DAEVID ALLEN & EUTERPE: GOOD MORNING!

Daevid Allen's first solo album after his resignation from Gong after You is a collaboration with Euterpe, a mainly acoustic group of Spanish musicians. The album is a bit more cohesive than his previous solo effort, Bananamoon, and finds Allen in a contemplative mood. His famed sense of humour and whimsy is still present, of course, but this time around there's heavy doses of reflection and ponderings on the way people hurt each other and the struggle not to repeat the mistakes of the past - topics which are of great interest to Allen, but which had only been communicated through whimsical comedy in his previous work.

Euterpe are a fine backing group for Allen's musings, Gilli Smyth is of course on hand to add Gong-esque space whispers, and the album comes to a peak with The Wise Man In Your Heart, on which fellow Gong veterans Mike Howlett and Pierre Moerlen guest, and which in its swirling futuristic-psychedelic rhythms seems to provide a precedent for the dance music of a couple of decades later. On the whole, Allen couldn't have judged this one better - the album not only reassures fans that he's still the mischievous wizard of times past, but also has a distinctly different sound from his work with Gong, proving that there's more to Allen than pothead pixies.