Steven Wilson
Beyond the Map
by Anil Prasad
Copyright © 2026 Anil Prasad.

Photo: Kevin WestenbergSteven Wilson has always been drawn to the edges of expression: places where genres blur, where technology meets instinct, and where ideas expand and splinter the further you follow them. His music has repeatedly taken that journey across radically different scales, from the intimate and song-oriented to the abstract and experimental, from the elaborate architecture of Porcupine Tree to the ambient and drone explorations of Bass Communion and the diverse collaborative worlds of No-Man and Storm Corrosion. And within his solo work, Wilson has rarely been content to occupy the territory he previously inhabited.

After 2025’s The Overview looked outward toward the infinite expanse of the cosmos, Wilson decided to go in the opposite direction. Not merely away from outer space, but toward a more intimate human universe: a village. Requiem for a Village takes place in a fictional, unnamed community somewhere in the British Isles. It’s a place that doesn't appear on any map and exists outside the technology-mediated velocity of modern life. Its inhabitants cling to their own rituals and traditions, and the surrounding countryside seems almost sentient.

Beneath the superficial quaintness lurks the peculiar intrigue of British folk horror. It’s a world populated by cultural ghosts from Wilson's childhood—eccentric children's television, traditional folk songs, and spectral rural mythology. And they’re refracted through dynamic compositions that deliberately embrace imperfections, accidents, unexpected stylistic intersections, and unfamiliar instruments.

The album's cast reinforces its sense of being a miniature universe unto itself. Guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Randy McStine is a significant collaborative presence, with drummer Russell Holzman and vocalist Katherine Priddy also contributing to the landscape. Andy Partridge wrote the album's spoken-word narrative, drawing on the eccentric village portraiture of Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, while actor David Tennant provides the voice.

Requiem for a Village reflects Wilson's philosophy of being defiantly unconcerned with genre. For instance, its title track emerged from an unlikely collision between drum-and-bass and progressive rock, built from a loop supplied by Holzman and transformed into a recombinant overture that sets the stage for the anachronistic tale that follows.

The instinct to keep moving forward also defines Wilson's other projects. Bass Communion has reemerged with two 2026 releases, Apparitions and Analysis Reveals Nothing of Substance, while No-Man has begun generating new material following a series of archival releases. Porcupine Tree remains active with the trio periodically reconvening to write and record. And a second Storm Corrosion album is also underway, built around an extensive body of predominantly acoustic elements.

Wilson’s extensive Atmos and surround remix output also continues apace, with recent projects ranging from Phil Collins' Face Value and No Jacket Required to landmark recordings by King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Jeff Buckley, and Tears for Fears. His work in this area, as well as his network of expert surround remixers, propelled him to establish Headphone Dust, a new digital download platform. Its goal is to make high-resolution spatial mixes more accessible, while establishing a carefully curated environment for the format.

More than 30 years after Innerviews first began talking with Wilson, this Zoom conversation finds him reflecting on his restless creative instincts, his resistance to the status quo, and his pursuit of music that transcends its era, and invites reconsideration and reinterpretation deep into the future.

Photo: Kevin Westenberg

Describe the story you’re telling on Requiem for a Village.

The initial idea for it came as a reaction against the previous album The Overview, which was about the universe and the cosmos. It was about the biggest possible landscape. I always like to do something completely different from what I did before. So, this time, the question was, what can I do that would be the complete opposite of an album about the universe? The answer was the smallest possible community, which is a village. 

The idea of focusing on a very small part of the universe was appealing. I also wanted to tap into a kind of folk horror aesthetic. I’ve always loved folk horror. I grew up with ‘70s British television, which was really creepy. I think it kind of scarred most people of that era for life. [laughs] So, folk horror is ingrained in the DNA of my generation. 

I also wanted something that had an element of a countryside that’s alive, where people don’t die. They almost become parts of the landscape.

The fundamental idea of the album is there’s a village that doesn’t really exist. You won’t find it on a map, but the people are still there.

