Phoenix

January 28, 2008

Electronic / Ambient / Techno / Trance

#ambient#techno#trance#London

System 7 take their unique and personalized psychedelic techno style to a new and higher level on their album PHOENIX. System 7’s project is inspired by the manga graphic novel series 'Phoenix' by Tezuka Osamu - one of the founding fathers of Japanese manga culture. The project grew from a meeting a few years ago between System 7’s Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy and Tezuka’s daughter Rumiko Tezuka who has her own techno label Music Robita in Japan. Rumiko suggested that System 7’s sound would fit perfectly with her father’s Phoenix stories and his universal message. The resulting album release is a collaboration between Music Robita and System 7’s own label A-Wave. This project has led to an ongoing collaboration between System 7 and Japanese animation team Mood Magic – including manga animators famous internationally for work on 'Animatrix' – which has resulted initially in a superb promotional video clip for the first track on the album Hinotori. 'Honitori' in Japanese means literally 'Bird of Fire'. The clip uses 21st century Japanese manga animation techniques to transform the original Tezuka images in ways that work perfectly with System 7’s music track. This video has been endorsed by Tezuka Productions. 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 books. System 7 have also worked on these tracks with a number of musical collaborators including Jam el Mar (of Jam and Spoon), Son Kite, Eat Static, Slack Baba, Daevid Allen of Gong and Mito from the Japanese band Clammbon.