Unique and personalized psychedelic techno ascends to new level. System 7's album 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.

The Phoenix music portrays, in a variety of ways, travel through time and space, life, death and rebirth - 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.

There is an additional collaboration between System 7 and Japanese animation team Mu-Magic, including manga animators famous internationally for work on "Animatrix" - which resulted initially in a beautiful promotional video clip for the track "Hinotori".

The CD has a fascinating and detailed 12 page booklet full of background information on each of the tracks. Samples of all tracks on a-wave.