STEVE HILLAGE

"Fish Rising", the 1975 LP from Hillage, is quite simply a lovely record. Full of beautiful guitar textures, spacey vibes, and thoughtful and spiritual lyrics.

Truly a must-have record for the guitarists out there into Prog and Psych, as well as European and Canterbury Prog scene fans. There are wondrous sounds at every turn. Layered guitars awash with modulation effects create beautiful clean melodies and arpeggios, then the next moment a meaty distorted guitar breaks and wails lyrical leads. This aspect of the LP is the highlight for me, but there is so much more as well.

Synth sequences and oscillator sounds float through the background of the "Solar Musick Suite", the first track and a highlight for sure. While there is fabulous layering and depth to the instrumentation, it leaves space between the parts and never feels busy.

There a rich tapestry of guest appearances on here--Lindsay Cooper (Henry Cow, Comus, National Health), and Dave Stewart (Egg, National Health, Khan, Hatfield and the North) as well as several Gong members. The musicianship is outstanding and the sounds they create engrossing. While it can seem at times that the record is primarily an instrumental tour-de-force, there are plentiful and interesting lyrics throughout, often sung in unassuming fashion and mixed a bit low so that they blend into the instruments. The words paint a vision of togetherness and growth--humanity's connection to a spirit of the world, of our consciousness. That said, they also have a sense of levity and a dash of absurdity that keeps them from being heavy-handed and overly lofty.

"The Salmon Song" at times feels as if it is one long guitar solo, but its middle section--a Zappa-esque instrumental interlude--is outstanding. "Aftaglid" is intense. That seems like the easiest way to describe it. Seemingly innocuous bouncing guitar notes that repeat lead into a heavy and rocking section of overdriven, fuzzed-out guitars wet with tape delay, great textural synth work, and visceral drumming the all come together to make you want to bang your head. Following that, a beautiful and pastoral melodic section with acoustic guitar and ambient textures provide a welcome contrast as it rides you off into a swirling multi-colored sunset.

There's plenty to love about this--what many consider his best solo work?and thus it should come highly recommended to add to your collection. How Hillage is not incredibly famous the world over as a preeminent guitarist on the level of Page, Clapton, Beck, and Hendrix is beyond me. An outstanding work of excellence, with great sleeve art to boot.

"We've explored the infinite circuitry. To try and find a scheme that gave us form It burns our curiosity. And the answers that we sit and hope to find Are living here inside of we." -- "Sun Song", from Solar Music Suite

After Daevid Allen left Gong following the band's epic classic "You" which concluded the hippie prog adventures on "The Radio Gnome Invisible Trilogy," STEVE HILLAGE decided to stick around and continue his spaced out glissando guitar antics on Pierre Moerlen's newest rendition of the Gong universe. Despite a noble effort things got a little to hard to handle with all the changes and having just found a major score with his own debut "Fish Rising," HILLAGE decided to forge ahead as a solo artist rather than endure the drama of the band situation he found himself in at the time.

In most ways, "Fish Rising" was a continuation of the sound that Hillage helped pioneer on Gong's albums "Angel's Egg" and "You" and since it was recorded while he was still a participating member, many of the musicians from Gong joined in to transmogrify a wealth of material left over from HILLAGE's Khan days into full-on progressive space rock astral rockers. While the album didn't quite have a universal commercial appeal, it was and remains a veritable classic of the world of 1970s progressive rock but when it came to following up with second solo offering, HILLAGE had to start from scratch without his Gong connections to steer him through.

The result was the album L which found HILLAGE trading in members from Gong for members of Todd Rundgren's Utopia. The album was in fact recorded in New York produced by Rundgren himself who had made quite a name for himself as a producer. Given the slicker crossover prog of Rundgren and his band Utopia, it's no surprise that L itself followed suit with several more direct tracks that sprawled less and enticed with heavier guitar workouts yet still embraced the new age hippie ethos that HILLAGE had willfully inherited from the Gong-o-sphere. While the album did indeed hit the #10 position on the album charts in his native UK and having become his most successful album commercially, for HILLAGE's prog fans this album was somewhat of a disappointment.

First of all, of the six tracks on board, three are covers leaving only half of the album to feature HILLAGE's own distinct compositional fortitude. The rather strange opener "Hurdy Gurdy Man" showcased a palatable cover of Donovan's classic hit but also cast a dubious spell as to whether Mr HILLAGE could continue to forge a career in the footsteps of his amazingly creative and mind-expanding debut. The following "Hurdy Gurdy Glissando" is a return to form sounding as if it indeed could've been slipped into the debut's effortless flow but also sounds a bit out of sync with the psychedelic pop sensibilities of the Donovan cover.