This idea is very relevant in the age of social media because this community is relatively cut off. It’s not part of the digital highway. These people are very insular. That’s the great thing about folk horror—the idea of going into a community that’s idyllic on the surface, but there’s something very perverse, peculiar, and eccentric underneath. Some might say pagan. The idea of having your own religious beliefs, which have no bearing on the rest of the world, is at the heart of a lot of folk horror.

If you analyze my whole catalog, there are certain themes I’ve come back to time and time again. One is the idea of the Internet and the digital world eroding our personality, uniqueness, and our sense of insular otherness. But I think you can still find it in the US and UK by just driving off the highway and into the countryside. You’ll come across little villages, of which there are thousands in the UK. They’ll have one pub and corner shop, and it’s almost like time has forgotten them and left them behind. 

I’m taking a village that is very cut off and examining it from the point of view of people that are not affected by the outside world. And if you visit from the outside, you’re greeted with incredible suspicion and you might feel very uncomfortable, because their experience doesn’t quite tally with your perspective on life and the world.

Some of the late '60s and early '70s British children’s shows that influenced Requiem for a Village include Bagpuss, Catweazle, Trumpton, and Magic Roundabout. What did you find fascinating about them?

They had a sense of otherness, strangeness, and weirdness about them. They almost had a surreal, post-psychedelic dream logic. 

They’re very quaint. Nothing much happens in a lot of them. Bagpuss was a show about a toy cat that comes to life and lives in a shop. Every week, the focus would be on an object the little girl who owned a Bagpuss would bring into the shop. All the puppets in the shop would come alive. It had this non-eventful sense of otherness about it.

Magic Roundabout was almost like an acid trip. You can almost imagine that the people who were writing these shows were under the influence of LSD. I don’t see anything like what these did in modern children’s TV shows, that’s for sure. I don’t think you’d ever get away with it any longer.

Another interesting thing is a lot of the children’s TV shows from that era were created by eccentrics working in the shed of their back garden. Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin created Bagpuss. They used whatever materials they could come across to create their puppets and sets. They also used stop-motion slightly jerky animation, which I’ve always loved. 

These shows left a mark on all children of my generation in the UK. They all remember these shows as having a really deep, profound influence on their childhoods, and how they look at life as an adult.

The spoken word narratives were written by Andy Partridge and recited by David Tennant. Tell me about the direction you provided Partridge and why you felt Tennant was the right person to deliver his words.

The reference point was Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood. He wrote this piece that’s set in a village in Wales. It has very eccentric characters, which is exactly what this album’s about. His use of language is so beautiful.

There’s one phrase many will be familiar with: “Starless and Bible black.” That comes from one of the first paragraphs in Under Milk Wood.

I love the idea of using prose and very poetic language that feels like painting with words to try and create feelings. I knew Andy would get that. So, for Andy, Under Milk Wood was a strong reference point. It was one of those things where you know when something works. Andy created a lot of stuff. Not all of it worked, but what we’ve ended up for with David Tennant sounded so good.

Right from the beginning, I had imagined a regional accent reading the text. I kept hearing the late Ivor Cutler’s voice in my head. I also had the idea of a Scottish accent, too.

We tried a few people, including voiceover artists, and none of them were doing it for me. I think it needed someone who was a really good actor that could deliver those words and make them feel convincing. The professional voice artists sounded a bit contrived and fake.

I knew David was familiar with my work. He had some admiration for some stuff I’ve done in the past. So, it was relatively straightforward to approach him through his agent and ask him to do it. He came back straight away with a yes. In fact, the recording was in my inbox the following morning. He was doing it while he was on location for a movie. So he had an incredible work ethic.

As soon I heard David, I realized, “That’s a real actor. That puts me here in the intended environment, now.”

Photo: Kevin Westenberg

The album starts with the tribal percussion opening of “Swirl in a Lark’s Eye” that shifts into children singing, and then into Tennant’s introduction. What tone were you trying to set?

I wanted something that would make the listener a little bit uncomfortable and not quite sure of where they are. There’s quite a lot crammed into the first two-and-a-half minutes. You have the narration, the tribal percussion, the sound design elements, the choir, and the church bells. All of these things are trying to situate the listener in this place.

