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Steve Hillage has had a long and interesting musical life- part of the Canterbury scene in the early 70s, solo and with Kevin Ayres and Soft Machine, then Gong with Daevid Allen (and where he met his partner Miquette Giraudy, his and Miquette's 1979 solo ambient opus Rainbow Dome Musick, production work with Simple Minds in the early 80s and The Charlatans a decade later and from 1989 his and Miquette's ambient/ dance outfit System 7 with The Orb and Youth and he played a key role in establishing the dance tent at Glastonbury.

Steve and Miquette are not standing still. System 7 are back with a new album, Flower Of Life, out later this month. A single came out ahead of it at the end of March, I Want More...

Coldcut's Matt Black is present on I Want More, which starts out with Can inspired bass and then mutates into pulsing synthlines, Matt's demo the launchpad for a soaring, insistent, four- four track that began as a discussion about Miquette's early 70s film soundtrack work, specifically a French underground film from 1969 about heroin addiction in Ibiza called More (to which Pink Floyd contributed the soundtrack). This short clip provides a flavour of the film...

This is Pink Floyd's Main Theme from the soundtrack, a very late 1960s Floyd track- cymbal splashes, wheezy organ, skittery drumming and throbbing bass. The sound of what they called a Happening. 

Main Theme

System 7's album follows in couple of weeks, ten tracks with early 90s ambient/ progressive house grooves and synth sounds. The title track pulses with positivity. On Beulah Alex Paterson from The Orb shows up, crunchy drums, synth squiggles, a Mae West vocal sample and visions of fields filled with dancers. There are faster and thumpier tracks, full on banging psy- trance on Atmosphere and an Eat Static collaboration Transceptor. Penultimate track Bonjour takes us down, three minutes of comedown with a slightly paranoid edge that eventually evens out. Flower Of Life finishes with a System 7 remix of Delia Derbyshire Appreciation Society, Dubby Chain Signal is an extended downtempo/ ambient, chill out room delight that could be twice its seven minute length and not outstay its welcome. 

Monday's Long Song

I found a copy of Steve Hillage's 1979 ambient album Rainbow Dome Music in the second hand record shop in Stretford recently, the forty one year old sleeve and vinyl in pretty much perfect condition and priced at just £8.00. The album is two long pieces of ambient music composed and played by Hillage and his partner Miquette Giraudy, using guitars, Fender Rhodes, ARP and Moog synths,a double sequencer and Tibetan bells. It was recorded specifically for the Mind- Body- Spirit festival at Olympia in London but its influence has lasted long after that. When Dr Alex Paterson of The Orb started off playing ambient house in the back rooms of London's acid house venues he'd have a copy of Rainbow Dome Music on one deck, some sound affects albums on the second (birdsong, voices) and the rhythm tracks on the third. The Orb and Steve Hillage would go on to work together after the man who made the music introduced himself to Paterson while he was DJing with a copy of Rainbow Dome Music. Hillage would go on to form his own 90s ambient house outfit, System 7. Rainbow Dome Music's influence on The Orb's own recordings is huge. I don't know if Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty had heard it but it seems reasonable to assume they had and to these ears there seems to be a fairly straight line between Rainbow Dome Music and The KLF's Chill Out. Less of a straight line maybe, more of a meandering, wandering, gently drifting line but definitely a line connecting the two.

Garden Of Paradise, side one, is almost twenty five minutes of ambient, pastoral, dreamscape- running water, ringing bells, organ notes, bleeps, synths and long keening sounds, delayed guitar notes, all stitched together carefully and seamlessly, lush and rich and pushed along by Giraudy's double sequencer.

Garden Of Paradise