Cassette
See also: Echardt & Kash - Songs of the Soul
More shadowy operations with these two most recent cassettes from the ever-inquisitive Goaty Tapes. Let's start with Echardt & Kash, a most-likely-contemporary duo channelling pretty serious post-Music From Memory vibrations that dance around the interconnecting oneiric zones of ambient, new age and after-hours/chill out electronics. Dreamstate bliss with a vaguely balearic kiss, and yes that is the sound of flowing water and bird song. Catnip escapism for when reality aint so chill. The Darrell DeVore collection is a slightly different proposition, twelve recordings of both known and unknown time culled from the previously untapped archives of the Pygmy Unit leader. We're really in Goaty Tape country, digging around in these lost and/or unheard experiments in fourth world electronics, ethnomusicological investigations and general inner world/outer zone sonic exploration. These recordings don't bear too close a resemblance to the avant jazz (anti-)formations of DeVore's parent band, though they possess the same venturing tendencies, drawing on all sorts of manifestations of cosmic/psychedelic musics, be that the new age drift of post-kraut Tangerine Dream, the vaporous dreaming of K. Leimer or the uncanny alien vistas of Jon Hassell or Roberto Musci. Given the time period (1980-2001) and range of inspirations these tracks cover, I'd be surprised if there weren't a lot more of this to come. On the strength of Another Song of Civilisation, far more excavation seems necessary.