The beautiful "Electrick Gypsies" is perhaps one of the best tracks with HILLAGE's poetic prose accompanied by glistening guitar antics and guest musician Don Cherry's ominous trumpet sounds. The track features excellent space rock guitar effects and a more blues rock approach to HILLAGE's solos. Continuing down the hippie eccentrics of the 60s, "Om Nama Shivaya" which is a traditional Hindu mantra brings some raga rock to the table which featured a vocal accompaniment by Miquette Giraudy who presumably serves as HILLAGE's counterpart in the classic Gilli Smyth role as space whisperer. While not bad, the track suffers from a bit of cheesiness as HILLAGE's once magnanimous composiitons had been tamped down to more digestible units.

Side Two on the original LP captures the closest vibe to "Fish Rising" with the excellent "Lunar Musick Suite" only turned up a few notches with faster tempos and a heavier rock heft. Still though, the dueling guitar licks are right out of the "Fish Rising" playbook making this 12 minute track another highlight of L. This one is the most progressive as well with loads of time signature deviations, space rock atmospherics and even an excellent trumpet solo from Don Cherry who brings his jazz sensibilities to the table in perfect form and gives this album a much needed upgrade in the stylistic approach of the debut. This track really should've been the template for the entire album to revolve around. Finishing the album is the George Harrison cover "It's All Too Much" which prognosticates the more poppy direction HILLAGE would visit in the future with simple electronic drumbeats and catchy verse / chorus arrangements. Not bad but doesn't fit on this album overall.

In the end, L fell a few steps down from the perfection of "Fish Rising." Whereas the debut made seamless transitions with an epic flow to its trajectory, L on the other hand sounds stilted with clunky covers oafishly sitting next to three excellent originals therefore i have never been able to get into this second album as a whole. True that even the covers are well performed and adequately adapted to HILLAGE's unique idiosyncrasies however the problem lies in the fact that the album doesn't flow smoothly like its predecessor. If the album started out with the superb "Lunar Musick Suite" and then built off of that established sound, L could've been a worthy successor to the debut but unfortunately HILLAGE seemed to want to distance himself from his Gong days and forge a new commercial path as the tides in the music industry were beginning to shift around the year 1976. While it may have made sense at the time, by today's classic prog standards L just doesn't have the mojo magic that "Fish Rising" had in abundance. No true HILLAGE fan will find this album missing from the collection because there is plenty on here to love but unfortunately it signaled the decline in HILLAGE's do-no-wrong days.

3.5 rounded down

If the angels in heaven above were to relinquish their harps in favour of electric guitars and ARP synthesizers, they would surely sound like Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy on this album. Rainbow Dome Musick is the ultimate culmination of the tripped-out celestial soundscapes with which Hillage had made a name for himself throughout the decade, taken here to their extreme: no drums, no vocals, just a blissful atmosphere, stretched across two side-long compositions. Track 1, "Garden Of Paradise", may not sound too special by today's standards, but it is beautifully done: starting from a collection of nature sounds and sweet electric piano tones, it develops very slowly into something that sounds like a Berlin School track without a pulse, with loads of sequenced synth arpeggios washing over the listener until Hillage's guitar roars wonderfully on top of it all. However, it is the second track "Four Ever Rainbow" that makes this album truly timeless: the guitar sounds like something from another planet, being processed through so many filters and pedals that it becomes an indistinct mass of consonance. The chord changes that ensue from this mass are magical, and the piece finally settles on the record's sole moment of rhythmic pulsation with a final synth melody in E major, which eventually devolves into arrhytmic synth and guitar glissandos as the piece fades out. This is a true masterpiece of space rock and ambient music.

Kind of dull. Most of it is boring and the synth sounds are god awful. The singing is solid, the lack of an omnipresent organ makes me sad. No horns, pretty much just guitar drums bass and spacey synths... So yeah I dislike the instrumentation. The music is also not jazzy enough, too psychedelic.

The album starts out at 4* with Solar Musik Suite then gets PRoGressively (hahaha) worse. Reminds me of Tarkus if the sidelong was a little bit worse. The three songs after the aforementioned are straight up ambient filler, no point listening to. Last song is profoundly boring psychedelic guitar jam -> ambient nothing (again) -> eastern drone -> spacey guitar (spacey =/=? psychedelic) -> (got bored and shut it off)

If you like space/psychedelic rock definitely give this a go. My review may seem a bit scathing but the music is fine, just not my cuppa.

