There is a moment halfway through “Mystic Sister/Magick
Brother,” the opening track on Gong’s 1969 debut album Magick Brother, in which the band members all seem to forget what
they’re doing all at once and drift out of the mix. They take a few seconds to
reorganize and remember what they were supposed to be doing, and they all start
up again. The moment is both charming and frustrating. Even mid-song, the band wasn’t
quite sure what they were going for. At this stage in their career, Gong was a
soon-to-be great band stumbling toward a breakthrough and knocking over a lot
of stuff on the way. For a fledgling free jazz label like BYG/Actuel, it’s an
unfortunate first excursion beyond its established jazz framework.
Gong was formed in Paris in 1967 by Australian guitarist
Daevid Allen after British customs denied him reentry into England at the end
of a tour of France with Soft Machine, the band Allen cofounded with Robert
Wyatt. He apparently wasn’t too discouraged by the British government
essentially kicking him out of Soft Machine because he quickly pulled together
the first incarnation of Gong. Unfortunately, tensions during the 1968 student
protests caused the group to fracture, and Allen and “space whisperer” Gilli
Smyth decamped to Deia on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca without the rest
of their band. While in Deia, the two attracted a few new musicians and began
honing their psychedelic sound. Jerome Laperrousaz, a director based in Paris,
reached out to the band in 1969 to record the soundtrack for his second film Continental Circus. While there,
BYG/Actuel executive Jean Karakos saw them perform and signed them. They
ultimately released three albums on the label, including the Daevid Allen solo
album Bananamoon, that tracked their
progression from embryonic psych rock band to prog/psych powerhouse.
Magick Brother is
the weakest of those three albums. It starts out promisingly enough with an
intro that gives the impression that it will be a fairly standard BYG/Actuel
record. The freeform improvisation and ghostly, slightly sexual moaning
provided by Gilli Smyth and then run through an echo machine sound not unlike
something that could be found on a mid-sixties AACM project or an obscure
ESP-Disk. In what is to be a very common happening on Magick Brother, the band shifts gears suddenly into a very pleasant
lightly psychedelic acoustic rock song with flute accompaniment. The tune
wouldn’t be out of place on an early Soft Machine album, but some odd effects
help set it apart from Allen’s original band a bit. They also make canny use of
stereophonic sound, using the separation to prevent the listener from fully
gaining a foothold in the song.
Two pretty good songs, the unsettling and repetitive “Glad
to Say to Say” and “Rational Anthem,” which sounds like it was heavily inspired
by Pink Floyd’s post-Syd Barrett transitional period, follow but things begin
to go off the rails immediately after. The “Chainstore Chant” is more Syd
Barrett aping, and “Pretty Miss Titty” could pass for a bawdy Kinks song played
by a band that’s a bit too acid fried to remember how it goes. “Fable of a
Fredfish” is a waste of a minute, a glorified skit before “Hope You Feel OK,”
which starts out well enough with an interesting guitar tone, but it quickly
becomes interminable as at lumbers on.
“Ego” is a bit better. The songwriting is still pretty weak,
but it sounds like an intoxicated first take, which suits Gong well. Still, the
song lasts for much too long, and good work by guest pianist Burton Greene and
contrabassist Earl Freeman (both of whom are regular figures in the BYG/Actuel
catalog) aren’t enough to keep the song from growing taxing quickly. “Gongsong,”
with its opening narration about an alien from the Planet Gong and impressive
soprano saxophone work by Didier Malherbe, is better, especially when it gets
significantly heavier around two minutes in, but it is certainly nothing
groundbreaking.
“Gongsong” bodes well for the rest of Magick Brother, and the band displays steady improvement across the
last three songs. Malherbe’s saxophone at the beginning of “Princess Dreaming”
sounds like an unearthly, possibly not entirely human baby crying, and
dissonant violins and more crying come in soon after, making for the most
unsettling, nightmarish tune on the record. Vocally, “5 & 20 Schoolgirls”
is also a bit too close to Syd Barrett for my liking, but Malherbe again proves
himself to be the star of the record, soloing indiscriminately over the choruses
and most of the verses. Allen also tries to play his guitar without any vocals
for a bit after the third chorus, but Malherbe steamrolls over that as well. Closing
track “Cos You Got Green Hair” opens with a spooky ambient guitar and flute
intro, and Allen sings low in the mix on what sounds to be a very cheap
microphone. It’s a dark, evocative end to the album. Most importantly, “Green
Hair” and “Schoolgirls” illustrate the two primary musical styles that Gong could
be effective in. They would deliver on that promise toward the end of
BYG/Actuel’s run.
For a label that is most remembered as a free jazz concern,
about a fifth of Actuel’s output consists of records that do not fit into that
category. Daevid Allen and Gong, along with the Italian experimental electronic
collective Musica Elettronica Viva, are the most important non-free jazz
members of the BYG/Actuel stable. Like MEV, Allen’s work is every bit as
exploratory and groundbreaking as the best Actuel free jazz. On Magick Brother, Allen and his Gong cohorts
were still hammering out their path into the psychedelic cosmos. It’s
unfortunate that this collection of musical experiments is so unsatisfying when
taken as a whole.
Coming up in the
weeks ahead:
Actuel 06: Claude Delcloo & Arthur Jones – Africanasia
Actuel 07: Michel Puig – Stigmates
Actuel 08: Burton Greene - Aquariana
Actuel 09: Jimmy Lyons – Other
Afternoons
Actuel 10: Alan Jack Civilization – Bluesy Mind
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