I talk about my albums a lot as being “movies for the ears.” This is probably the best example in all of my catalog. I’m introducing you to a village you’re going to spend the next hour in. And it’s a place that I want you to feel slightly discombobulated in. I want you to feel like there’s a sinister edge beneath this very idyllic little country village. There’s something bizarre and strange going on beneath the surface and behind the curtains. In this village, the people aren’t who they seem to be.

The acoustic guitar is deliberately playing microtonal intervals as well. This isn’t something I’ve done before. I’m playing the same note on acoustic guitar on two different strings, but I’m allowing one of the strings to go very slightly in and out of tune. So, you get this very dissonant and discordant sense that things are not settled.

This is not beautiful, harmonic music. In fact, one of my mantras right through the album when I was working with Randy McStine was, “Let’s not tune the instruments. Let’s deliberately pick them up, and if they’re a little bit out of tune, let’s embrace that.”

From there, we go into the title track, which features a drum and bass meets prog rock meets experimental metal approach. Tell me about the construction of that piece.

That came out of working with Russell Holzman, who is Adam Holzman’s son. I think he’s one of the best drummers in the world. His milieu is drum and bass. He’s made a name for himself by recreating incredibly complex rhythm tracks that were originally programmed on electronic drums. He can play things you would think are impossible to play by people like Aphex Twin, Venetian Snares, and Squarepusher.

I’ve always loved drum and bass. Russell sent me his loop pack designed for DJs and electronic producers. But I thought, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if I took one of those and tried to write one of my prog rock tracks?” So, the result is “Requiem for a Village.”

One of the things I love about this record is the pieces are really hard to talk about in the sense of what genre does a piece belong to. The title track reflects an idea I’ve been moving towards for many years, which is making music which exists outside of any notion of genre.

That’s not a hard thing for me to do musically, but it’s a hard thing for me to go out and try to sell. We live in a world where things that are beyond genre are incredibly hard to get across to people.

I think there was very briefly an era in pop music from the late ‘60s to the late ‘70s when it was possible to get those records across. But now, and increasingly with every year that passes, I think it gets harder and harder to make music which exists outside a genre. People are very conservative in their tastes. And I understand why. It’s because life comes at us so quickly now. We’re bombarded with so much content all the time that we don’t invest the same amount of time in things.

I think one of the big casualties of that is art that isn’t immediately obvious in terms of what it is and what genre it exists in. So, there you go. The first two tracks on this record are exactly that. I don’t know why that is. I just followed my nose.

I love all of these different kinds of music. I’m not self-consciously thinking, “I’m going to take this and I’m going to take that. I’m going to put it together and won’t that be really clever?”

You seem to have no concerns about the commercial appeal of this uncompromising record. Discuss defying expectations and putting a record like this into the marketplace.

A funny thing about my career is that the more willful I’ve been over the years, the better I seem to do. My attempts at making slightly more accessible, mainstream pop music, such as The Future Bites, didn’t really resonate. I’m still very proud of the work I’ve done in that area. I genuinely love pop music, so it’s not like I do it for ulterior motives.

And yet, when I did The Overview, which is two 20-minute-long tracks, it was a breakthrough for me, commercially. It was also a breakthrough in places it shouldn't have been. It was the first time I was playlisted on German radio. I think I now hold the record for the longest piece of music to ever be playlisted on mainstream German radio.

So, what is that teaching me? It’s teaching me to just follow my instincts. And when I do that, I feel better about myself. It’s more fun.

In a way, I’m contradicting myself when I say this record’s going to be really hard to promote. But you know what? Every record is hard to promote in 2026, particularly if you come from the tradition of rock music. It’s almost impossible to promote a record now. What do you do? You make a video. But what can you do with a video? You can’t get it shown on TV. So, you just stick it on YouTube and hope people will watch it. That’s all videos are these days. They’re very expensive commercials for your music. 

