(Psychedelic/Space Rock) Here & Now {Gong Family} - Give & Take (1978), Gospel of Free (1999) - FLAC (tracks/image+.cue), lossless

Review by Certif1ed
SPECIAL COLLABORATOR Honorary Collaborator
4 stars Floating Anarchy

Here & Now's debut album is a stunning, if slightly inconsistent effort; when it's good, it kicks serious donkey and ranks up there with the very best space/prog has to offer. You will be hard pushed to find better.

If you're familiar with "Floating Anarchy" (listed under Gong), then you'll have an idea of what you're in for, as this is "The Here and Now Band" referred to on that album. Here & Now mix punk, reggae influences and space rock into a sound reminiscent of Gong and Hawkwind, and it's easy to hear where the Ozric Tentacles got their sound from (the Ozrics regularly supported Here & Now in the early 1980s before their first album release).

The first track is actually entitled "What You See is What You Are" on my original vinyl copy - and on the Here & Now fan sites. A catchy, spacy keyboard hook is joined by a unison female vocal and the bass/drums/guitar pile in with a driving riff for a pair of verses and chorsuses that are pleasant but don't attempt to progress. But the interesting bit is to follow; the instrumental section kicks off into a different dimension - a spine-tingling space bridge that could have been lifted from "You", but with the Here & Now twist; Kieth da Bass driving Kif Kif le Batteur's jazzy percussions under some superb Hillage-esque guitar from Steffi Sharpstrings - we get the feeling that this is something the Ozrics would like to have achieved.

"Nearer Now" is a well-written song with fabulous "walky" bass lines. There seem to be snippets of early Pink Floyd and Hawkwind here. There's a punky edge, and the song is in a fairly standard format - but somehow this is unmistakably prog rock, with the catchy yet unpredictable melody lines, contrapuntal instrumental parts and ambiguity of key base. Around 3:40 the instrumental section kicks in, and Steffi S provides spine-tingling and melodic guitar solo lines treading once more into Steve Hillage's shoes with something that might have come from "Green".

"Grate Fire of London" is the centerpiece for me. An absolute masterpiece in itself and worth the price of the album. Smoky keyboards swirl around ambient guitars as Sooze ba Blooze sings "I'm gonna find you again" in a pure voice - comparisons to Annie Haslam may be appropriate here, but the space whispers are more similar to Shakhti Yoni. Percussion and bass increase the dramatic tension, and we get colours of "Angel's Egg", but with added chaos and sirens. The instrumental section from around 5:02 onwards is peculiarly regressive in some ways, in that it hearkens back to "Flying Teapot" and even "Camembert Electrique", but with Keith's pounding bass lines. Steffi's unison guitars and Kif Kif's precision drumming confirm the "Camembert..." links - but the music does not kick in, leaving anticipation for what happens next...

...which I find somewhat unsatisfying. Keith's bass has a fantastic rich sound, da Blitz works some great spacey keyboards, Sharpstrings provides some really subtle stabbing accompaniment - but the overall effect is of a very repetitive and unimaginative song "This Time". When the change comes it's chaotic - but in a disorganised way. The "stream of consciousness" male vocals are probably the best feature of this track - although I might take issue with the line "If you wanna lot of chocolate on your biscuit join a club..."

"Seventies Youth" is delightfully "Dippy Hippy" and a simply wonderful song. At the same time, it is the foundation of the songwriting path that Here & Now would follow. The albums that come after this, up to "Been and Gone" all develop the style presented in this track - but are very hard to track down. Notable points; It's just a great song with superb textures - not harmonically adventurous, but slightly Bowie in flavour, and very psychedelic.

"Improvisation" is just that. 11 minutes of blissful Here & Now style improv - although you just know that the structure was pre-arranged... H & N demonstrate what it is to play with feeling - this is how it's done, boys and girls, and this would only be out of place on an Ozrics album because it outclasses the Ozrics all over. Otherwise, you might be forgiven for thinking this was the Tentacular ones with Hillage on lead and beautiful and sometimes slightly disturbing female backing vocals. Enjoy this one at maximum volume and dance around your clothes, which are probably in a pile on the floor by now...

But close the curtains, OK ;0)

Easily the proggiest of Here & Now's output of the 1970s and 1980 (the remainder of their albums focus on progressive songwriting, incorporating ever deeper punk and reggae influences), "Give and Take" possesses something of a mysterious otherworldly quality and comes highly recommended, despite the fact that I can't really award masterpiece status, mainly because of "This Time".

