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

Does he have Logic, too, or did you just send him a reference file?

Fortunately, it was coincidence because he was using it before we met, but he also happens to run Logic. So we’re pretty interchangeable with our files.

There are a lot of textural sounds on Insurgentes. Did you use virtual instruments for those?

A lot of the instruments on the record that are more what I’d call in the sound-design area are actually guitars. They’re almost all guitars.

How did you get those sounds?

Plug-ins. I love plug-ins, and I love messing about with plug-ins. I love using plug-ins in the way they were never meant to be used.

What are some of the plug-ins you were using?

I’m a big fan of a suite of plug-ins called the [Digidesign] D-Fi. They include Lo-Fi, Vari-Fi, Sci-Fi [and Recti-Fi]. They’re great for producing things like ring modulation and that kind of distortion, which is not like natural distortion; it’s distortion where you’re reducing the bit rate until you get that kind of digital breakup.

If you’re running Digidesign plug-ins, you must be using Pro Tools hardware.

Yeah, I’m using TDM stuff. I use the DAE engine with the Logic front end, which for me is the best. Because I tried using Logic native, but that whole latency issue is a problem for me. Because when I’m creating sounds, a lot of the time I’m playing the instruments through the plug-ins. The problem with native is that there’s such a great latency between the playing and the hearing it back. So anyway, those kind of plugiins [D-Fi] and things like the Line 6 Echo Farm plug-in let you do some amazing stuff like saturating the signal and putting that tape warble on it. I love all that stuff. It’s kind of old-fashioned techniques in digital form, so you have so much more control [see Web Clip 3].

On the song “Get All You Deserve,” there’s a section where all of a sudden there’s this wall of white noise. Talk about that.

I’ve always loved noise. I love the brutality of taking something very beautiful and destroying it with noise. For me, that’s a very powerful dramatic device. And it does, in a way, happen in Porcupine Tree. There are moments when Porcupine Tree will go from very subtle, beautiful, and spacious to quite heavy; you hear it with the metal sort of element on Porcupine Tree. But on my record I wanted to do something more with pure noise. I’ve always been a fan of pure noise artists, you know. The so-called industrial musicians, people like Trent Reznor. And some even more extreme artists like Merzbow, the Japanese noise musician. I love that, and I love that sense of taking something quite fragile and destroying it. Those kind of dynamic shifts are incredibly dramatic.

Back in the days of tape, a big issue in the studio—especially a 4- or 8-track home studio—was fitting everything onto the available tracks. Whereas with today’s DAW systems, the challenge is often to not use too many tracks. Do you find that to be true?

I do feel that, actually. Interestingly enough, I’ve been remixing all the King Crimson albums in surround sound. What’s been fascinating for me is hearing how economic those albums are. Mixing an album like Red [Atlantic, 1974], for example, in surround sound and realizing actually that there’s only like a power trio playing— guitar, bass, and drums—very little overdubbing. And yet it sounds huge. Whereas with some of my stuff I’m tracking guitars seven, eight, nine times. And I’m thinking, “Am I doing that because I can? Is it sounding any better?” Sometimes it sounds worse. If you can get the sounds good enough without having to track [multiple layers]. I think the problem with digital technology sometimes, the fact that you do have an endless supply of tracks, is that you tend to cheat a little bit. Rather than getting the sound exactly how you want it, you think tracking will kind of make it sound big. “Oh f--k it, it’s not quite right, but if I track it enough times . . .” And I do think I’m guilty of that sometimes, because I never came up through that era. I think the guys who came up through that era know so much about how to get great tones and great sounds with very limited resources. As you say, if you work on an 8-track, you can’t afford to track a guitar four or five times, so you spend a lot of time getting the tone so that it takes your head off with just one guitar. And I really admire that.

(Editor’s note: To read more of this interview, in which Wilson talks further about his studio and the new album, see the online bonus material at emusician.com.)

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Mike Levine is EM’s executive editor and senior media producer. He hosts the monthly Podcast
“EM Cast.”