System 7

Steve Hillage represents the sole connection between the ambient house movement of the 1990s and its space-rock origins in the preceding decade. After performing with the prog-rock ensemble Gong and issuing multiple solo records on Virgin in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he reentered the music world during the 1990s by establishing System 7, an entity that functioned chiefly as a recording collective. Dr. Alex Paterson of the Orb drew him back into active production by playing Hillage’s Rainbow Dome Musick at London’s Heaven nightclub during one of Hillage’s visits. The pair developed a friendship that prompted Paterson to urge Hillage toward ambient-house recording in which his guitar lines remained as foregrounded as they had been on his earlier solo releases. Alongside longtime Gong associate Miquette Giraudy, Hillage issued the single “Sunburst” in late 1990 and the self-titled album the following September, enlisting an assortment of techno figures that included both Paterson and Derrick May. Astralwerks soon offered the project an American deal, yet the existence of another band sharing the name forced a temporary rebranding to 777; the album therefore appeared stateside under that title in 1992.

Throughout 1992 Hillage and Giraudy put out the UK-only singles “Freedom Fighters” and “Altitude” under the System 7 name, the American restriction not applying at home, while readying a second album. Although titled 777, this new work bore no musical resemblance to its predecessor and carried further production input from Paterson; it received no American release. Their subsequent undertaking—a pair of simultaneous releases, one techno and one ambient, issued late in 1994—was packaged domestically as a double-disc set still credited to 777. Producer Youth signed the collective to Britain’s Butterfly imprint, where he had already engineered several sessions, and Hillage, Giraudy, Derrick May, Carl Craig, and Paterson together completed 1996’s Power of Seven. The album stayed unavailable in the United States until Cleopatra, an industrial label, acquired System 7 later that year, finally permitting the original name on American soil and releasing the remix collection System Express in early 1997. Golden Section appeared later in 1997, followed by Seventh Wave and Mysterious Traveller in 2002, Encantado and Live Transmissions in 2006.

January 2008 brought the conceptual album Phoenix, inspired by Osamu Tezuka’s manga graphic-novel series of the same name; each piece mapped onto a character or motif from the books. Contributors included Mito, bassist of the art-rock-cum-J-Pop outfit Clammbon, together with Son Kite, Jam El Mar, Eat Static, Slack Baba, and Daevid Allen. A year afterward came Live @ Shinjuku Face 11.4.2009. Hillage and Giraudy also rejoined Allen and Gong for that year’s album 2032. The next studio album, 2011’s Up, incorporated work with A Guy Called Gerald, Josh Wink, and Funky Gong Minoru (also known as guitarist Minoru Tsunoda); the EPs Positive Noise and Passion appeared soon after. In 2013 the collective joined forces with the vanguard Japanese group Rovo on Phoenix Rising, issued under the combined billing Rovo System 7, which also yielded the Hinotori EP. The 2015 album X Port included Rovo on the track “Love For The Phoenix” and further collaborations with Paterson and James Munro. Almost at once Mirror System—System 7’s downtempo counterpart—delivered N Port, while the jointly credited mini-album N + X System followed under both System 7 and Mirror System.