We’re a long ways out from Back From The Grave-oid garage-fash purism, and thank god. I mean, who’s gonna tell the dude from Coachwhips and Osees that he shouldn’t helm a bunch of shaggy-ass Kraut-prog-fusion instrumental jams? John Dwyer’s succession of improv sessions that kicked off with 2020’s Bent Arcana have, befitting the music itself, inverted the phrase of the times by deciding that the goal is to find out and fucking around is merely the method. If Gong Splat is the peak culmination of all those experiments, then it’s worth a voyage that sounds like 90% detours. Percussionists Andres Renteria and Ryan Sawyer maintain their recurring roles in this groove-first-form-later vision, with Greg Coates (previously heard on Endless Garbage) plunking out basslines that keep wandering their way into idiosyncratic grooves and El-P conspirator Wilder Zoby making synthesized On the Corner interjections. Extended jams like “Toagut” and “Yuggoth Travel Agency” use sprawl to their polyrhythmic benefit, with Dwyer’s finger-scrambling guitar dictating the weightiness and flightiness where needed. But even the shorter songs are deep — click with the malleable plasticine Tago Mago-isms of the title track, and you’ll be more than ready for the four-song/ten-minute gamut-run of cosmic noise at the end that concludes with the awe-stoned drone of “Giedi Prime.”