Rovo and System 7

The word that first comes to mind when this album arrives is ‘Intriguing’; Steve Hillage has been around for many, many years and has been involved in many different scenes over those years while Rovo are a new name to me but their Japanese origins suggest that their music will be original at least. In the end, and after a good number of listens through, the word that comes to mind about this album is ‘Awesome’.

Hillage and Miquette Giraudy (System 7) were once of Gong and have been making music together since the early seventies. They moved into dance music some time back and the music they have created over the years has had many of the ‘hippy’ attributes of their origins with beats and sonic imagery that set them apart and above the vast majority of rave merchants.
Rovo are a Japanese Prog/Jam band featuring electric violin, keyboards and twin drummers along with guitarist Seichi Yamamoto (ex Boredoms).
The two bands first got together in Japan in 2011 and performed together at O-East and from there kicked off the project that finished as ‘Phoenix Rising’.

The album could have been a mash-up of the two styles as both bands are strong performers in their own right but they have avoided the obvious duplications of two lead guitars and two keyboardists and the result seems to be featured around the individual tracks and using the different musicians and influences to make the best of each of the numbers – the slight downside of this approach is that the tracks all have different identities and the album as a whole is comprised of multiple numbers but the upsides are that each track is listenable to in isolation and I have seen my reactions change from track to track as the music ebbs and flows. They manage to achieve some genuinely new things in a form that is so heavily oversubscribed by dint of bringing such totally different experiences together.

The music moves between trance and psych effortlessly with the lead instruments guiding the music rather than being the sole focus and on numbers like their cover of Mahavishnu Orchestra’s ‘Meeting Of The Spirits’ their combined skills make the familiar fresh and original while on ‘Unseen Onsen’ they create an otherworldly and esoteric sense of space and galaxies of movement. On ‘Cisco’ they pull switches around a throbbing and repetitive heart, lulling you into a groove before smacking you around the chops with sudden changes .

The entire album sounds like music that has been caught, snatched out of the ether, and it sounds like some of the most complex live music programmed – I think the two shows in Manchester and Shepherds Bush in 2014 could be highpoints of the year.