Fri Sept 28th - Cabbage 20th Anniversary, Hebden Bridge, UK
Sat Oct 20th - Café Seven Live, Under The Bridge, London UK
Sat Nov 19th - Shiiine Weekender (with Orbital), Minehead, UK

Café Seven, the new album from System 7’s Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy mixes 5 tracks from their chill-out project Mirror System with 5 more up tempo System 7 tunes, and features a System 7 collaboration with Marcus Henriksson (Minilogue / Son Kite) on ‘Million Suns' and a Mirror System collaboration with Ajja on ‘Smooth Operator’.  The album also features some high profile remixes by Steve and Miquette including Sudo’s 'Sensation (System 7 remix)’  and Joujouka’s ‘And Justice Killed  (System 7 remix)’ and a Mirror System remix of Six Degrees Records artists The Delia Derbyshire Appreciation Society on ‘Cloudface’.

X-Port - the latest album release of System 7 - presenting a unique combination of techno and trance beats and live musicianship. On October 16th 2015 A-Wave Records simultaneously released the full power System 7 X-Port album and the more chilled Mirror System album titled N-Port. This ambitious release plan celebrates the 21 year anniversary of System 7’s seminal Fire and Water dual albums, and presents the full range of Hillage and Giraudy’s work in the field of electronica.

Released March 2015:-  System 7 & Mirror System mini-album N+X - a trailer for the ambitious simultaneous dual album release of System 7's new album X-Port and Mirror System's new album N-Port planned for the autumn. This is a celebration of 21 years since the release of System 7's ground breaking Point 3 Fire album and Water album.

SYSTEM 7 released Out (dbl CD) - on 07-07-14 - The Definitive Single Remix Collection featuring remixes and collaborations by Richie Hawtin / Dubfire / Carl Craig /James Holden / Laurent Garnier / A Guy Called Gerald / A. Mochi / Liquid Soul / Son Kite / Alex Paterson / Voyager / Rovo / Evan Marc / Jam El Mar / Doc Scott

SYSTEM 7's previous release - the Passion EP - really hits the spot, showing that in 2013 they remain on top of their game with their unique blend of trance and techno.

The most recent full System 7 album UP (released May 2011) tips the balance a bit in a more techno and tech house direction, still showcasing the unique System 7 sound with ultra modern production and a feeling of positivity. The album was inspired by time spent in Berlin. The club single, taken from UP, is PositiveNoise, a collaboration with Berlin-based A Guy Called Gerald, and features a new deep techno remix from Carl Craig and a powerful remix from Japanese techno star A.Mochi. PositiveNoise also has great new Japanese animation video clip

SYSTEM 7’s Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy have had a strong influence on the birth of psychedelic dance music and it’s journey up to the present, forging a unique and bang up-to-date identity on the genre map, in a space where techno, progressive and trance meet – with a healthy side-element of unique quality ambient chill which is connected and reflected in their sister project Mirror System. 

Since the beginning of the 90s System 7 projects have been marked by a series of high powered collaborations, working with Detroit luminaries Derrick May and Carl Craig, Laurent Garnier, The Orb, Jam El Mar, Son Kite among others. System 7’s club singles have had outstanding remixes from the likes of Plastikman, James Holden and Dubfire, whose mix of Space Bird was number one on Beatport’s main chart for 2 weeks in 2008.

A globally-respected organisation of over 30,000 musicians working in all sectors of the music business.

Musical anorak with 1960s/70s music reviews site (in fact two: www.alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk where the reviews are easier to find and www.alansalbumarchives.moonfruit.com where the reviews are really hard to find but everything looks so pretty). All of these songs were recorded between 1996 and 2000 when I was alarmingly young and were recorded on a simple machine. I add them a) because they might as well be here as well as gathering dust on a shelf and b) it helps add a bit of music to my sites (seeing as everything written by everybody else is still in copyright!)