All bets are off in terms of the rules about what you do, how you promote yourself, and how you conduct your career as a rock musician in the current era. I believe the best thing you can do is find what’s special about you and home in on that, even if it seems counterintuitive on the surface.

Look at a band like Angine de Poitrine. They’re doing phenomenal business. Who’d have thought a band playing microtonal instrumental music in silly costumes would be resonating so much? And yet it is. I think it’s because they stand out from the pack. So, that’s almost a mandate to focus on the more uncommercial aspects of what one does. That’s fantastic for me. I feel emboldened with the last few records I’ve made to arrive at a point where I could make an album like Requiem for a Village.

Russell Holzman, Randy McStine, and Steven Wilson | Photo: Miles Skarin

Expand on Randy McStine’s contributions to the record.

They’re very important. He’s my major collaborator on the record. In fact, we ended up writing a few pieces together.

Randy came to stay with me over the new year. We basically finished about half the record while he was here.

What I love about Randy is he gets that the magic of music is in trying to create something unusual and new that will confront expectations. He embraced the idea that we would do something that would challenge us, as well as the audience.

I’d say things to Randy like, “Can you make your guitar sound more out of tune? It sounds too in tune.” Another thing I said was, “Can you play that drum fill, badly? It’s too good. I want you to play it more badly.” 

Now, 95% of musicians will never understand questions like that. I’m trying to capture something unexpected, unpolished, and that has a grain to it. It draws people in and makes them respond to the music, because it’s not slick, professional, tidy, or neat. 

Randy is very curious about creating new sounds and sonics. That’s something. I’ve had fantastic guitar players in my band over the years, but they’re not the most innovative when it comes to sound design. But Randy absolutely is. You can tell, when listening to the tones he creates that he’s as committed to the idea of getting a really unique tone as he is in getting a unique performance or creating a fantastic solo. 

Randy is always searching for sounds. He’s a sonic explorer. He relishes the challenge of surprising me, himself, and the audience.

Tell me about the classic British folk-rock influences on Requiem for a Village.

I love that whole genre. I’m a massive fan of Incredible String Band. They were a very strong reference point. One of the things I love about them goes back to what I was talking about a moment ago—the sense of the savant, and people playing instruments they can’t necessarily play. There’s something about that on this record. I play drums on one track. And I’ve never played drums on any of my records before. I also play violin and oboe. I can’t play any of these things. But as a producer, I can approach an instrument I don’t know how to play and get something out of them that a professional would never get.

So, that idea of approaching music as a wide-eyed savant appeals to me. It’s a case of not knowing what I can do with an instrument but seeing if I can get something interesting out of it. 

I remember a lot of that from the Incredible String Band. Mike Heron and Robin Williamson would pick up everything from a sitar to a violin, and you could tell they couldn’t really play them. They were far from accomplished players. But the performances have an almost childlike quality to them. 

Comus’ First Utterance and Jan Dukes De Gray’s Mice and Rats in the Loft are also influences. The latter is really dark folk, like the evil twin of Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span. 

Early T-Rex, Donovan, and Magna Carta are also important. Side one of Magna Carta’s Seasons is a very important piece of music to me.

Tell me more about picking up instruments like violin and oboe—two of the most difficult instruments imaginable—and trying to create something with them. 

Another big reference point on my new record is Third Ear Band. They did a lot of raga-like pieces. One of the tracks by them I like, “Ghetto Raga,” from their first album Alchemy, includes constant violin bowing all the way through. So, when I’m playing violin, I’m basically creating drone and raga-like things. I’m not doing anything particularly melodic. But the point is that it sounded good. It’s a texture and sound I couldn’t have got from any other instrument. It’s indisputably the sound of a violin. It became the basis for “On Chapel Slope.”

I could have easily walked over to a synthesizer and created a drone, but I thought it would be more interesting and more in the spirit of the village to play one on a violin. So, that’s what I did.

Photo: Kevin Westenberg

The deluxe edition has a 17-minute piece called “Requiem for a Village – The Original Soundtrack” that includes ideas that were initially explored and not used on the final album. Describe what it reveals about the creative process informing the record.

