Steven Wilson

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Steven Wilson
Steven Wilson on stage with Blackfield at the Bowery Ballroom, NYC, 2007.
Steven Wilson on stage with Blackfield at the Bowery Ballroom, NYC, 2007.
Background information
Birth name Steven John Wilson
Born November 3, 1967 (1967-11-03) (age 40)
England
Genre(s) Progressive rock
Progressive metal
Psychedelic rock
Experimental rock
Art rock
Ambient
Drone
Occupation(s) Musician
Record producer
Instrument(s) Vocals, Guitars, Bass, Piano/Keyboards, Mellotron
Years active 1987 - present
Associated acts Porcupine Tree (1987-present)
No-Man (1987-present)
Incredible Expanding Mindfuck (1996-present)
Bass Communion (1997-present)
Blackfield (2001-present)
Continuum (2005-present)
Opeth
Anathema
Orphaned Land
Website Steven Wilson Headquarters

Steven John Wilson (born November 3, 1967) is the lead guitarist/singer/songwriter and the founder of progressive rock band Porcupine Tree. Wilson is also a self-taught producer, audio engineer, guitar and keyboard player (among other musical instruments).

Contents

[edit] Biography

 Please help improve this section by expanding it.
Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion.

Born in Kingston Upon Thames, Surrey, England, but from the age of 6, brought up in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, England,[citation needed] Wilson discovered his love for music around the age of 8. It began one Christmas when his parents bought presents for each other in the form of LPs. His father and mother received Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and Donna Summer's Love to Love You Baby, respectively. The young Steven spent much of his childhood listening to these albums in "heavy rotation", as he once commented. Both LPs would influence his future song writing. He claims "...in retrospect I can see how they are almost entirely responsible for the direction that my music has taken ever since." With Pink Floyd leaning him towards experimental/psychedelic conceptual progressive rock (as exemplified by Porcupine Tree and Blackfield), and Donna Summer with her trance-inflected grooves (which No-Man, Wilson's long-running collaboration with fellow musician and vocalist Tim Bowness initially adopted as its musical approach. Subsequently, the band's sound evolved and pursued a more meditative and experimental Talk Talk-esque approach).

As a child, Steven was forced to learn the guitar, but he did not enjoy it; his parents stopped paying for lessons. However, aged 11, Wilson rescued a nylon string classical guitar from his attic and started to experiment with it; or in his own words, "...scraping microphones across the strings, feeding the resulting sound into overloaded reel to reel tape recorders and producing a primitive form of multi-track recording by bouncing between two cassette machines." It was clear that the eleven year-old displayed an early fascination with different possibilities of arranging and playing with sounds. At the age of twelve, his father who is an electronic engineer, built him his first multi-track tape machine so he could begin experiment with the possibilities of studio recording.[1]

It didn't take too long before he began to form bands with his friends from school and play live. However, the thing which kept him truly satisfied was experimenting with sounds and producing the recordings he made.

Between the years 1984 and 1986 he recorded material with underground bands Altamont and Karma. Some of those tapes have recently resurfaced due to the increasing popularity of Porcupine Tree. Wilson describes it as "...a bit like a painter having his nursery school paint blots on display..."

He was only 15 years old when he recorded a tape with Altamont, called Si Vockings. This particular work includes lyrics by Alan Duffy which Wilson later used for two Porcupine Tree songs: "This Long Silence" and "It Will Rain for a Million Years".

Around the same time he played with Altamont he was also in a band called Karma, which recorded two tapes: The Joke's on You (1983) and The Last Man to Laugh (1985), which contained the original versions of songs later used by Porcupine Tree, "Small Fish" and "Nine Cats" and "The Joke's On You," the latter of which can be found on the Staircase Infinities mini-EP.

Up to this point Wilson's diverse musical experiments contained avant-garde industrial, psychedelia (with Altamont) and progressive rock (with Karma). Steven's next step was forming two bands: No-Man and Porcupine Tree.

"There is a very thin line between an artist and a serial killer."
Steven Wilson[2]

During the late 90's Wilson's love of experimental, drone, and ambient music began to manifest itself in a series of new projects, notably Bass Communion and Incredible Expanding Mindfuck also known as IEM. He also began to release a series of CD singles under his own name.

Later on, Wilson became known for the high standard of his production and was invited to produce other artists, notably the Norwegian artist Anja Garbarek, and Swedish progressive-metal band Opeth. Though he claims to enjoy production more than anything else, with the demands of his own projects, he has mostly restricted himself to mixing for other artists in the last few years[3].

