(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
Steve Hillages career was, to say the least, multifaceted. In the 70s he played in progressive-rock bands, particularly of the Canterbury school. In the 90s, he instead got involved in the ambient adventure of Orb and similar projects.
Steve Hillage debuted as the guitarist of Uriel, who later changed their name to Egg. His trio Khan (plus the external contribution of Dave Stewart on keyboards) recorded Space Shanty (Deram, 1969), a psychedelic-rock album with both surreal and cosmic overtones (Space Shanty, nine minutes of aggressive and spacious jamming; Stranded Effervescent Psychonovelty No.5, a jazzy ballad; Mixed-Up Man Of The Mountains, a chameleonic track; Driving to Amsterdam, nine minutes of high-class fusion; Hollow Stone, the philosophical piece that closes the album). In the same year, another Hillage project released an album, Arzachel (Evolution, 1969).
That freak spirit brought him into the orbit of Daevid Allen and his Gong until 1975.
His first solo work, Fish Rising (Virgin, 1975), presents him as a cheerful, amazed hippie, creator of a fish-rock that is essentially a continuation in a late-psychedelic key of Allens ideas, enriched by the valuable collaboration of Miquette Giraudy (veteran synthesist, previously working with Todd Rundgren and the Tonto's Expanding Head Band).
That spacey-progressive rock triumphs on L (1976), thanks also to a host of exceptional collaborators (Todd Rundgren foremost among them) and to a Lunar Musick Suite.
For Motivation Radio (1977) and Green (1978), Hillage and Giraudy were essentially left to work alone.
Live Herald (1979) still delivers a 1988 Aktivator, but the guitarist fails to focus his message. The sound is caught between a danceable psychedelia and an abstract spaciousness.
Rainbow Dome Musick (1979) crowns his experimental indulgences with two long suites (Garden Of Paradise and Four Ever Rainbow). Open (1979) brings him back down to Earth.
Aura (1980) is a compilation.
Hillage disappeared after For to Next (1982). He resurfaced among the collaborators of Orb in 1991.
System 7 (Ten Dix, 1991), the new incarnation of Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy, debuts under the aegis of Alex Patterson (Orb). The album, preceded by the single Sunburst, is a double record and feels like a melting pot of ideas Hillage had to keep in the drawer for many years. Songs like Freedom Fighters are certainly not flights of fancy, but overall the work traces a suggestive path from hippie aesthetics to rave culture.
The ambient turn was cemented by 777 (Big Life, 1992), where his spacey guitar intersects house rhythms with calm subtlety. While compositions like 7:7 Expansion remain fundamentally monotonous and cloying, others, like Sinbad, unleash the full melodic potential of the Hillage-Giraudy duo.
Fire And Water (Astralwerks, 1995), two albums each the alter ego of the other (one frenetically dance, the other ecstatically trance), amplifies the strengths (especially Sirenes) and weaknesses of the artist, trapped by his need to be fashionable and striving toward a cosmic vision that continues to elude him. Interstate and the most driving tracks of Power Of 7 (Butterfly, 1996), such as Metoub, To The Power Of 7, and Hangar '84, are practically perfect within techno, but at the same time add nothing new to the genre. Power Of 7 also contains an Osmosis Suite in three movements, serving as a bridge to his prog-rock past.
These were followed by the remixes of System Express (Hypnotic, 1996) and especially Golden Section (Hypnotic, 1997), which marked the peak of his abilities as a producer.
In 2006 Hillage, Daevid Allen and some eight more guitarists
(the Glissando Orchestra)
performed a hour-long improvisation on a single sustained note.
Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy's
System 7 returned with Phoenix Rising
(Purple Pyramid, 2013), a collaboration
with Japanese band ROVO.
