MISSION
When Gong’s founder Daevid Allen died in 2015, many of the veteran act’s fans assumed they were gone for good – but the truth is that the Kavus Torabi-led Gong are better than ever, just as Allen knew they would be. “He always loved to throw a grenade into situations!” says Torabi, beckoning us into the caverns of the mind.
Do I ever feel any pressure? Only if I read comments on the internet!” jokes Kavus Torabi, singer and guitarist with Gong, the psychedelic act and later prog-rock institution founded in 1969 by Daevid Allen. Before he died – or decoupled from the physical realm, as he would no doubt have put it – Allen tasked Torabi and the band with taking Gong to the next level, wherever in the universe that might be. Of course, not every Gong fan agrees with that decision
“Every single person who likes Gong, whether that’s old Gong or new Gong, will have their own take on what the band should be,” continues Torabi. “I’m the same about the bands that I like, so I get it. At the same time, you have to be confident about what you’re doing, and we are. Fabio Golfetti, our guitarist, has been working with Daevid since the 80s. He’s really grounded and really aware, so if Fabio thinks something is good, I know it’s good.”
Not that the new band have anything to worry about on that score. Since Allen succumbed to cancer eight years ago, Torabi and Golfetti – plus bassist David Sturt, sax/flute player Ian East and drummer Cheb Nettles – have fulfilled their late boss’s wishes with ease. Unending Ascending is the Torabifronted band’s fourth album without Allen: even more so than its enjoyably surreal predecessors, it pays deft homage to the original Gong sound.
Anyone familiar with the beautifully warped Radio Gnome Trilogy albums from Allen’s imperial period – Flying Teapot (1973), Angel’s Egg (also ’73) and You (1974) – will hear echoes from that far-off era in the new songs. Sure, the insane humour of those early LPs has been toned down, and the new sound is pristinely digital as opposed to organic and analogue, but otherwise it’s pretty much Gong as we used to know it. How did they pull this off?
Torabi, whose former membership of the much-missed Cardiacs makes him no stranger to unhinged music, explains. “It’s funny: the first thing is that we have to not think about that too much. We’ve all met fanboy characters who get very obsessive about every single Gong track and say, ‘Why don’t you do this?’ If any of us were like that, we’d find it a little bit overwhelming and a lot of pressure. So because we’re not like that, we’ve got the confidence to do things the way we feel they should be done.
“The other thing is that Unending Ascending is the second of a loose trilogy of albums, joined by three ke
