"'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 writing and drawings." -Goaty Tapes.