Renowned guitarist STEVE HILLAGE has been part of the Canterbury Scene since the late 1960's. He was involved with two early one-album band projects: the psychedelic Arzachel (Uriel) album in 1969 and Khan's outstanding "Space Shanty" album in 1971. He's also been a longstanding member of the Jazz-Rock band, Gong. More recently, Steve Hillage was one half of the electronic dance duo, System 7. He also teamed up with ambient musician Evan Marc in 2008 to record the album "Dreamtime Submersible". The album reviewed here, "Fish Rising" (1975), is his first album in a long solo career spanning four decades and seven studio albums. He followed the "Fish Rising" album with six more releases in the late-1970's & early 80's:- "L" (1976); "Motivation Radio" (1977); "Green" (1978); "Rainbow Dome Musick" (1979); "Open" (1979); & finally, "For to Next" (1983). Many of Steve Hillage's bandmates from Gong featured on his first solo outing, including most notably, Pierre Moerlen on drums and percussion and Mike Howlett on bass. The line-up also included Dave Stewart on keyboards, who later paired up with Barbara Gaskin for "It's My Party (And I'll Cry If I Want To) in 1986. The 2007 remastered CD edition of "Fish Rising" added two bonus tracks to the original five pieces of music on the album.

"Fish Rising" consists of three long suites of music and two shorter songs. The album opens radiantly with the four-part "Solar Musick Suite", the longest piece on the album at nearly 17 minutes long. The first part "Sun Song (I Love It's Holy Mystery)" bursts into view like a brilliant ray of sunshine. This warm and melodic prog is positively glowing in rainbow colours with some simply sensational soaring guitar riffing from Steve Hillage. He's in fine voice too with his rich silver-toned vocals adding to the sense of warmth. It's a joyous and uplifting song with a flower-power message of love and peace and eternal optimism as these lyric reveal:- "So people look into each others eyes and gaze at them with certainty, We're gathered here today from all around to celebrate eternity, The spirit in the air is never far immersed in our totality, And the answers that we sit and hope to find, Are living here in side of we." ..... This joyful and invigorating music feels like the burgeoning arrival of spring, where colourful flowers are blooming in a twisting and transitional dance of new growth, as mother nature shakes off winter's cold embrace. This is warm and radiant music to stimulate and rejuvenate the soul. The "Solar Musick Suite" merges effortlessly into "Canterbury Sunrise", a lively Jazz-Rock instrumental, giving Steve Hillage a chance to really shine with some impressive soloing and with Dave Stewart providing sterling accompaniment on the organ. Next up is "Hiram Aftaglid Meets the Dervish", a wild and uninhibited whirling dervish of stirring Canterbury Scene music that's very reminiscent of some of Caravan's wilder Jazz-Rock freak-outs. Finally, there's a brief reprise of the glorious opening "Sun Song", to leave one feeling in joyously buoyant mood. Next comes the simply-titled "Fish", which is a bit of a tuneless mess to be perfectly honest, with the discordant music thrown together in a seemingly haphazard fashion. This is a fish that would have been better left in the ocean. The only good thing about this musical mash-up is it's less than 90 seconds long. Moving swiftly on now with the dreamweaving "Meditation of the Snake", a swirling and twisting magic carpet ride of transcendental ambience that washes over the listener like a blissful dreamwave of sound.

Opening Side Two now, we're going fishing with the 9-minute aquatic suite, "Salmon Song", and it's a pretty good catch too. It's a psychedelic rainbow trout swimming in a sea of spacey guitars, combined with some heavy sonorous riffing, and not forgetting those trademark Hillage guitar glissandos which soar right up into the stratosphere. This is one fish you won't want to throw back into the sea. And now we come to the album highlight, the 15-minute-long seven-piece suite, "Aftaglid", to bring the album to a dramatic and powerful conclusion. This is a real psychedelicatessen of musical styles, featuring gently pastoral acoustics, wild psychedelic riffing and Middle Eastern mantras, all combined together into a magnificent musical melange of sound.

"Fish Rising" is an album full of psychedelic delights, featuring super soar-away soloing, spacey New Age ambience, dynamic keyboard virtuosity, and jaunty Jazz-Rock, all combined together into a delicious potpourri of Canterbury Scene music. This fish-themed album will have you hooked.

Let's be clear about how Steve Hillage was stuck in the Canterbury tag for no other reason but his past Gong experience. As I have mentioned a million times, labelling is just a way of trying to keep order in a ruthless & naturally chaotic world, more when it comes to such abstractions as sonic air waves.

Steve Hillage is an epitome of the spirit of the progressive music artist. He portrays to perfection the hunger for new means of music expression. Maybe his music composition skills are not always up to that spirit's challenge but he is still relentless in his personal quest, if not actually in music composition, at least it is in true poetic electric guitar playing intentions and performance.

