Steven John Wilson's Blog, page 7

Moving through the emotions – Hajo Müller photos from Hamburg

Here’s a series of photos taken by Hajo Müller in Hamburg on 20th Feb. I love them because they show many of the different emotions I move through during (and before) a concert. Performing for nearly 3 hours every night during the To the Bone tour has been a very intense and rewarding experience, but one that always leaves me pretty drained by the end of the night.

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New Tim Bowness album ‘Flowers At The Scene’ now available to pre-order

The new Tim Bowness album “Flowers at the Scene”, which I co-produced and mixed with him under the No-Man moniker, is now available to pre-order for 1st March release. As I previously wrote I think the album is wonderful. It features 11 diverse and concise songs of propulsive Art Rock, heartbreaking ballads and quirky pop, delivering cinematic storytelling and confessional lyrics. You can sample the album by watching a lyric video for the first single “I Go Deeper” here.

Available from burningshed.com/store/timbowness as deluxe digipak CD, 180g black vinyl, and 180g red vinyl editions. Both vinyl editions come in a gatefold cover with insert and also include a CD of the album.

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Steven Wilson’s New Year Update 2019

This is my customary end of year post reflecting on the last 12 months, and looking forward to the next year. 2018 has been one of almost non-stop touring, myself and the band having just finished the latest leg of the To the Bone tour. We now stand at 115 shows since we started in January. The visuals, the music, the chemistry in the current line up of the band, and the audience responses have made perhaps the most fulfilling touring experience of my career.

If you got to see the show I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, but if you didn’t get to see it a reminder that the recently released Home Invasion concert film is available on Blu-Ray/2CD and DVD/2CD (also as stand alone editions without the CDs), filmed at the Royal Albert Hall during a 3 night residency there in March. A beautifully packaged limited 5LP vinyl box set edition will also be issued in March, featuring expanded artwork and an LP of additional music not included on the CDs.

The show itself has evolved a lot over the year. Recently some older material came back into the set, and I’ve given the band a few more songs to recap on before we leave for what will be the final leg of the tour. This starts in Lisbon on 15th Jan, and finishes with shows in Russia and Ukraine in early March, after which I’m done with live performances for the foreseeable future, so this will be absolutely the last chance to see the To the Bone show. I’ll be spending the rest of the year (after a holiday!) developing new music. One thing I’m very proud of with all my albums is that none of them sound alike, each has its own musical signature, and the next one will be no exception. Based on what I’ve written so far it’s certainly going to be significantly different again. Expect the fruits of this work some time in 2020.

In the meantime the first new no-man music in more than 10 years is likely to be released in 2019. Myself and Tim Bowness have been working sporadically on a particular musical idea we came up with many years ago, something we knew would require a dedicated full length album to explore properly. We finally made a concerted effort to get it into shape earlier this year, and with one more push I hope it will soon be ready to release. It’s music that in many ways sees a return to our roots as a synth-pop band, albeit with the conceptual sweep of our more recent albums.

On the classic album remixing front, I’ve reluctantly had to decline most projects of this kind recently in order to concentrate on my own music. But one project I did take on was a substantial Tangerine Dream box set focussing on the golden 70’s Virgin Records era – although this is strictly speaking not a “remix” project, as the majority of my work was selecting and mixing previously unreleased studio recordings, 3 full CD’s worth in fact. For a TD fan this should be a pretty mind blowing release, and if all goes to plan it should be out in the Spring. I have also been slowly moving towards finishing another remix in the XTC series, as well as one more Jethro Tull album, 1979’s Stormwatch, I would expect both to be late 2019 releases.

It only remains for me to say thanks for all your continued support over the last year and have a wonderful 2019!

SW – 31st Dec 2018

Portrait above by Joe Del Tufo, Philadelphia, November 2018.

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Steven Wilson’s Picks of 2018

As it’s that time of year again, I have compiled a Spotify playlist of some of my favourite 2018 sounds, which includes songs from new albums and reissues from the last year.

All of this of course with the usual caveat that what I actually heard was but a tiny fraction of the many things released in 2018, so please feel free to leave your own recommendations in the comments section for others to read. If I have to pick one above all others then I pick Low “Double Negative” as my album of the year. It takes guts for a band to reinvent itself 25 years into its career, but that’s what Low did, giving their beautiful songs a strange electronic production, and then making them sound like they were left out in the garden to rust, creating a beautiful and eerie effect. (I see that for once I’m in sync with at least part of the UK media, as Uncut have also selected it as the number one album of the year).

Other top picks for me are Loma’s gorgeous debut album (a new project of Jonathan from Shearwater) and Autechre’s massive 8 hour, 12 disc NFS Sessions. The latter is certainly not an easy listen, with its long melody-free pieces of constantly mutating electronic rhythms, but I can lose myself in it for hours at a time. Also I must mention Matt Berry’s utterly charming Television Themes album, which surely can’t fail to have nostalgic appeal to anyone like me that grew up in England in the 80’s.

More tracks from albums I enjoyed this year in my Spotify playlist.

