Audiopile Review: Goaty Tapes issue their second volume of archival digs from the vaults of Darrell DeVore, probably best known for his work in SF out-jazz-psych group Pygmy Unit, who had their lone album, Signals From Earth, reissued a few years back. The recordings here, mined from anywhere between the 70s and 90s, are certainly not worlds away from Pygmy Unit, though the ecstatic free-form style explored previously are focused more on the ritualistic here. You can hear the worlds of minimalism, ambient, jazz, folk, exotica, and fourth world all creeping in, though DeVore’s approach here has a hermetic, idiosyncratic feel to it, giving you the vibe that these pieces were recorded in relative isolation.

“A Song of Civilization Up to Now” is a collection of rarely heard recordings by the late Darrell DeVore, an integral yet elusive figure in the long history of Californian psychedelia. The selected tracks center on what DeVore called “acoustical sound magic”— songs that exploit the resonance of organic materials in motion. While his methods are experimental, DeVore resists high-minded abstraction in favor of groove and feeling. He uses the shape, density, weight, and tension of natural objects to utterly musical ends.

DeVore was a founding member of The Charlatans, San Francisco’s first psychedelic rock band. His jazz training emerged in earnest with his second project, Pygmy Unit, whose album “Signals from Earth” remains a holy grail of California weirdness and a radical precursor to Jon Hassell’s “fourth world” aesthetics. Much of his later life was spent in quieter surroundings, raising children, building instruments, and forging his own musical cosmos in Petaluma, California.

The release comes with a hand-printed, tape-size book that combines documentation of DeVore’s instruments with his poetry and drawings.