“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.

Discount Heaven House Band is an elegy for friends long made and suddenly lost. These are low-lit, ember-glowing vignettes captured during the hours between late night and early morning in Tijuana, Mexico. Played by Alfonso Azcaiturrieta, Ian Collins, and Brandon Ángeles with an appearance by Peter Gray Hurley, the recordings were made in memory of Kiva Ivey and took on new depth following the death of Ángeles. Grooving but doleful, extended yet broken, they are loose, ludic, and ever-unfolding. Thick basslines bend under the shuffle of a rhythm box, pangs of melodica cut through glittering synth aureoles. Emissions from a celestial lounge act, misty and hypnotic, to accompany a final ascension.

Focus is a program for sense evacuation and mind enhancement. Ponderous stretches of shifting synthesizer slip infinitely inward; the slow pulse of pentatonic vibration activates a fundamental human welfare. For this release, the musician has relinquished authorship in order to turn tones over to absolute presence. It is as if these recordings are hallucinations, visions, apparitions—keyboard reveries that come from nowhere, thread through consciousness, and disappear into the ether.