{"id":840,"date":"2012-07-27T06:44:03","date_gmt":"2012-07-27T11:44:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=840"},"modified":"2012-07-27T06:44:03","modified_gmt":"2012-07-27T11:44:03","slug":"album-review-the-steve-hilliage-band-live-at-the-gong-family-unconvention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2012\/07\/27\/album-review-the-steve-hilliage-band-live-at-the-gong-family-unconvention\/","title":{"rendered":"Album Review: The Steve Hillage Band – Live at the Gong Family Unconvention"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steve Hillage<\/strong> was (and\/or is) the guitarist from British\/European hippie collective Gong<\/strong>. Always possessed of a mystical bent, Hillage’s songs straddled the space between psych-jam and wide-eyed folike sensibility. His music is as likely to feature loopy analog synth bleeps as it is to deal with subject matter you’d expect from Syd Barrett<\/strong><\/a> or Robyn Hitchcock<\/strong><\/a>. He’s an impressive and entrancing guitarist who makes intelligent (and non-clich\u00e9d) use of any number of effects pedals. His voice, however, is a somewhat limited instrument. His longtime partner Miquette Giraudy<\/strong> provides wacky synthesizer backing \u2013 especially tasty and textured on a cover of the Beatles<\/strong>‘ \u201cIt’s All Too Much\u201d \u2013 but her vocals \u2013 at least as represented on this live document \u2013 are even more, er, humble than those of Hillage.<\/p>\n

But fear not: the focus of this 2006 live recording is mostly on the music. The extended \u201cSolar Musick Suite\u201d is particularly exciting. Hillage’s music and sensibility foreshadows the musical approach of Ozric Tentacles<\/strong><\/a>, though Hillage’s music leans a bit more in a pop direction. A companion DVD version of this set (with a slightly different set list) is also available. After an extended period out of the music and performance scene, Hillage’s Live<\/em> is a welcome return (and return to form).<\/p>\n

Follow \u201cthe_musoscribe\u201d on Twitter<\/a> and get notified
\nwhen new features, reviews and essays are published.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steve Hillage was (and\/or is) the guitarist from British\/European hippie collective Gong. Always possessed of a mystical bent, Hillage’s songs straddled the space between psych-jam and wide-eyed folike sensibility. His […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","cat-65-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/840\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}