmanship that transcends the genre's frequently pedestrian standards.
"Dream Chasers," one of the album's focus singles, exemplifies the group's peculiar alchemy. Built around a glacial keyboard progression and punctuated by wordless vocals that recall Lisa Gerrard's work with Dead Can Dance, the track unfolds with the patience of a Japanese tea ceremony. Where lesser practitioners might rush toward resolution, 2002 understands that contemplative music requires space to breathe, silence to frame sound. The production, credited to the band themselves, displays a cinematic scope that recalls the work of Harold Budd and Brian Eno's ambient collaborations, though filtered through a distinctly Californian sensibility.
"Savitri's Dream" ventures into more overtly spiritual terrain, its title referencing the Hindu goddess of learning and wisdom. The track layers acoustic guitar arpeggios beneath swells of synthesizer that could easily tip into New Age cliché but for the restraint shown in the arrangement. The vocals here are particularly striking — ethereal without being saccharine, present without dominating the mix. It's meditation music, certainly, but made by musicians who understand that true meditation isn't about emptying the mind so much as focusing it.
The album's conceptual framework — wishes as ripples in water, intentions cast into the universe — might scan as hopelessly naïve on paper. Yet 2002 approaches this metaphor with such sincerity that cynicism feels almost churlish. The instrumentation throughout maintains a delicate balance between organic and electronic elements. Harps and flutes, instruments that can easily veer into Renaissance Faire kitsch, are deployed with judicious care, their acoustic properties enhanced rather than obscured by studio wizardry.
*The Wishing Well* achieves precisely what it sets out to accomplish. This is music for winding down, for contemplation, for those liminal moments between waking and sleep when the mind floats free of its usual moorings. The billions of streams 2002 has accumulated over their career suggest they've tapped into a genuine hunger for this kind of sonic balm, and the current cultural moment — anxious, fractured, overwhelmed — only amplifies that need.
The British music press has historically regarded New Age with suspicion, perhaps because it refuses the dialectical tensions we've been trained to value: loud versus quiet, simple versus complex, sincerity versus irony. But 2002 reminds us that music can serve purposes beyond provocation or innovation. Sometimes it simply needs to create a space for stillness. *The Wishing Well* does exactly that, and does it rather well.