Steven Wilson Interview

Mar 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Mike Levine

THE PORCUPINE TREE GUITARIST/VOCALIST EXPRESSES HIS ECLECTIC MUSICAL VISION ON HIS SELF-RECORDED SOLO PROJECT

In some ways, Steven Wilson is a throwback. The Porcupine Tree guitarist-vocalist admires concept albums, reminisces about LP packaging and graphics, and finds today’s download culture, especially the compression of audio into MP3 format and the emphasis on single-song downloading, antithetical to his musical vision. Yet Wilson is by no means a Luddite. He wholeheartedly embraces digital recording technology, uses many signal-processing plug-ins, and has a personal studio that’s centered around his Apple Mac G5. His setup is a home studio in the most literal sense—it’s located in his parents’ house, in the room he grew up in (see Fig. 1).

Wilson used that studio for much of the tracking on Insurgentes (K-Scope, 2009; see Fig. 2), his new solo project. (Some of the guitars were recorded at Red Room Recorders in Florida, and the drums and a few of the other tracks were recorded elsewhere.) Wilson did all the mixing for the project, both in stereo and surround. The music on Insurgentes shares some similarities with that of Porcupine Tree, but because it was a solo project, it allowed Wilson to explore musical elements—ranging from wall-of-noise segments to atonal orchestral passages to piano vocal ballads—that are unlikely to be heard on a Porcupine Tree release.

But Insurgentes encompasses more than just a CD. The standard release, which is slated to come out in February 2009, features both a CD and a DVD. The latter contains Wilson’s surround mixes of the material in DVD-A and DVD-V format (DVD-V can be played on home-theater setups), as well as an 18-minute excerpt from yet another facet of the project, a “documentary road movie” by filmmaker Lasse Hoile that features Wilson in a variety of locations around the world, talking to musicians about how the digital age has changed the music world for them (see Web Clip 1).

In one scene, Wilson is shown shooting a rifle at an iPod, in a symbolic put-down of how those devices have contributed to what he calls the “jukebox mentality” endemic to downloadable music.

This past fall, Wilson showed his reverence for creative album packaging by releasing a limited-edition, deluxe version of Insurgentes that contained a 5-track bonus disc (those tracks were not included on the subsequent standard release) and came inside a hardcover book, replete with color photos taken during the making of the movie.

I had a chance to speak with Wilson about Insurgentes when he was in New York previewing the surround mixes.

Genrewise, how would you describe the music on Insurgentes? Would it be correct to call it progressive rock?

I think I can honestly say that this is the first time I’ve made an album that’s almost beyond generic classification. So yes, Insurgentes has elements of progressive in it. But it also has elements of industrial music, pop, Britpop, shoegazer, and alternative. It has tricky time signatures on it, but it also has very simple piano ballads. It’s something beyond. In a way, I’ve always aspired to create music that’s beyond genre. But it’s actually easier said than done.

So it’s your musical vision, regardless of genre.

It’s me. Absolutely, it’s me. And it’s all the music that I’ve ever been inspired by and makes up my musical personality. I listen to so many kinds of music, but that all kind of gets filtered through into my work. So I hope there’s something that’s quintessentially Steven Wilson about it, and beyond that kind of “It sounds like this band” or “It sounds like that band” or “You can put it in that box or this box.”

How did the experience of doing this album compare to recording with Porcupine Tree?

Obviously, there are similarities, because my approach to working is fairly consistent regardless of what I’m doing. In some ways it was easier, in some ways it was harder. It was easier in the sense that I didn’t have any baggage or agenda with this record. The thing is, when you have a well-established band, no matter how liberated and experimental you are as a musician, you do always, with every new project, bring the weight of your back catalog with you. And you bring the weight of your fans’ expectations with you, and you bring the weight of your own style, or however you’ve defined your sound and your style. So that was easy because I had no agenda. If I wanted to get the orchestra to play two minutes of atonal noise, I could tell them to do that. If I wanted to do a piano ballad one day, I could do that. If I wanted to make complete industrial noise the next minute, I could do that. I don’t think I could do that in the context of a band, because a band is always about the kind of common ground that you share. And there are always things in everyone’s musical personality that they can’t bring to the band because for whatever reason, they don’t fit in the matrix of whatever the band [is doing]. So that was great, that was liberating.