So now that I wrote that, it was all meant to underline how he has no problem in collaborating with other musicians as in the case of this Evan Marc + Steve Hillage - Dreamtime Submersible (2008), in which he works alongside: Electronic/ambient/analog/chillchillout/downtempo/electronica/idm/modular/psybient/psychill & Bluetech's producer Evan Marc renowned in the electronic music world which grows outside these PA´s P.E. walls.

The combination showcases two recognizable music languages fusioned as one, where in fact the listener can detect Steve Hillage's trademark guitar style blending into electronic music perfection Marc's own means of expression.

Exciting, vivacious & intelligent CONTEMPORARY electronic music. If you are expecting anything else, music composition wise, but Evan Marc's sound and the thrill of Steve Hillage transfigured electric guitar emblematic style working wonders, don't get even close and enjoy something else.

****

One of the unsung heroes of guitar god status of the 70s prog scene, STEVE HILLAGE (aka Steve Hillfish here) paid his dues through various bands that have become recognized over the decades as highly influential musical entities in their own right. Starting his first band Uriel while still in high school, HILLAGE wasted no time developing serious guitar sophistication that forged new sounds in both Khan and then the psychedelic space wandering as heard on Gong's space trilogy but after Daevid Allen jumped ship from Gong in early 1975, Hillage was uncomfortable with the band's trajectory led by Pierre Moerlen but stuck it out to finish the album 'Shamal' before making his own exit and after the success of his debut solo album FISH RISING which was recorded and released while still a member of Gong, the move proved to be the right one and in the process HILLAGE was able to nurture his musical contributions and develop them into extremely complex knotty creatures of sound.

While still in Gong, FISH RISING was recorded with many members of that band. Bassist Mike Howlett, drummer Pierre Moerlen, keyboardist Time Blake and saxophonist Didier Malherbe all makes appearances which gives HILLAGE's debut the most Gong sounding qualities of all his solo releases. The album also hosted other legends from the progressive rock universe including Dave Stewart (Uriel, Egg, Khan, Hatfield & The North, National Health) on organ and piano and Lindsay Cooper (Henry Cow) on bassoon. Also joining his team was his girlfriend Miquette Giraudy on various percussion instruments. She and HILLAGE would later collaborate in the 80s electronic dance music band System 7 which in many ways found its seeds sown with the electronic experiments found on tracks like 'The Salmon Song.' Additionally various members provide a wealth of extra sounds with instruments like the marimba, darbuka, tamboura, Indian flute and glockenspiel.

FISH RISING is one of STEVE HILLAGE's crowning achievements not only as a composer but also as a guitarist and most surprisingly of all an awesomely talented lead vocalist. The album with the help of magical pixies and Hare Krishna chanting flawlessly fused the progressive rock sounds of Khan with the psychedelic space rock of Gong but not only that incorporated the jazz-rock technical wizardry of the Canterbury Scene complete with HILLAGE's phenomenal finger melting guitar playing techniques. Add a dash of avant-prog and ethereal electronica and it's really no mystery as to why the FISH was RISING and seemingly unstoppable. The original album consisted of only 5 tracks, three of which were sprawling epic suites whereas the shorter 'Fish' and 'Meditation Of The Snake' served as unique intermissions that condensed the duality of the album. 'Fish' was a Daevid Allen inspired bout of silliness whereas 'Meditation' displayed the seriousness of the album and its focus on the more Zen inspired vibes of cosmic bliss and psychedelic splendor. The album was even a surprise hit as it peaked at No. 33 on the British album charts.

The complexity on FISH RISING is off the charts and has been referred to as the psychedelic version of the Mahavishnu Orchestra with its far reaching space rock soundscapes that take voyages through ethereal sonic fog zones as well as technically infused jazzified progressive rock workouts where highly demanding time signature workouts perform unthinkable gymnastics with bizarrely timed overlays of echo effects and an infinite supply of varying textures, timbres and harmonies. The near 17-minute 'Solar Musick Suite' with its four distinct sub-sections was actually a leftover from STEVE's Khan days but never found the proper home. Although it was performed live with Khan as well as with Gong, the track was gussied up in its best progressive space rock attire and displayed a new kind of Canterbury magic unlike anything that had ever been recorded before. The effortlessly glides through a galaxy of mood shifts, tempo changes and textural stylistic shifts that range from the happy-go-lucky freewheeling passages to the blistering pyroclastic flows of angularity.

