Pygmy Unit - Signals From Earth

Avant classic back in stock ICYMI last time around. As when it first surfaced around here, it remains a real head-melter - who knows what was made of it back in 1974 on initial release, if indeed anyone outside of their seven man crew even heard it. Led by multi-instrumentalist Darrel De Vore, whom the keen-eyed among you will also have seen pop-up in solo form on Goaty Tapes, Pygmy Unit assumed a Organic Music Society-like take to improvisation, folding all manner of influence into their already free-ranging jazz-rooted purview. With Native American Jim Pepper among their ranks, an interest in modern electronics that seems almost Cageian and an ostensibly DIY approach to instrumentation, their sound is both worldwide in perspective and, somewhat inevitably although in no way predictably, not of this world (certainly not within any accepted western standard of it). Call it spiritual or cosmic, or simply avant garde, but Signals From Earth still plays as a distinctly alien expression, off-grid and unfenced, searching out for inspiration across the vast expanse of North American heritage and in doing so, coincidentally enough, creating its own hermetic universe, uniquely so. Jazz/not-jazz in symbiosis, and as brilliantly perplexing as such a conceit should be. 
 
FFO: Don Cherry, Organic Music Society, Luis Perez, Khan Jamal’s Creative Arts Ensemble, Taj Mahal Travellers