There was so much that went into making the record in terms of creating new sounds and sound design. For example, it has the entirety of the murder ballad “Cruel Sister” sung by Katherine Priddy in it, but we only needed 40-45 seconds of it on the record itself. 

I had the idea of taking her voice and electronically processing it and then creating all the musical material around her, generated from her voice. So, I created a four- or five-minute passage, but it was too long to go on the record.

There are other elements like that, where I worked very hard on sound design elements, but that were only really justifiably usable for a few seconds on the record. So, I created this thing called “The Original Soundtrack.” It allowed me to home in and focus a lot more on those sound design elements.

It’s kind of a piece of musique concrète in a way. It’s got all of these sounds you hear on the record but allowed to breathe a lot more. You can hear them in all their glory, including the complete performance of “Cruel Sister.”

What are your thoughts about realizing Requiem for a Village in a live context?

We went into the studio and did a kind of in-session performance with me, Randy McStine, and Russell Holzman. We performed about two-thirds of the record with overdubs. We created it by performing a lot of it and then creating a second layer where we performed over our first performance. We had a lot of fun.

I can definitely see this record working live. The question is, how many musicians would I need? That’s always the dilemma I have with music that’s so sound design-oriented. It’s so complex in terms of all the different colors and instrumentation going on. But I think it could be really exciting live.

We’re going to play some of it at the Royal Albert Hall shows I’m doing at the end of October. Those are essentially about The Overview and the closing of that album cycle. But it’s also the beginning of this album cycle, so I’m going to be playing a couple of new pieces at the concerts.

I’m taking a slightly more pragmatic approach about touring. I toured so much last year. I need a little bit of a break. We’ll see how the record is received. I would love to go and play it live. We’ll see how it goes. Maybe in 2027.

Describe the process of creating orchestral arrangements for The Overview. 

They’ve been done by a fantastic arranger called Simon Dobson, who’s worked with a lot of rock bands over the years. My brief to him was, “Take the pieces and expand and extend them.” So, the orchestral version of The Overview is over an hour long.

It takes the more minimalist-influenced sections of the records, like the beginning of “Objects Outlive Us,” where you have a repeating motif. Simon turned that into a complete 10-minute orchestral cadenza, which sounds more like Steve Reich, John Adams, or Philip Glass. It’s absolutely amazing. I love that.

Another brief I gave him was, “Use the band as much or as little as you want.” And he’s used the band quite a lot.

It’s a very different take on the album and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Doing a slavishly faithful performance of the record and trying to bolt on the orchestra somehow would not be of interest to me at all. This version is a complete reimagining of the album and it’s all the better for it.

Do you have plans to record the shows?

No, because it’s really expensive. We have something like 70 people in the orchestra. To record and release it would involve having to pay all of them an enormous amount of money. That’s just the way it works. 

I kind of like the idea that you have to be there to experience it on the night, and that’s the only chance you’re going to get.

Photo: Kevin Westenberg

Your work as Bass Communion has reemerged with two 2026 projects, Apparitions and Analysis Reveals Nothing of Substance. Tell me about the construction of these pieces and the source material you drew from.

Apparitions is some stuff I had left over from The Itself of Itself sessions, which is the Bass Communion album that came out in 2024. That was the first album I’d made under the name since 2011.

I convinced myself that there were too many people doing drone, noise, and ambient music. I wouldn’t say it’s easy to make that kind of music, but these days, if you have a laptop and some plugins, you can create drone or noise music. There are more people creating it than at any time in history. And there are more people making music now than at any time in history. So, it’s another aspect of that fact.

I felt I should leave it to the people that focus on it 100% of the time. I dabble in making that music. But at the same time, I didn’t stop doing it because it’s fantastic R&D. If you listen to an album like Requiem for a Village, there’s a lot of Bass Communion in it. It’s as rich as it is because I’ve taken a lot from my work in that area, including experimenting with analog synthesizers and processing acoustic sounds.