Favourite movie of the year was actually one that came out in 2016, but I only saw this year for the first time; Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper, with a phenomenal central performance by Kristen Stewart. This film is many things; murder mystery, ghost story, commentary on the fashion industry, but above all a haunting and unforgettable mediation on grief. I also really liked Alex Garland’s flawed but ambitious sci-fi movie Annihilation, with another great central female performance by Natalie Portman. On TV the documentary Evil Genius blew my mind in a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction kind of way, and The Haunting Of Hill House was fantastic (and much better than the hyped up Hereditary, which is certainly NOT the scariest horror movie since The Exorcist). Although it did fizzle out a bit at the end, some of the episodes, especially The Bent Neck Lady, had some of the scariest shit I’ve seen for many years!

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Listen to ‘Always Never’ from the first ever Porcupine Tree concert

25 years ago today, on the 4th December 1993, Porcupine Tree made its first ever live appearance at the Nag’s Head in High Wycombe, UK. By then 2 albums and an EP had been released under the name (and a third one was half finished), all of which gave the impression that Porcupine Tree was a band, when in fact it was a solo project, just me messing about in my bedroom studio, although Colin and Richard had both guested on one song each on Up the Downstair released earlier that year. Positive press and a growing fanbase had led to increased pressure for live appearances, so in late 1993 I asked 3 brilliant musicians I knew, Colin Edwin (from my home town of Hemel Hempstead), Richard Barbieri and Chris Maitland (both of whom had played with my other band No-Man) to join me in forming a real band line up of the project. For some reason they all agreed, and on the strength of the buzz about the project, Richard Allen at my then record company Delerium managed to book this show, as well as 2 others and a BBC radio session. After one week of rehearsals this was our first ever gig in front of an audience, performing a 7 song, 70 minute set in a backroom of a pub to about 200 people that had traveled from all over the country. The first song played was Voyage 34. which you can find elsewhere on the web, but here is a mixing desk recording of the second song Always Never. This would have also been the first time I had sung in front of an audience, at least since the days of my various school bands, so I can only imagine now how nervous I must have been at the prospect!

The rest, as they say, is history…

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Home Invasion: In Concert at the Royal Albert Hall out now!

My new concert film ‘Home Invasion: In Concert at the Royal Albert Hall is released today, available on Blu-ray, DVD, CD and digital/streaming! Watch the full performance of ‘Vermillioncore’ below and if you haven’t already, order your own copy here!

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Watch the video for ‘People Who Eat Darkness’ directed by Jess Cope

Watch the video for ‘People Who Eat Darkness’, directed by Jess Cope, below!

“Steven’s song, ‘People Who Eat Darkness’ addresses the subject of terrorism and the uncomfortable thought that you could quite literally be living next door to a terrorist and never know until it was too late. Originally when we chatted about the concept, I thought I would tackle the subject head-on and do something quite hard hitting. But whilst I was midway through writing a narrative in which my main protagonist was constructing a home-made explosive device, the Manchester arena bombing happened, and it stopped me in my tracks.

The video was specifically for Steven’s show and I realised the perception of doing something so literal could backfire badly if a real attack took place somewhere while he was on tour. I still wanted to stick with the theme, but like all of my videos I aim to take a theme and twist it into something a little less “realistic and a bit more supernatural. So, terrorism turned into an alien invasion, something perhaps along the lines of ‘The Faculty’ meets ‘Rear Window’. During my research I decided that the two-tone Hitchcock poster-style artwork would look awesome for the look of the film. The whole thing was animated and coloured digitally, but to avoid it being totally computer generated, I insisted that the artwork be hand drawn by the brilliant illustrator, Adam Oehlers.” – Jess Cope

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VIP upgrades now available for select To The Bone US/Canada 2018 dates

For the first time I am making available VIP upgrades at several shows on my forthcoming North American tour! http://smarturl.it/SW-NA-VIP

The upgrade includes early entry to attend an informal soundcheck performance of a few songs that won’t be in the main show, as well as exclusive goodies including a 60 minute live CD of a high quality recording made during the 2013 Raven tour (while Chad Wackerman was with the band). Each CD will be signed and personalised with your name, and will not be available from any other source. There are only a small number of VIP upgrades available for each of these shows, so if you’d like to get one please don’t hesitate.

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Home Invasion cinema screening at Everyman Kings Cross London

There will be an exclusive pre-release cinema screening of my new concert film Home Invasion: In Concert at the Royal Albert Hall, at Everyman Cinemas Kings Cross, London on 25th October at 7.30pm.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with yours truly. A very limited number of tickets are now on sale on the Everyman website. Hope to see you there! BUY TICKETS

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Home Invasion nominated for best live concert at UKMVA

Home Invasion: In Concert at the Royal Albert Hall is already picking up plaudits, despite still being just over a month away from release.

It’s just been nominated at the UK Music Video Awards in the Best Live Concert category, and will be battling it out with Arcade Fire, Arctic Monkeys, Biffy Clyro, MGMT, and Royal Blood for the award, which will be presented at a ceremony at The Roundhouse in London on 25th October. Home Invasion is released in multiple formats on 2nd November, and is available to pre-order now.

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