Goaty Tapes / USA / 2024 / CS
“Another Song of Civilization” continues the excavation of rarely heard music by Darrell DeVore, creative force behind San Francisco’s Pygmy Unit and foundational figure in the psychedelic underground. Drawn from an enormous repository of recordings made between the 1970s and the 1990s at Studio UM (or Universal Music), volume two offers more imaginary ethnoscapes and multitracked polyrhythms, this time supplemented with extended synthesizer atmospheres, off-kilter jazz configurations, and a slow-burning experiment in piano and horn.
Loose correlations might be made with so-called Fourth World music, insofar as DeVore fleshes out musical vocabularies belonging to cultures as-yet unknown. But he also sought a more fundamental “sound magic” that could exist beyond the human world entirely, evinced in instruments that, by way of wind or water, play themselves. His heavier interest in acoustics brings to this idiom something woozier, more spontaneous, and utterly unfamiliar.