Gong at the Louhisali Theater

Gong
Louhisali Theater
Espoo Cultural Centre
Espoo, Finland
November 19, 2024

If writing about music is as senseless as dancing about architecture maybe we should take a leaf out of the antics of Gong's lead guitarist and singer Kavus Torabi. Maybe it was a consequence of the bite of a chill wind blowing through the concrete streets of Tapiola Center in Espoo that he had sampled before the start of this, the second concert in Finland on the band's 18-stop northern European tour, which sparked the dancer in him as he jigged and jived all around the stage area. After over 20 gigs in the previous two months, this band was running in top gear at this shiny 1960s culture center six miles outside Helsinki, and Torabi was having fun!

Four of the five men of Gong have been playing together now for 10 years, since just before the passing of founder Daevid Allen, and, unsurprisingly, his presence is still felt in the spacey psychedelic music that they offer and, equally, in the minds of the somewhat elderly male audience. The set featured five of the eight tracks from the album Unending Ascending (Kscope, 2023), most of which are forceful contemplations of inner geometry, with the majority of the songs evoking eternal cosmic forces. All songs were well received, though the heartiest response came from the very faithful rendering of "Master Builder," the climax of the 1974 album You (Virgin Records, 1974).

Equally important to any inner journeying by the audience were the torrent of visual images that flood the backstage screen during their show. While most of the human figures bore a singularly androgynous form, they roamed and "glid" (a very special Gong expression!) around a visual universe filled with symbols from various esoteric sources that founder Allen would have been very familiar with in the 1960s—Dravidian, Kabbalist, Buddhist. Fruit Salad Lights have been a feature of the band's live shows since the turn of the century, and the current range and volume of tightly synchronized graphics are awesome, though for old eyes sometimes overwhelming.

But back to the music and an evening of yearning, aspiring lyrics and washes of dominant guitar sounds, heavily drenched with reverb and echo. Torabi admitted in a pre-gig interview that until a hallucinogenic confrontation with a death force, he had been almost obsessed with the idea of termination of life. The experience left him better prepared to express his acceptance of a spiritual reality described in the songs. In contrast to the band's mystical yearnings is the solidity of the drumming of Cheb Nettles. Single-handedly, he forces the pace forwards and, with a no-holds-barred approach, launched the band through the multiple time changes that have been a staple of Gong's compositions since its inception. In the last few minutes of the final song, "Choose Your Own Goddess," Nettles moved from powerhouse drummer and backing vocalist to lead vocals, drawing to a close the exceptionally energetic outing of the world's busiest gigging hippie band with a mission.

Comments