More recently Wilson has become known for his 5.1 Surround Sound mixes - the 2007 Porcupine Tree album Fear of a Blank Planet was nominated for a Grammy in the "Best Mix For Surround Sound" category[4]. The album was also voted #3 album of the year by Sound And Vision [5]. Wilson is now rumored to be working on several other surround sound projects, including remixing the King Crimson back catalogue [6].

Steven Wilson has recently began to write reviews for the Mexican edition of the Rolling Stone magazine. They're all translated to Spanish. Two reviews have been published so far: one for Radiohead's In Rainbows and other for Murcof's latest work, Cosmos.[7]

[edit] Porcupine Tree

Main article: Porcupine Tree
Steven Wilson photo of 2007
Steven Wilson photo of 2007

Porcupine Tree started out as a Wilson solo project, he began experimenting by recording music in his home until he had the hunch it could become someway marketable so he poured the material subsequently into three demo tapes (Tarquin's Seaweed Farm, Love, Death & Mussolini and The Nostalgia Factory). For the first tape, he even wrote an inlay introduction to an obscure (imaginary) band called "The Porcupine Tree", suggesting the band met in the early '70s at a rock festival, and they had been in and out of prison many times. The booklet also contained information about band's obscure members like Sir Tarquin Underspoon and Timothy Tadpole-Jones, and crew members like Linton Samuel Dawson (if put into initials formed LSD). Wilson: "It was a bit of fun. But of course like anything that starts as a joke, people started to take it all seriously!"[8]. When Wilson signed to Delerium label, he selected what he considered the best tracks from these early tapes, all those song were mastered and made the Porcupine Tree's first official studio album, On the Sunday of Life....

Quickly, Wilson would push his music towards a more contemporary area by releasing the single "Voyage 34", a thirty-minute long piece that could be described as a mixture of ambient, trance and psychedelia. With non-existent radio play it still managed to enter the NME indie chart for six weeks and became an underground chill-out classic. [9]

The second full-length album, Up the Downstair, was released in 1993 and had a very good reception, praised by Melody Maker as "a psychedelic masterpiece... one of the albums of the year"[10]. This was the first album to include ex-Japan member, keyboardist Richard Barbieri and Australian bassist Colin Edwin. About the end of the year, Porcupine Tree became a full band for the first time with the inclusion of Chris Maitland on drums.

Wilson continued exploring the ambient and trance grounds and issued The Sky Moves Sideways. It also entered the NME, Melody Maker, and Music Week charts[9] and many fans started hailing them as the Pink Floyd of the nineties, something Wilson would reject: "I can't help that. It's true that during the period of 'The Sky Moves Sideways', I had done a little too much of it in the sense of satisfying, in a way, the fans of Pink Floyd who were listening to us because that group doesn't make albums any more. Moreover, I regret it"[8]. Anyway, it still remains a fan's favourite.

The band's fourth work, Signify, included the first full-band compositions and performance, which resulted in less use of drum machines and more band-like sound. It can be considered a departure from its predecessors for a more song-oriented style[11]. From now on, the band would follow this path. Just after the release of the live album Coma Divine, they finished deal with Delerium in 1997, they moved to Snapper and issued two poppier albums, Stupid Dream in 1999 and Lightbulb Sun in 2000, both achieved very impressive success.

Two years would pass until their sixth studio album, and in the meantime the band switched label again, this time signing to Lava, and drummer Chris Maitland quit to be replaced by Gavin Harrison. Now with the support of a major label, In Absentia saw the light in 2002, featuring a heavier sound than all its previous works. It charted in many European countries and remains one of the top-selling Porcupine Tree albums by now, it was also their first record to be released in 5.1 Surround Sound, in a special edition of 2004 that shortly after won the "Best Made-For-Surround Title" award for the Surround Music Awards 2004. Another two years elapsed before its follow-up, Deadwing, an ambitious and very cohesive record, inspired on a film script by Steven Wilson and his friend Mike Bennion, which came to be the first Porcupine Tree album to chart the Billboard 200, entering at #132. The album was prizewinning for the "Album Of The Year" award on the Classic Rock magazine awards[12] and its surround version received the "Best Made-For-Surround Title" once again[13].