The short snippet 'Fish' is right out of the Daevid Allen playbook whereas 'Meditation Of The Snake' provides the ultimate testament to the power of the echo effect. 'The Salmon Song' which is just shy of the 9-minute mark provides some of the album's most veritable prog technical workouts but also bedazzles the listener with plenty of Canterbury infused whimsy that delves into the realms of ridiculousness! The beefy sinew of the guitar riffs accompanied by the jittery oscillating pulsations of the electronic wizardry provides a glimpse into HILLAGE's future electronic music endeavors. The near 15-minute 'Aftaglid' finds a pendulum shift back towards the serious side of the album and with some hand chimes seems to usher in some sort of meditative practice that drifts through seven different segments. While starting out as an easily digested hypnotic echoey guitar riff, the track soon shoots off into the stratosphere of proggy complexities and offers the most ambitious musical workouts on the entire album. The senses are soon bombarded with a series of polyrhythmic overload, Eastern mediative ritualistic sensuality and mind-bending psychedelic escapism. The track also provides some of the most demanding guitar workouts ranging from acoustic guitar bliss to sizzling electric freakouts.

In many ways FISH RISING was STEVE HILLAGE's creative peak as nothing he did after even came close to the sheer magnanimous nature that exudes from every scale, gill and fin of this ichthyological ascension into some of the most adventurous musical workouts of the 70s classic prog years. In many ways a culmination of everything that led up to FISH RISING, this album also allowed the guest musicians involved to flesh out the most appropriate interpretations of the compositions at hand which proved HILLAGE's interest was in serving the greater purpose of the musical content rather than his own guitarist sensibilities. While the guitar is clearly an important ingredient of the album, the main focus is to ride the cosmic waves and worship the gods of psychedelia while tending to the chores of conjuring up the most knotted complexities that the prog universe demanded in the mid-70s timeline. The results culminated in one of my personal favorite albums of all time. The complexities of FISH RISING require many attentive listening experience before the magic really sets in. Sure, the riffs are easily comprehended on a single listen but this is one of those multi-dimensional albums that keeps giving time after time and ultimately FISH RISING comes off as the ultimate conclusion to the 'Radio Gnome Trilogy' albums of Gong that immediately preceded. One of those few albums i can put on replay for eternity.

I was a bit 'non-plused' when I first bought his on vinyl and I didn't play it a lot. It certainly seemed a deviation from his earlier work. I've followed Tangerine Dream for many years, but this seemed a bit too unfocussed to hold my interest.

But I'm older now and can look back on this through the years of System Seven and can see the path. I'm now glad I bought it and glad he was brave enough to release something that would not appeal to all his fans at the time.

It appeals the me in the same way that tracks like Soft Machine's 'Soft Weed Factor' and Terry Riley's 'Rainbow In Curved Air' do. Also reminicent of the Island label period of Jade Warrior, especially 'Waves'.

Well played and produced. A bit better than 3 stars, in my view. A bit more than 'Good, but non-essential', but not an 'Excellent addition to any prog rock music collection'.

When this was released I was immediately interested because of its content (a full live set from the 'Live Herald' tour), but concerned about the audio quality. I needed have worried, as this sounds as good as (indeed better than some) live albums from the period, despite being a cassette recording from the front of house desk.

This is no 'Earthbound'. I don't know how much work Hillage has done to refine the sound, but I don't think one can ever make 'a silk purse from a sow's ear', so I guess what we hear is pretty much what the audience heard on the night.

It must have been a pretty good night - a dynamic show that flows well, with material unavailable in live form elsewhere. If you like Steve Hillage there's plenty to like here. Got to be worth four stars.

Steve Hillage had largely transitioned from a free festival headlining space rock guitar hippy into a house music artist at this point in time, but he'd never dropped the guitar and when the Gong Family Unconvention of 2006 came around things were chill enough between all parties that Hillage, Miquette Giraudy, and their backing band were willing to do a set of Hillage's solo work - mostly the sort of stuff you'd expect, but there's an extended and substantially proggier version of These Uncharted Lands from For To Next which ends up an unexpected treat of a closing number.

Nostalgic revival projects like this are a mixed bag, but in the case of this appearance Steve and his band deliver a more than acceptable set. The performance would pave the way for a stint of live appearances, working as an opening act for Gong, during Steve and Miquette's short-lived return to the fold, but it wouldn't see a new studio album released or anything like that, and to be honest that's only to be expected given that their ongoing explorations of the spacier, ambient ends of EDM are clearly their creative priority these days. Still, both as a souvenir of a nice reunion concert and a decent-quality life rendition of this material - some of which had never been performed live in Steve's original run as a solo artist - it's pretty good.