S teve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy, former old-school hippies turned cybertechno pioneers with their band System 7, have a career that puts most of their contemporaries to shame. And, unlike Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, after three decades of making music, they still love each other, still challenge themselves, and still have an audience whose median age is about half theirs.
Hillage made a name for himself with the cult U.K. space-rock band Gong in the 1970s, while Giraudy had a stint as an actress — appearing in the hippie flick "The Valley" (1972), which Pink Floyd-scored — before turning to keyboards and synths. The two hooked up in the mid-'70s when Hillage was making a number of trippy progressive-rock albums, of which his floating, beatless "Rainbow Dome Musick" from 1979 is considered a classic, must-have ambient album.
Encouraged by The Orb's Alex Patterson — who often spun "Rainbow Dome" in his DJ sets — Hillage and Giraudy re-invented themselves in the early '90s as System 7, a modern electronic act that moved seamlessly through genres, touching upon ambient house, techno, trance, drum 'n' bass, and more. Though they moved into the realm of programmed beats and sequenced synths, System 7 never lost the human touch, with Giraudy's glissando keyboards and Hillage's percussive, echoing guitar phrases remaining a constant in the mix.