Steven Wilson started writing Porcupine Tree's next album in early 2006, in Tel Aviv, Israel, (he was staying there working on the second album for his side-project, Blackfield). Writing sessions finished in London, UK, in June, 2006, then in August of the same year, the band released their first live DVD, titled Arriving Somewhere and started a tour between September and November to promote it, where they played the whole forthcoming album at the first half of the shows. When the tour concluded the band went to studio and finished recording and mastering and added the last touches to the album. In early January, 2007, the band revealed the album title was going to be Fear of a Blank Planet, and the concept was influenced by Bret Easton Ellis novel Lunar Park. The album hit the shops on April 16, 2007 in Europe and April 24 in USA. Despite lyrics cite the most commons 21st Century issues such as technology alienation, prescription drugs and attention deficit disorder, Wilson, explained he's not trying to tell people how they should live their life:

“ I'm not really a big fan of trying to send messages within music. I always feel like the music should be like a mirror to what's happening in the world at any given time, you hold it up and let people make up their own minds about what they see reflected back at them. „

—Steven Wilson, Prograrchives.com[14]

Fear of a Blank Planet resulted in the most successful album to date in terms of market and sales, and also received the most favourable reviews of the band's whole career. It entered the Billboard 200 at #59, and charted in almost all European countries, peaking at #31 in the UK. It was nominated for a US Grammy, and won several polls as the best album of the year (e.g. Classic Rock magazine, Aardshock, The Netherlands).

[edit] No-Man

Main article: No-Man

No-Man is Wilson's long term collaboration with singer Tim Bowness. Influenced by everything from ambient music to hip-hop, their early singles and albums were a mixture of dance beats and lush orchestrations. However, after a few years the duo started to create more textural and experimental music, most comparable with later Talk Talk. Beginning with Flowermouth in 1994, they have worked with a very wide palette of sounds, and many guest musicians, blending balladry with both acoustic and electronic sounds. No-Man was the first Wilson project to achieve any degree of success, signing with UK independent label One Little Indian (the label of Björk, The Shamen and Skunk Anansie among others), an releasing a string of critically acclaimed singles. However, although the band still continues to this day they never achieved the same commercial success of Porcupine Tree.

[edit] I.E.M.

Main article: Incredible Expanding Mindfuck

In 1996 came the first in a series of albums by I.E.M. (The Incredible Expanding Mindfuck), dedicated to exploring Wilson's love of krautrock and experimental rock music. Initially Wilson had planned for the project to be anonymous, but then label Delerium Records published a song on their Pick N Mix compilation with the composition credited to "Steven Wilson" and so attempts to pass off the project in this way were abandoned[15]. The project released 2 more albums Arcadia Son, and IEM Have Come For Your Children, both in 2001. Since then the project appears to be dormant.

[edit] Bass Communion

Main article: Bass Communion

In 1998 Wilson launched another solo project Bass Communion, dedicated to recordings in an ambient, drone, and/or electronic vein. The atmosphere of the music has tended towards the dark and melancholic, but expressed with an almost Zen-like beauty. More recently Wilson has also started working with a guitar and laptop configuration to create fuzzy power drones. So far there have been several full length Bass Communion CDs, vinyl LPs, and singles, many of them issued in handmade or limited editions (which sell out very quickly) in elaborate packaging. The most recent release was Pacific Codex, which contained just one 40 minute piece, issued in a limited edition of 975 copies packaged in a deluxe box set containing a CD, 5.1 surround sound DVDA, and a book. Bass Communion has collaborated with many leading experimental musicians such as Muslimgauze, Robert Fripp, VidnaObmana (on the ongoing Continuum project), Jonathan Coleclough, Colin Potter, Andrew Liles, and several others.

Steven Wilson during a Blackfield performance at New York, in 2005
Steven Wilson during a Blackfield performance at New York, in 2005

[edit] Blackfield

Main article: Blackfield

In 2001 Wilson met and began to collaborate with Israeli rock star Aviv Geffen, with whom he created the band Blackfield. Since then the duo have released two highly acclaimed albums of what they refer to as "melodic and melancholic rock". The albums spawned several hits, notably "Blackfield", "Pain" and "Once". The band has toured several times, and a live DVD of their show in New York was released in 2007. Wilson splits his living time between Tel Aviv, Israel and London, UK.[16]

[edit] Solo works

In 2003 Wilson started to release a series of two track CD singles under his own name, each one featuring a cover version and an original SW song. The choice of cover versions was unpredictable, with the first 4 featuring songs by Canadian singer Alanis Morissette, Swedish pop group Abba, UK Goth band The Cure, and Scottish songwriter Momus. He has also released some of his experiments in electronic music as a CD and 2LP set called "Unreleased Electronic Music". These are released on his own Headphone Dust label.

Wilson is now working on his first official solo album.

"Sometimes you have to confront your own patterns and expectations of yourself and do away with things that you enjoy doing in order to move forward and keep evolving as a musician. That's exactly the definition of the word progressive of course."
Steven Wilson[17]

[edit] Current works

Steven has also signed on to produce the next album of Israeli progressive metal band, Orphaned Land. During the Porcupine Tree tour, in the fall of 2007, with Anathema as the support band, it was announced that Steven will mix their new album. Work on this album will start "late spring/early winter 2008".

