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Acceptable face of prog
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Lugia
970 posts

Re: PHP
Jan 23, 2004, 17:52
Actually, "Flying Teapot", "Angel's Egg", and "You".

They're a spectacular trilogy of work in which Gong manages to successfully crosswire loads of different musical influences and directions into something that remains pretty much consistent and cohesive for these three albums. And on them, you have the elaborate cosmic saga of Zero the Hero, which is sort of a pagan/transcendent/trippy variant on "Pilgrim's Progress".

During the punk days of the late 70s and early 80s, these Gong releases were some of the only prog I had on hand that still 'rang true', because you could tell that there was some real craft that went into the music, instead of a 'let's crank out the next 10,000 notes and time-sig changes, lads' attitude. Look at it sort of like the difference between some later Miles Davis electric period thing (like "Agharta", etc) and any later Return to Forever joynt (such as "Captain Marvel", a great example of 'look how many notes _I_ can play'-type fusion).

It's also interesting, I note, that when you look at the split-ups between other prog things and Gong, there's some startling differences in quality as to the results. ELP, for example, partly gave us the formula rock-schlock of Asia or the halfhearted Emerson, Lake, and Powell. But Gong's Daevid Allen, a few years after Gong's breakup, fell in with Bill Laswell's crowd in NYC, Steve Hillage went on to do some very interesting solo stuff (especially "Rainbow Dome Musick"), and so forth. True, there was Moerlin's "Gong", which was...eh...nigh'pon fuzak, reallly...but the bulk of the Gong breakup kept giving us interesting stuff. Says volumes about the people who were in it.
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