System 7’s Second Summer of Love (Part 2 of 3)

Continued from Part One…

Bill Kopp: From my perspective, your guitar work seems to be more integrated into what System 7 does on Flower of Life than it perhaps was on some of the earlier recordings…

Steve Hillage: It’s an ongoing project to try and get the guitar to work with dance music. Because just blasting solos out on top of a dance beat? That doesn’t cut it. It’s nice to play bits and have hints, to have various peaks and arrivals, but you have to do it with a lot more ingenuity.

Over the years now, we’ve developed all kinds of ways of using the guitar. And quite a lot of what’s in there is based on guitar, but it doesn’t actually sound like guitar: we’re using the waveforms. But there is definitely more guitar now than there was, and we’re happy about that.

Bill: Do you view System 7’s back catalog as source material for potential reuse in other forms?

Steve: Yes, we reuse bits. It’s all potential ammo, you know.

Bill: Can you give an example from the new album?

Steve: On the new album, the track “Firewheel” has got a repeated rhythmic noise that comes in after about a minute and a half or two minutes. That’s actually a sound from a remix done by a celebrated techno artist. It was one of our tracks from a record, [1997’s] Golden Section, called “Ring of Fire.” That in itself was a sound that came from a cassette – given to me by a guy in Bali – of some drums from the island of Timor. We did a lot of filtering and messing with the sound, and we came up with all kind of interesting techno noises for the original “Ring of Fire” track and various mixes of it.

And then I suddenly thought it’d be really cool to use that one particular sound, but at a slower tempo. I had that idea about six years ago; I wanted to use that, and we did it. So that’s an example.

Bill: Miquette, you have been a key part of recordings by System 7, Gong and Steve’s solo recordings. Have you ever had any interest in recording under your own name?

Miquette: Well, I am very good at ping pong; I need somebody to kind of answer. I do a lot of little things right, but I always need a Steve to finish them, if you see what I mean…

Steve: [to Miquette] Yeah, but several of our tracks are basically your tracks.

One whole side of Rainbow Dome Musick – the “Garden of Paradise” side – Miquette put that together.

Miquette: Okay. But in general I prefer to “answer”; I love that in music. This kind of bouncing off each other’s instrument or voice or whatever is gold for me.

Bill: Collaboration has been a defining characteristic of System 7 from the beginning. Can you give me an example of a way in which working with someone else has influenced you?

Steve: We can give loads of examples. Alex Patterson and the Orb: I could write a whole chapter about how that has transpired and is still ongoing.

But I’ll also mention one particular collaborator that opened a huge number of doors: Derrick May, the Detroit techno artist. We were introduced to him by our label manager at Virgin Records. They had a new dance [imprint] called 10 Records. And when we decided to start System 7, they enthusiastically put us on 10 Records. They had just done a compilation of early Detroit techno, and they said, “Hey, Derrick May’s in town; would you like to meet him?” I said, “Wow! Is the pope Catholic?”

We met him, and we really got on because he was familiar with Gong, and he was a fan of Manuel Göttsching. We were best buddies instantly, because Manuel’s E2-E4 [1984] had become an iconic ambient house source for remixes and sampling; he had huge status in the dance scene in the early ‘90s. And then through Derek, of course, we met a lot of the other Detroit characters, including Carl Craig and Juan Atkins.

There’s one very funny incident. We were out in Detroit doing a track with Carl Craig for our [1996] album Power of Seven, a track called “Civilization.” And he took us to meet another very interesting fellow called Mike Banks, who has a project called Underground Resistance; they’ve got legendary status in the techno world. And we met Mike Banks, and also known as Mad Mike by some, on account of the fact he used to do road racing, a bit like Mad Max. He told me, “Hey Steve, I know you play guitar; here’s my guitar.” He got out this really great Strat and asked, “What do you think?” I said, “Well, it’s fantastic!” He said, “I used to play guitar with the Brides of Funkenstein.” “George Clinton? Wow. We saw the Brides of Funkenstein with Funkadelic in 1978 at Hammersmith Odeon! Were you in the band?” He was.

That’s just an example of where things go with collaboration. It opens lots of doors. It’s a wonderful thing, dance music. The whole dance music thing has been about collaboration. Not just with us; with a lot of people. It’s one of the good things about the creative side of the dance music world.

To be continued…