Totally unfashionable at the time (being at odds with the recent fallout of punk), and never really in fashion since, this album is worthy of attention as it is fully functional as a stoner’s sugary-sweet playground. If you want it to put you to sleep it will happily oblige at low volume. If you want it to play unobtrusively whilst pursuing other relaxing activities it will happily oblige at mid volume. If you want it to soundtrack a tripped out midsummer landscape it will happily oblige at high volume. Infact it will do everything so happily you’ll sometimes want to slap its face to bring out a bit of Grrrr in it. It sounds too too New Age for many people. If this happens you’ve put it on at the wrong time (of day or of your life). This record is mother’s milk at midday.

‘Rainbow Dome Musick’ is the female counterpart to Brian Eno’s male take on ambient. (Although Eno’s ambient music has been described as female compared to his earlier ‘male’ rock — see: Eric Tamm’s ‘Brian Eno And The Vertical Colour Of Sound’ thesis). Eno’s music always has an edge of uncertainty which I love, but which is absent from this record. This is in reality a Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy album. Miquette, Hillage’s wife, has sole writing credit and joint production credit for side one and shares the writing credit with Hillage on side two. She plays synths, piano and Tibetan bells and pulls the whole project into the Mother realm. Conceived as music for the Rainbow Dome at the festival for Mind-Body-Spirit at Olympia in London, April 21st-29th 1979, its birth must have been a beautiful thing. A decade later it became the link to 90’s ambient-house and spring-boarded Hillage into his involvement in The Orb when he walked into an chillout room at a nightclub to find Alex Patterson playing this very record.

‘Garden Of Paradise’ starts off sounding like Edgar Froese’s ‘Aqua’ with the archetypal ambient effect of running water. As gentle synth begins to burble in, however, it is evident that we aren’t in the mysterious frozen depths of ‘Aqua’ at all. A countryside soundscape emerges where the watery allusions give the feel of a summertime stream. Harold Budd-like fender Rhodes piano tinklings begin to imitate flowing water, each meandering keyboard line being rounded off by the same two descending tones. Synthetic birds twitter in the trees as shimmering sunshine synth-washes build inexorably . Hillage’s guitar then begins to play the soundtrack to high-flying migrating birds. Hillage gets carried away with the whole thing in the most eyes-closed, self-satisfied way. The bass tones fade and the whole thing eventually bubbles away over the horizon.

‘Four Ever Rainbow’ begins with a sumptuous bell sound which punctuates much of this track. The violin-like Gong guitar is layered over low-end synth washes as echo-guitar meanders up and down. Take the Gong sound, filet it’s rhythmic backbone out, play all the instruments at different speeds so that they all go out of synch and you’re close. Anyone familiar with ‘Angel’s Egg’ or ‘You’ might expect this track to suddenly break into one of Daevid Allen’s anarchist pixie-fixated asides, but it never does. It surges from one synth chord to the next. And just as it starts to suggest it might get threatening, raindrop synth notes start to float around, and we’re flying over the rainbow of the title. Vibrato synth pads guide us back to the ground as the rainshower ends and the rainbow fades into the sky. Aaaaah! 

There are no shocks here, nothing to be unsettled by. It is a cotton wool-lined womb music. Unashamedly pretty and as sickly sweet as honey, but with a gentle soul. Music for playing with baby so that Mummy and Daddy can feel like babies too. Just try not to speak in baby babble when the 44 minutes are up!

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Hillage virgins are advised to consider this review a description of a record which is unlike all other Hillage albums. Any interest in his other releases should be investigated elsewhere before investment!