INTERVIEW WITH STEVE HILLAGE

System 7 has been very successful in Japan the past years. No surprise, System 7's newest album is inspired by the manga graphic "Phoenix" by Tezuka Osamu - one of the founding fathers of Japanese manga culture. Phoenix sounds more energetic compared to its predecessors. Is the extra bite due to the manga effect?

"I think we’ve got a bit more of our live show energy into the Phoenix recordings – and of course some of the energies evoked by the stories (volcanic elemental tectonic power) have been very inspiring and generally seem to fit with techno music. But we just opened ourselves up to creative inspiration and that is what came out. As you know the Phoenix project started when we met Tezuka’s daughter, Rumiko Tezuka. She’s a System 7 fan and she came to us saying she thought our music was perfect for working with her father’s Phoenix stories. Everything evolved from that point."

Dubfire's remix of "Space Bird" is a big hit in the clubs right now. You wrote and produced that track with Jam El Mar. Just curious, but how did you guys met and decided to work together on music for the new album?

"Jam contacted us a few years ago around the time we were doing our Mirror System cover of Jam and Spoon’s “Stella”. We sent it to him and he loved it and said he wanted to make tracks with us. When we started reading the Tezuka Phoenix books and we sent some to Jam and he got inspired to work on the album with us. We visited him in his studio in Frankfurt and wrote “Space Bird” and “Masato Eternity” there with him, and then later did the final mixing in our studio in London."

What are you working on right now?

"Right now we’re preparing some of our Derrick May techno tracks for playing live at summer festivals, starting a Mirror System downtempo extension of the Phoenix album, and doing some music for a crazy Japanese video game."

On the "Phoenix" album System 7 collaborated with Son Kite, Jam El Mar, Eat Static, Slack Baba, Daevid Allen of Gong and Japanese bass player Mito from the band Clammbon. The Phoenix music portrays, in a variety of ways, travel through time and space, life, death and rebirth, with each track inspired by characters or images from the manga books, and described in the 12-page booklet that comes with the CD. Yammie!

1 | 2 | 3 all interviews