ike The Gak Omek's earlier release, The Alien Eye, all of the music on this CD was written by the multitalented Robert Burger, who also designed the album art. The Gak is essentially Burger's solo project, but he's joined here on a few cuts by Dave Cashin on keyboards and Glenn Robitaille on drums, and they do perform live upon occasion. The band does space music, pure and simple, but there's a lot more bite here than one might expect.
The disc's opener is loosely fashioned along the lines of a concerto, with fast-slow-fast movements. "Return of the All-Powerful Light Beings" is also, at 15:06, the longest cut on the album. The opening movement plays 4/4 against a balls-to-the-wall 5/4. There's so much going on here that multiple listenings are pretty much mandatory. After a brief tacet, the piece's second movement, as slow as one might expect, is reminiscent of the slow section of King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King, albeit more straightforward. Bolstered by some very good patches and nice production, this movement is joined by alien gibberish and a guitar sting to the third section, an up-tempo section dominated by drums and keyboards. Listen to Cashin wailing out at the nine-minute mark. It's just too bad he doesn't get a bit more time for his solo here (but he gets another chance at about 12:15). Another guitar sting brings back the theme for a recapitulation, with some good sweep to it. Overall the piece sounds a bit like early Procol Harum, sans vocals (the album is purely instrumental).
Track 2, "Forbidden Technology of the Lost Clown Civilization," sounds like some sort of alien device clicking along at 6/8. The opening section segues into a playful, jazzy call-and-response at about the one-minute mark. Then, in the third movement, Burger's Clapton-esque guitar comes in over nicely layered percussion. At 3:00 the piece shifts gears yet again into a march tempo, bringing Emerson, Lake and Palmer to mind. Does anyone play the organ anymore? Well, the Gaksters are using an organ patch on this one, because it's all Burger on this cut, but it still sounds pretty good. The song goes out with an extended percussive exploration using a good steel-drum patch for an underpinning.
For those who hate space music
The rest of the album is no less interesting. The third track, "Cydonia," opens with a melancholy segment that somehow seems to evoke the arid wastelands of Mars. The percussion here has an odd texture; it sounds as if it were taped at high speed and played back more slowly, sort of like what the Beatles did with the rhythm track for "Rain." It's overlaid by Burger's soaring guitar and understated keyboard work. But just when the song seems ready to lose itself in itself, Burger kicks its ass into a fast 7/8 section and keeps it there for several minutes until returning to a slower two-minute coda.
Most of the rest of the disc is a straight-ahead 4/4. "Apparitions of Departed Human Personalities" opens with a series of playful keyboard/guitar runs contrasted against a rising drone before segueing into a series of good-humored major-key "inventions." The intricate melodic lines here are almost Bach-like—until the samba starts! "Apparitions" is a hoot. It's good to see that Burger isn't afraid to show his sense of humor.
Three shorter but no less interesting tracks close the album—"Radio Hypnotic Intracerebral Control," "Dance of the Nine Unknown Men" and "The Departure of the All-Powerful Light Beings." "Radio Hypnotic" is rendered in a jittery 5/4 that makes it sound like another alien machine out of the Lost Clown Civilization. Burger seems to be channeling Yes (or ELP again) in this one. "Dance" is a Bolero-like exercise that opens with an interesting sitar patch under a Pat Metheny guitar. The Indian flavor recurs in a long single-chord drone section toward the end. The album's closer, "Departure," is the shortest cut here. Dave Cashin opens with a series of piano triplets that drift into a melody that flirts with the Dead's "Mountains of the Moon" for a moment before the main theme comes crashing back in even more heavily than it did in the album's opener. The musicians back off almost at once, though, stretching out into a lyrical passage dominated by Cashin's organ, which is then zapped out by an extended guitar sting that brings the proceedings to a satisfying close. Nice!