Having written 101 album reviews, nearly destroyed four computers and almost single-handedly closed the Skills Exchange (where the first draft of this website was made) it seemed clear to me that the one thing my new super duper all-singing all-dancing website dedicated to the art of music was missing was..wait for it...music. With that in mind, it seemed a good idea to open Alan’s genuine album archives and let you readers listen to the musical treasure troves that had been gathering dust on my shelves for the past decade and reveal to you just why I feel I have a minute bit of knowledge to write about the process of songwriting elsewhere on this site. Now, I’ve tried every which way to get my files online – regular readers will tell you that this is the one section of the site that’s had a ‘coming soon’ sticker next to it since pretty much day one – including links to sister sites and an aborted attempt to use the ‘moonfruit’ juke boxes (which didn’t seem to accept my files for some reason. In the end, the answer was surprisingly simple – after our original web hosts t35.com shut down their free service I discovered that Sky Files on Windows Live allowed me to add music files as well as written ones. Now, at last, some five years after the first sentence was written for this site and some 15 years after the earliest pieces here were made, I can at last bring you 30-odd songs dating from four separate writing projects: ‘Encomiuming To Us All’ ‘Branches’ and ‘2 Parts Water To One Part Fire’, plus a few odds and ends. If nothing else, it will give all the musicians I’ve criticised on this site a chance to get their own back! 


All of these songs are written single-handedly by me, performed single handedly by me and were played on the same worn-out piano. The tapes were made over an increasingly large amount of years past on an MP50 overdubbing miracle machine, transferred onto analogue cassette and only now –years later – onto digital CD. (Hence the sound quality. Sorry, the amazing new technology had only just been invented when I first started and it was hard enough getting this stuff on cassette originally, never mind CD). Practically all of these songs are on piano and practically all of these are improvised (the exceptions I’ll be telling you about later) and were literally done by me finding a nice idea or phrase that set something off in my subconscious and left me frantically reaching for the recording equipment before I could forget how the phrases went ( I still forgot anyway more often than not and went on to find something else instead).   

Most of the time I never knew where I was going with these songs – they all seemed to find their natural way to the end without much of my help. As a result, there’s the odd duff note here and there though not as many as there ought to be considering I’m making this stuff up as I go along, so apologies – but what you lose by way of the odd mistake is made up for by the magic in the room (I hope). In short, think of these tapes as a pioneering primitive album in the spirit of McCartney or Let It Be rather than a full-blown polished epic like Band On The Run or Sgt Peppers. I’m also rather hampered by the fact that my MP50 machine has (hopefully temporarily) stopped working, so I only have access to my cassette copies, which were in turn copied onto CD by an extremely moody computer copies few years back! The player is now broken so I can’t, alas, retrieve any more for my computer to put on CD or add a few of the others I had lurking around. I know this stuff doesn’t sound perfect all the through – but most of it sounds better than expected, so just enjoy the bits that are! You’ll also be pleased to learn that, although I did make recordings of my singing for the lyrics, more as a record of where they go than anything else, I’ve spared you my godawful voice for the mixes here. Alas, working with only a four-track tape recorder means that a handful of other interesting bits were mixed in with the vocals and are lost now too – but seeing as my tambourine playing isn’t all that much better than my singing you’re lucky to have been spared this as well!

 In case you’re wondering by the way – I never ever got a decent song written when setting up the tape deck before playing: I tried several times over the years but no, there’s something about charting the unknown that brings out the best in the art of creation – and the Goddess of music probably wanted a cheap laugh along the way too. I’ve added a bit about each song and the lyrics, where relevant or remembered, for you to enjoy while listening to the music. Oh and at the moment the links merely take you to a long list of the songs when you press on the ‘globe’. Sorry about that: hopefully I’ll get that fixed in the future and I’ll let you know when it does. Oh and to the few people who’ve been waiting in anticipation for these songs and want to know which of the AAA groups they most sound like: well, there’s bits and pieces there but they don’t really sound like anybody I’m afraid. My real inspiration from the groups we cover from this site (and were in my record collection at the time) is to be yourself and find your own style.

