New York Gong, "About Time"

I've been a Gong enthusiast for a good while and have always loved bassist extraordinaire Bill Laswell, so how this project that saw the two of them converging passed me by is a mystery. Fortunately, it is found now, and I'm just a little more complete.

In the late 70s, Gong's Daevid Allen made a trip to New York City to submerge himself in the CBGB punk scene, and About Time is effectively his travel diary. While it sounds very much influenced by the city's downtown movement, it's less Ramones and more Robert Fripp's Exposure, a wonky, involved exploration of new wave, a refraction of the jazzy prog of Gong through New York art rock. After About Time, Laswell went on to work with his group Material, and the early stuff they yielded sounds very much like it was cut from the same cloth.