I carried on doing it all these years but didn’t release anything for a long time. Then this guy, Richard Johnson from Fourth Dimension Records, started bugging me in the nicest possible way. He said he was a big Bass Communion fan. I said, “Well, I have some pieces, but aren’t there too many people doing this, nowadays?” He said, “Yeah, but none of them sound like you.” That’s a very obvious thing to say, but I went back to a lot of the pieces and acknowledged that there is something unique about how I approach things.

So, I put together a bunch of music I’d created over 15 years and created what I thought was a satisfying record that’s very diverse. There are noise pieces, creepy ambient, and nice ambient on it. It embodies some of my favorite ideas that didn’t make it onto The Itself of Itself for reasons of context.

Richard told me he was going to do a subscription-only label and asked if I would contribute to it. I thought that was a good opportunity to reclaim some of these other pieces, and that became Apparitions. 

Analysis Reveals Nothing of Substance is a collaboration with my friend Frans de Waard from the Korm Plastics label, who works under the name Modelbau. When I did a show to promote The Itself of Itself, I felt uncomfortable doing it on my own. I wanted a collaborator on stage with me. So, I asked Frans. We spent a week improvising and preparing material for that show. A lot of it became heavily edited, produced, and post-produced. And that became the record. 

Another core focus for you in recent times is the launch of the Headphone Dust digital store. Talk about its mission and what spurred you to create it.

The main reason I wanted to create that is because a lot of the Atmos and 5.1 remixes I do get released on very limited run Blu-rays and become unavailable very quickly. They also sometimes get bundled into very expensive box sets. So, they become unavailable over time. Now, I work very hard on those mixes and how we’ve been able to reimagine the music in spatial audio. It was very frustrating that the only way to get these mixes was on expensive Blu-rays that are now very collectable and only available on eBay for stupid amounts of money.

They might be available on Apple Music in very compressed form. To provide an example, a typical Atmos file of a five-minute song might be 2GB for full-resolution audio. That gets squashed down to about 30MB on Apple Music. So, that’s the equivalent of an MP3. That’s also frustrating to me. It’s a contradiction in the sense that Atmos is supposed to be the ultimate audiophile format. Yet, it’s hosted on a lot of these websites in very lo-fi compressed form. Headphone Dust was created primarily to make them all available in full resolution.

As soon as we started talking about creating a store, other ideas came up, such as approaching other artists and saying, “Will you let Steven remix your album in Atmos? You don’t have to pay him to do it. We’d just like some exclusivity to be able to make it available on our new platform.” So, I’ve started doing that. We’re approaching artists, who for whatever reason, didn’t want to pay for an Atmos mix. I’m saying, I’ll do it for free and you’ll own it, but we’ll get six months exclusivity on Headphone Dust in exchange. So, it’s a no-brainer. It’s a win-win. They get paid the royalties. I get to create exclusive Atmos content. That’s a new strand and it’s very exciting. We’re talking to lots of people now.

The one problem we’ve had is that when we launched the platform, we had issues with people not being able to figure out how to play the files. So, we’ve temporarily paused the platform while we develop an app for playback of the files. I think this will expand the audience even more, because it’ll take away the layer of technical complexity. Some people have questions like “I can get the file, but how do I play it?” and “How do I route it through my speakers?” The app will take care of all of that for you. I think we’ll relaunch the platform probably towards the end of the year with a lot of new exclusive content I’m generating in the meantime. I feel this could be a game-changer in that it could take spatial audio and Atmos to a much broader audience.

We’re seeing a lot of cars now being sold with Atmos systems. So, imagine being able to log into Headphone Dust on your car Atmos system and be able to stream a vast library of Atmos mixes in full resolution. Not only that, but it’s Atmos mixes that have been curated and have a gold standard of quality.

I think another problem is that a lot of Atmos mixes on other platforms have some that aren’t that good. The platforms don’t really have any sense of filtering. Some of these Atmos mixes are very clearly done by people who don’t really get the format. They’ve been told by their record company “You have to deliver an Atmos mix to us.” So, they go back and do one and don’t really understand how to use the format. I’ve heard a lot of mixes that have been very disappointing. Some are very high-profile records.

