Prog-rock demigod Steven Wilson is bafflingly predictable in his unpredictability . While he has been recognized for his relentless experimentation throughout his 25 year long career , his more recent solo ventures have seen this master of melancholia branch between various musical guises faster and with more layered absorption .
In his newest album The Future Bites , Wilson grounds his sound in the present . He chisels narratives out of electronic avantgardism , and tells both ominous and amusing stories with a dark playfulness that remains his signature . Catching up with The Score Magazine , he muses on artistic insight , his bewilderment with this arriving-somewhere-but-nothere world , and his fascination with a £ 140 brick .
What have been the greatest challenges in your first decade as a solo artist ?
For me , the main idea to be a solo artist was to be able to change direction much more easily . When you are in a band , you can ’ t reinvent yourself in the same way because everyone has to agree . To get everyone to agree to the styles is very difficult .
I started my career as a solo artist . Porcupine Tree was a solo project before it became a band . So going back to being a solo artist , the main challenge was to confront the expectations of fans . What really excites me is to do different things like working with different people .
With social media , everything I do is subjected to immediate feedback . Some of this feedback can be negative as much as it is positive . The biggest challenge for me is to ignore that and only do what I need to do to be myself .
You mentioned in an earlier interview that the album was finished right before the pandemic descended . Has your artistic perception of the already completed album changed because of 2020 , then ? Is there something you wish you had done differently in hindsight ?
In many ways , there is an irony here . The Future Bites , in a way , feels more relevant now . It was written and recorded before the pandemic . It seems that the future is biting even harder than when I wrote the album . When I wrote the album , we had the whole Brexit situation going on here , and there were a lot of changes happening , and I feel the situation has only become worse now . In many ways , The Future Bites seems even more topical now .
I am one of those people that can ’ t stop playing around . There is always an element of me that wants to do things differently .
How do you ensure that despite changes in sound from one album to another , the music essentially still sounds like you ?
The answer to that is that I don ’ t know . I have kind of come to understand that myself because for many years I have not been confident in myself especially as a singer . When you look in the mirror , you very rarely see what others would probably see which is essentially your personality and charisma . For many years , I wasn ’ t aware of myself having a strong musical personality . It didn ’ t matter what type of music I was doing . There was always something that would sound like me .
Basically , I would be making new material and thinking to myself that it sounds so different and when I start playing to people around me , they would shrug and say “ Well , it sounds like you ”. I used to find that annoying but now I have understood that it ’ s a good thing that , whatever I do there is something quintessentially Steven Wilson about it . I have started to embrace it now .
You mentioned that The Future Bites is an album that could only exist now , in the current time . Could you elaborate on that ?
I think some of my previous albums have been guilty of sounding too nostalgic , for example my last album “ To The Bone ”, there was a sense of the 80 ’ s experimental pop .
With the album “ The Future Bites ”, I wanted to make a record that sounds like it could only
The Score Magazine
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