System 7’s Second Summer of Love (Part 3 of 3)

Continued from Part Two…

Bill Kopp: What kind of synthesizer gear did you use on Flower of Life?

Steve Hillage: Well, there’s quite a bit of our antique EMS. And Miquette is a very great fan of the Animoog on an iPad. She uses various plugins; Icarus, a whole bunch. And I use a lot of Native Instruments; quite a lot of it is plugin software. And also my Helix guitar pedal.

Bill: How would you describe System 7’s relationship between studio work and live performance?

Steve: Well, definitely we’ve got a good synergy going. We like to try new ideas out live. And then the way things work, live informs the way we mix things. And it also gives us some new ideas for new tracks.

Miquette: We try things as well that are not completely finished.

Steve: Yeah, we do try out half-finished tracks, and that helps us see how people react, and how it sounds on a big rig.

Bill: How has your approach to making music changed since the beginning of System 7?

Miquette: Like Steve said earlier, I think now he is playing his guitar in such a rhythmic way that you don’t know if it’s guitar. He used to be “time captain” in Gong; he’s so precise in his beat that nobody knows that it’s only guitar.

Steve: I wouldn’t say our approach has changed enormously. I hope – touch wood – that we’re getting a bit better at it. But we’re always open to learning new things and new ways of approaching stuff. And I’m always looking for new ways with sound, mixing, mastering and all that sort of stuff. That’s quite important to making dance music records. It’s important to making all records, but more for dance music.

Bill: Would you say that your music is a companion to the psychedelic experience, or a musical manifestation of it?

Steve: Bit of both, really. We used to joke when we first started System 7 that what attracted us to acid house wasn’t so much the house, it was the acid.

We’re kind of cross-genre. I find very often [that people get] too specific [in classifying] dance music genres. But if I had a gun to my head and was asked what genre we are, I’d say “psychedelic techno.”

Bill: Do you see a through-line that connects psychedelic, space rock, ambient, house and techno?

Steve: For us, yes. For other people, maybe not. But we see everything we’ve done as a logical progression.

I’ll give you an example. In 1973, When I first joined Gong, we all lived in this house in France in a forest. And one of the great things about this house in the forest was that it had a big room where we had all our gear set up. We could practice 24 hours a day, in whatever state we wanted to be in. And my music progressed massively in that year when we had that. (We lost it at the end of ‘73.) That was when I was really getting into my echo loop thing, playing the guitar with rhythmic echo.

We had this fantastic drummer, Pierre Moerlin. He’d come in and jam with me playing my echo loops. We did some really nice stuff. But the thing is, with the echo loop if you get really, absolutely, totally into the tempo, it opens up a kind of wormhole. This is where it really gets psychedelic and goes into a really interesting sonic space.

So there’d be occasions with Pierre when I’d be jamming with him, his tempo would shift a bit and I’d lose my wormhole. And I’d say, “Pierre, can you just sort of hold the tempo a bit more steady?” And he’d get a bit pissed off: “Hey, you know, I’m not a machine. If you want the perfect tempo, you should work with a drum machine.”

And I was thinking, “Well, that sounds like a good idea.” So that’s an interesting example of how things progress.

Bill: I’m a serious fan of Moerlen. I love the albums he did as Pierre Moerlen’s Gong, especially 1978’s Expresso II…

Steve: Seriously, Pierre was the best drummer I ever played with. A close second would be Joe Blocker [who played on Steve’s Motivation Radio, Green and Live Herald]. God rest his soul; wonderful drummer. And the current Gong drummer [Cheb Nettles] is very good. He’s definitely up to Pierre’s level as well; I have to mention him.

Bill: We’ve talked about the continuum of different styles all fitting together. Where do you think the music will go next?

Steve: We’re not actively looking for some great new revolutionary musical situation. We’re quite content in our little universe, trying to improve on what we do and reach out to more people. I mean, who knows where music’s going to end up?