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Give & Take was recorded without Daevid Allen, who had fallen ill after the release of Planet Gong's LP Live Floating Anarchy in 1978. The remaining members released it under their former name, Give & Take. Honestly, it makes no difference. If you don't look at the name on the CD and put it on, you could be tricked to believe it is a genuine early Gong album. Every element that constitutes the seminal space rock outfit's sound is reproduced to perfection: soaring guitar (courtesy of Steffy Sharpstrings, who would be drafted for the 1990s Gong reunion), sweeping synthesizers, psychedelic melodies, accelerating beats, and hypnotic pulses -- they're all there. The main difference resides in the quality of the compositions. They don't reach the same level of musical excitement; they lack Allen's cast of characters. The opener "What You See Is What You Get" is the strongest number, a tight song in two parts, first distilled from the best material on Angel's Egg and later hooking up on a riff that emulates the ground-laying space rock of You. This twin brother of a band gets suspiciously close to plagiarism in "Grate Fire of London," in which a female vocalist (either Suze Da Blooz or Annie Wombat) sings suggestive lines heavy on echo exactly like Gillie Smyth in "Prostitute Poem" (among other songs). The surprise comes with "Improvisation," an inspired, hard-driving space rock jam the likes of which Gong itself rarely recorded. Give and Take is much stronger than the group's later exercises, but it remains only an enjoyable curiosity for Gong aficionados. A long-out-of-print collector's item, this album has been reissued on CD by Tin Toy in late 2001. ~ François Couture, All Music Guide

2984160729 57028988 01 - What You See Is What You Get.wav
1696187019 60387644 02 - Nearer Now.wav
1374657056 80064476 03 - Grate Fire of London.wav
780273951 50495132 04 - This Time.wav
2145989614 53037644 05 - Seventies Youth.wav
3600712872 117414236 06 - Improvisation.wav

auCDtect: CD records authenticity detector, version 0.8.2
Copyright (c) 2004 Oleg Berngardt. All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 2004 Alexander Djourik. All rights reserved.
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Processing file: [01 - What You See Is What You Get.wav]

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This track looks like CDDA with probability 100%

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Processing file: [02 - Nearer Now.wav]

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This track looks like CDDA with probability 100%

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Processing file: [03 - Grate Fire of London.wav]

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This track looks like CDDA with probability 100%

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Processing file: [04 - This Time.wav]

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This track looks like CDDA with probability 100%

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Processing file: [05 - Seventies Youth.wav]

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This track looks like CDDA with probability 100%

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Processing file: [06 - Improvisation.wav]

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This track looks like CDDA with probability 100%

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Final Conclusion:
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These tracks looks like CDDA with probability 100%

Sleeve Notes:
In the summer of 1976, an impecunious & youthful bunch of nouveaux pranksters hit the world with their wacky bus. Their philosophy was the unwritten "Gospel of Free".

Their mission: To go to every Free Festival they could find & deliver their soundtrack of weird & savage beautyto the newly blessed souls of Albion.

These tracks are taken from Here & Now's improvised & live recordings of 1976, '77 & '78, and reflect some of the elusive spirit of that Free Festival era.

Exact Audio Copy V0.99 prebeta 4 from 23. January 2008

EAC extraction logfile from 10. April 2009, 13:24

Here and Now / Gospel of Free

Used drive : TSSTcorpCDDVDW SH-S202J Adapter: 0 ID: 0

Read mode : Secure
Utilize accurate stream : Yes
Defeat audio cache : Yes
Make use of C2 pointers : No

Read offset correction : 6
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : No
Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes
Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No
Null samples used in CRC calculations : Yes
Used interface : Native Win32 interface for Win NT & 2000

Used output format : User Defined Encoder
Selected bitrate : 320 kBit/s
Quality : High
Add ID3 tag : No
Command line compressor : C:\Program Files\Exact Audio Copy\flac.exe
Additional command line options : -V -8 -T "ARTIST=%a" -T "TITLE=%t" -T "ALBUM=%g" -T "DATE=%y" -T "TRACKNUMBER=%n" -T "GENRE=%m" %s

TOC of the extracted CD

Track | Start | Length | Start sector | End sector
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1 | 0:00.00 | 8:33.43 | 0 | 38517
2 | 8:33.43 | 7:40.25 | 38518 | 73042
3 | 16:13.68 | 11:05.39 | 73043 | 122956
4 | 27:19.32 | 6:33.10 | 122957 | 152441
5 | 33:52.42 | 9:29.04 | 152442 | 195120
6 | 43:21.46 | 16:11.23 | 195121 | 267968

Range status and errors

Selected range

Filename H:\CD Images\Freakbeat\Here and Now - Gospel of Free.wav

Peak level 99.2 %
Range quality 100.0 %
Test CRC 1742A149
Copy CRC 1742A149
Copy OK

No errors occurred

AccurateRip summary

Track 1 not present in database
Track 2 not present in database
Track 3 not present in database
Track 4 not present in database
Track 5 not present in database
Track 6 not present in database

None of the tracks are present in the AccurateRip database

End of status report

2180471546 630263132 Here and Now - Gospel of Free.wav

auCDtect: CD records authenticity detector, version 0.8.2
Copyright (c) 2004 Oleg Berngardt. All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 2004 Alexander Djourik. All rights reserved.
------------------------------------------------------------
Processing file: [Here and Now - Gospel of Free.wav]

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This track looks like CDDA with probability 85%

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Final Conclusion:
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These tracks looks like CDDA with probability 85%