Gong - Angel's Egg (1973)

Psychedelic adventures with Pothead Pixies, Octave Doctors and more from Daevid Allen, Steve Hillage & co.  This album by the classic Gong lineup starts with a spacey introduction, which segues into a great piece of jazz rock with some wonderful lead guitar from Hillage, and continues on in this vein for the rest of the album.

Many of the tracks are short connecting pieces which give the various band members a turn in the spotlight: more Hillage on Castle In The Clouds, Didier Malherbe on Flute Salad, Pierre Moerlen on Percolations.  Allen's "mystical histories of an undiscovered planet... for children of all ages" keep the narrative tied together among all these various interludes, and the three songs that close the album (including Hillage's I Never Glid Before) are among Gong's very best.

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pw: sgtg

Gong at SGTG:
You
Shamal
Gazeuse!
Expresso II
Daevid Allen at SGTG:
Dividedalienplaybax80
Steve Hillage at SGTG:
Motivation Radio
Green
Open/Studio Herald
Rainbow Dome Musick
Point 3: Water

Daevid Allen - Dividedalienplaybax80 (1982)

After the one-off reunion of classic Gong in 1977, Daevid Allen briefly moved to New York and formed New York Gong with the band who would go on to become Material.  The sessions for their sole LP, About Time, were subsequently plundered by Allen to create tape loops that became the basis for this nice little oddity, with new music added on top.  Allen also performed 28 solo shows in 1980, integrating the loop material into a multimedia spectacle.

Starting with a spoken introduction, album opener When develops into a minimal, post-punkish jam for eight minutes, after which eight tracks follow in quick succession at an average of barely two minutes.  Some are purely instrumental, some with just one or two vocal interjections, some fully sung.  Then there's the jerky Fastfather, probably closest to the funk-punk sound exploding all over NYC in this era, and then another lengthy jam to close.  A fascinating album in Allen's many-faceted career, this stripped-down, minimalist sound gets a definite recommendation from me.

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pw: sgtg