So, I like the idea that Headphone Dust will be curated. You’ll know anything on the website will have to meet a fairly rigorous standard. And I’m not just going to have my mixes on there. My idea is I’ll have mixes by others too, such as David Koston, Bob Clearmountain, or Stephen W Tayler—people I know who create fantastic spatial mixes that sound wonderful.

Steven Wilson and Phil Collins at the Face Value 45th-anniversary press conference, London, September 2026 | Photo: Will Ireland

Your remixes of Phil Collins’ Face Value and No Jacket Required have received a lot of attention. Tell me about your interest in working on them.

We started with No Jacket Required, because it was the big one in the catalog in terms of sales. But the funny thing is, I think Face Value, which is the second one announced, is getting a lot more interest. I think it’s because it’s an album that’s really beloved by a very wide spectrum of people from progressive rock fans to Genesis fans who probably don’t dig No Jacket Required so much, right through to mainstream pop fans—and everyone in between.

It’s a record people have a lot of love for, as do I. It’s also very interesting because it’s the record Phil Collins made before he was Phil Collins, the commercial mainstream megastar. At the time, he was the drummer for Genesis and Brand X. He made a fairly low-key, self-financed album of songs he demoed in his house on his little drum machine and piano. And of course, it became a commercial behemoth, driven primarily by “In the Air Tonight.”

I think it’s a brilliant record. Obviously, I knew the record and liked it very much, but I hadn’t listened to it for many years before working on it. When I listened to it, I was surprised by how playful it is. The breadth of everything he’s doing on there is impressive, from Beatles covers to orchestrated piano ballads to things like “In the Air Tonight.” And then you’ve got the brass rock in there as well, with the Earth, Wind and Fire horn section. You’ve got the instrumentals as well. It goes all over the place. Those types of records are the ones that endear themselves to me the most.

Stylistically, it’s Phil doing whatever he felt like doing the day he woke up and went to his little demo studio. Because of the strength of his personality, it’s so cohesive. It’s also beautifully recorded.

Everyone was always asking, “What are you going to do with the big drum fill on ‘In the Air Tonight?’” Everyone has their own idea. I did it the way I felt was right to do it. We’ll see how many complaints there are from people who say, “That’s not what I would have done.” But it sounds absolutely massive.

I’m surprised how much attention the remix is getting. I think it’s helped by the fact that Phil is really engaged in promoting it this time around.

There were some No-Man archival releases earlier this year with the 30th anniversary edition of Loveblows and Lovecries, and the Scatter: Lost Songs collection. Explore keeping the flame burning for No-Man and what you and Tim Bowness are considering for the future.

We started working on some new material recently.

I think a lot of the archive stuff has come about because One Little Independent wanted to do the box set of the One Little Indian years. So, I had to go back and remaster a lot of that music anyway. In doing so, I discovered there was this alternate history of the band through demo tapes, B-sides, and stuff we never released at the time we made it for whatever reason. So, that material became the Lost Songs series.

Scatter includes things we did over a period of years that had the wrong timing. If we were working on an album that was very lush and ambient, and we came up with something that was very aggressive or industrial, we put it aside. But now, context is no longer relevant. And now we just appreciate something that’s a great track, even if it didn’t fit with the album we were working on at the time.

So, coming back to the idea of creating diversity across a record kickstarted us to create something new. We’re taking a similar approach. We’re throwing it all in and creating something that is willfully eclectic that goes from our most lush, romantic, and ambient stuff to our more abrasive stuff. We’re currently imagining something like a double album that will be incredibly sprawling.

It’s not going to happen anytime soon, but we are gradually formulating something that will come out at some point.

How much progress has been made towards the forthcoming Porcupine Tree album?

We get together a couple of times a year to write and create music. We try to create music that excites and interests us, and that usually means not anything people would want us to do, which is something we haven’t done before.

We’re looking for things that have a strong Porcupine Tree DNA, but with a fresh take on what people associate with our sound.