This first opening batch of songs all come from a record I called Branches and dates back to 1998-99, the period just after pushing the limit of my MP50 overdubbing machine (sadly a bit of a museum piece now) and trying to go back to basics. You do hear two pianos and a few other things going on in these tracks but unlike the later earlier tracks (oops, well, you know what I mean…they’re coming up later on the list!) there isn’t usually anything else playing here, its all done on piano (even if it’s a piano set up to sound like a flugelhorn or something). The idea of ‘Branches’ was to be a sort of family tree in sound, with each experience and encounter with another person adding to your idea of who you are. I’ve also been fascinated by Nostradamus’ cryptic explanation of how he used to divine the future by ‘placing my rod against the BRANCHES’  (brackets on the original) – no one’s quite sure what this is (though a simple tripod is the favourite explanation), although if I know my Nostradmus he’ll have meant something metaphysical, like imagining himself as a tree with branches or something. Anyway, the title fitted nicely all round and it’s the album I’m most pleased with, hence the fact that its listed here first. Think of it as Pet Sounds without the strings or Brian Wilson’s perfect hearing, played on an out-of-tune piano. All of these songs have been ‘treated’ with a touch of echo from a CD-rom kit too to give them that nice warm reverb feeling – by some combin ation of luck and magic I must have had my microphoned set up in just the right place to make this work, but alas it just sounds awful when added to the other tracks here so I took it off again. 

The second album here is ‘1 Parts Water To Two Parts Fire’, a rather longwinded name for a project from Summer 2001. The title is fun with horoscopes – one of the tracks included here, ‘Glacier Bay #2’  has a line in it about strength from fires but feeling hurt like two  parts water’ which is about the fire and water signs in horoscopes. Actually, my horoscope is 2 parts fire to 1 part water with a little bit of air (probably hot air) thrown in. As a postscript, having had my horoscope done since I’ve discovered that Venus, my planet of communications, is in Gemini which means a) I’m passionate about the arts and b) I tend to write too much, which is proof of how accurate they can be when drawn up properly! This album wasn’t named until late in the day and seemed, unplanned, to be full of references to suns and seas so it seemed to fit quite naturally. Unlike Branches, which was taped at a rate of two songs a month for eight months, this was all done in a three month rush. Alas, despite being recorded later, the recording quality isn’t quite as strong as on the earlier songs: I think my microphone broke and I only had an inferior one to work with – that and the fact my piano was ever more out of tune!

Finally, the offcuts in the third batch were mainly meant for the album ‘Encomiuming To Us All’. (For those who don’t know – probably all of you not currently studying classic languages - encomium actually Greek for the word ‘eulogy’, which I’ve combined with the old CSN phrase of ‘love coming to us all. You see, you get an education as well as entertainment on this site!) They date from 1997 and aren’t really linked by any real theme. There’s a handful of other offcuts here too – two outtakes from an aborted session in 2002 that never seemed to work as well as the earlier songs and the earliest song here from 1996, recorded on a keyboard borrowed from my high school one summer. This was thankfully put onto tape before the keyboard blew up and blew me backwards across the room I was taping in due to a faulty socket – thankfully both me and the keyboard were OK, but it proved a valuable lesson for how hazardous recording music was! For the record, I’ve been messing around with tape recorders and pianos since I was seven, though the 30 odd songs here are easily the best of the bunch. 


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Songwriter, producer, & multi-instrumentalist I create original music that blends prog, pop/rock, and atmospheric textures, always chasing new ideas and sounds. Alongside recording, I still perform live whenever the chance arises. My music is made firstly for me, but also for anyone curious enough to listen. Thanks for stopping by — I hope you find something here that resonates. xx 

The new album 'The River of Change' is a collection of songs that have been reimagined, remixed and remastered from recordings that go back… well, let’s just say some of them have seen things. A few were written over 20 years ago, back when I still thought I’d definitely remember every setting on every piece of gear forever. (Spoiler: I didn't.)

I’m genuinely proud of how these tracks have come out in their new forms. They’ve had fresh life breathed into them, a bit of polish, and in some cases a complete rethink. Hopefully you’ll hear something familiar, something new, and maybe even something that makes you go, “Huh, didn’t expect that.”

Feel free to share these songs with friends, strangers, colleagues, sworn enemies, or that one person who insists they have “eclectic taste” but still only listens to the same five albums. Every listen counts, and I appreciate them all.

Thanks for sticking with me. I know it’s been a while — but good news: new music *is* happening, and a brand new track will be out before too long. Promise.

Hope you enjoy the revamped versions.

Chris

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