[edit] Collaborations

  • Currently, he is planning to record a collaborative album with Swedish band Opeth's singer, guitarist and composer Mikael Åkerfeldt, which will also involve Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy. According to his MySpace page this is "not looking very likely for a long time".
  • He will be producing the next album of Israeli band Orphaned Land, titled The Never Ending Way of ORWarriOR.
  • Has collaborated on many projects with Belgian experimental musician Dirk Serries of VidnaObmana and Fear Falls Burning, most notably on their collaboration project Continuum which has so far released 2 albums.
  • He is featured on the latest Fovea Hex EP "Allure" (Part 3 of the "Neither Speak Nor Remain Silent" trilogy of EP's) on bass guitar. The EP was released in April, 2007 through Die-Stadt Musik.
  • He made a guest appearance on Dream Theater's newest album, Systematic Chaos on the song "Repentance", as one of several musical guests recorded apologizing to important people in their lives for wrongdoings in the past.

[edit] Equipment

[edit] Recording studio

[edit] On stage

  • Babicz Acoustic Guitars and Octane Acoustic/Electric
  • Boss DD-20 delay and RT-20 rotary twin pedal effects

[edit] Barefooted

For live shows Wilson plays with bare feet. This particular custom goes back to his early childhood, where he remembers: "I always had a problem wearing shoes and I've always gone around with bare feet"[18]. He also adds that another factor on performing barefoot is the advantage it gives in operating his diverse guitar pedals[19].

Wilson:

"I’ve stepped on nails, screws, drawing pins, stubbed my toe, I’ve come off stage with blood just coming out… I mean, I’ve had it all mate, but to be honest, nothing’s going to stop me."[18]

He uses a carpet on stage to keep his feet protected.

[edit] Discography

Main article: Steven Wilson discography
See also: Porcupine Tree discography

[edit] References

  1. ^ Porcupine Tree. Free Williamsburg. Retrieved on 2008-04-13.
  2. ^ V-PT-Exclusive-Interview with Steven Wilson. Voyage PT (2007-11-13). Retrieved on 2008-05-01.
  3. ^ Guest Appearances - Steven Wilson Headquarters. Retrieved on 2008-04-06.
  4. ^ "GRAMMY.com - 50th Annual GRAMMY Nominations List" (2007-12-06). Retrieved on 2007-12-06.
  5. ^ "Top 10 DVDs and CDs of 2007". Sound and Vision. Retrieved on 2008-03-26.
  6. ^ " Ptree in Action, Crimson in Surround! ". Retrieved on 2008-03-25.
  7. ^ No Fear of a Blank Planet. Voyage PT (2007-11-13). Retrieved on 2008-04-24.
  8. ^ a b DPRP - Counting Out Time. The Dutch Progressive Rock Page. Retrieved on 2008-03-01.
  9. ^ a b Porcupine Tree Biography. Retrieved on 2007-05-15.
  10. ^ Porcupine Tree's Digital Releases. Snapper Music. Retrieved on 2008-02-02.
  11. ^ "Porcupine Tree (Review/Interview). Aural Innovations (July 1999). Retrieved on 2008-04-03.
  12. ^ Steven Wilson -The Complete Discography (6th Edition), p. 111. Retrieved on November 2005.
  13. ^ "Surround Expo 2005" (2005-12-15). Retrieved on 2005-12-15.
  14. ^ "Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree, April 2007 posts on Progressive Rock Forum by Progarchives.com. Retrieved on 2007-04-22.
  15. ^ " Porcupine Tree Interviews: Record Collector November, 1996 Issue 207 ". Retrieved on 2008-03-25.
  16. ^ Porcupine Tree frontman enjoys life in Israel - Israel Culture, Ynetnews (2006-05-04). Retrieved on 2008-04-14.
  17. ^ "Interview with Steven Wilson at ProgArchives Forum" (2007-04). Retrieved on 2007-05-08.
  18. ^ a b "Interview: Steven Wilson (Porcupine Tree). Rock Eyez (2005-05-12). Retrieved on 2008-03-10.
  19. ^ "Specials - Steve Wilson Interview". The Dutch Progressive Rock Page. Retrieved on 2008-03-10.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
v • d • e
Porcupine Tree
Richard Barbieri · Colin Edwin · Gavin Harrison · Steven Wilson
Chris Maitland · John Wesley
Albums
Singles and EPs
Compilations
Live albums
DVD
Other releases
Related articles