We have a number of pieces we’re quite excited about, but the album’s a long way off. I think we’re talking potentially about two or three years before we might actually release something. But we’re always interested in seeing if there is more to be said. The idea of more of the same doesn’t appeal. A belated follow-up to In Absentia or Signify isn’t what we’re likely to come up with.

Beyond that, I can’t say any more, except that Porcupine Tree still exists and we are very gradually edging towards something maybe coming out at some point, and possibly a tour to promote it.

Photo: Kevin Westenberg

You’re also working on the second Storm Corrosion album with Mikael Åkerfeldt. What can you tell me about it?

It’s very different, but you will recognize the aesthetic. We’ve still got a long way to go on it. It’s a massive chunk of music almost entirely played on a lot of acoustic instruments.

We were talking earlier about Requiem for a Village involving approaching instruments in a kind of savant way. There’s a lot of that on the forthcoming Storm Corrosion album as well.

So, it definitely continues the vocabulary we created on the first record, but it’s also very different, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. We wouldn’t do it otherwise.

You’re very comfortable balancing most of your major collaborative projects from across your career with your solo output. Discuss achieving that level of equilibrium and drive.

I think one of the things I love most about my career now is there’s no careerism involved. I have all these great collaborations with Tim Bowness in No-Man, Richard Barbieri and Gavin Harrison in Porcupine Tree, and Mikael Åkerfeldt in Storm Corrosion, and for each, it’s like getting together with friends and finding out if we’ve got any interesting music in us that excites us.

I think a lot of that contentment started when I developed my solo career. I no longer felt frustrated that I was in a group context. In fact, quite the opposite. Once I established my solo career, I felt a lot more inspired going into collaborative situations.

Previously, I might have been frustrated when I wondered, “Why don’t they like this idea? Because I do.” But that’s the beauty of collaboration. You have to find that part of the Venn diagram where you all agree.

Now that I have my solo career well established, I no longer bring those concerns to the table. If I go into a collaborative situation and they don’t like something I come up with, that’s fine. I can do it within my solo career.

So, the collaborations are without any sense of ego or frustration. It’s just about the joy of collaborating with fantastic, creative people.

You’re the host of the Sirius XM show Intrigue, in which you put a highly personal stamp on the meaning of progressive music. Tell me how you’ve expanded the definition.

I follow my instincts. I’ve always felt the word progressive is capable of embodying a lot of different styles of music. It’s one of those things you know when you hear it.

The progressive spirit can be heard in everything from Joy Division to Cocteau Twins to Fairport Convention to Massive Attack to Aphex Twin to Boards of Canada.

It’s something that’s very hard to articulate, but if I have to express it in words, it’s the idea of music that doesn’t necessarily go where you expect it to. It’s music that has a sense of journey to it. It’s analogous to watching a film. The music has scenes that unfold and develop in unique ways.

On top of that, there’s all the other stuff we associate with progressive rock, such as an allegiance to tricky signatures. I’ve always loved that too. But you hear that as much in metal as you do in progressive rock.

The show is all over the place in that sense. My concept was “Let’s play half of what people expect” which involves what we would call the canon of progressive rock, like King Crimson, Yes, Pink Floyd, and Jethro Tull. So, I do play a lot of that music, because I want people to engage with the show. And that’s all some people want to hear. But I take a Trojan Horse approach in which I’ll slip in something you won’t expect to hear that I think is just as progressive and has just as much of that spirit. So, it’s 50% of what you expect and the other 50% is going to confront your expectations. And sometimes the beauty is in the way I sequence the tracks together. I love doing that.

Your career has involved exploring so many vectors. Is there an unrealized ambition left for you?

A movie soundtrack. I’ve still never done one. The closest I got was the music for the video game The Last Day of June.

I’ve still never been commissioned or asked to do a movie soundtrack, which I think kind of raises an eyebrow for people sometimes. I talk so much about my music in relation to cinema, and how much of an inspiration cinema is for me, and how cinematic I try to make the records. And I think most people will acknowledge that’s certainly true.

So, that’s still top of the list.
 

Watch the two-part video podcast version of the interview: