#stevenwilson #porcupinetree #blackfield #rockfileradio
Steven John Wilson (born 3 November 1967) is a Grammy nominated English musician and producer, most associated with the progressive rock genre. Currently a solo artist, he is best known as the founder, lead guitarist, singer and songwriter of the band Porcupine Tree, but is also a member of several other bands and has worked with artists such as Opeth, King Crimson, Pendulum, Jethro Tull, XTC, Yes, and Anathema.
Wilson is a self-taught producer, audio engineer, guitar and keyboard player, playing other instruments as and where required (including bass guitar, autoharp, hammered dulcimer and flute). He currently lives in Hemel Hempstead, the town he grew up in, but has also spent time living in London and Tel Aviv, Israel.
Born in Kingston upon Thames, London, Wilson was raised from age 6 in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, where he discovered his affinity 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 The 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". His interest in Pink Floyd led him towards experimental/psychedelic conceptual progressive rock (as exemplified by Porcupine Tree and Blackfield), and Donna Summer's trance-inflected grooves inspired the initial musical approach of No-Man (Wilson's long-running collaboration with fellow musician and vocalist Tim Bowness), although the band would later develop 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 eventually stopped paying for lessons. However, at the age of 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". At the age of twelve, his father, who was an electronic engineer, built him his first multi-track tape machine and a vocoder so he could begin experimenting with the possibilities of studio recording.
n 1986, Wilson launched the two projects that would make his name. The first of these was initially called "No Man Is An Island (Except The Isle Of Man)", although it would later be renamed "No-Man." This began life as a solo Wilson instrumental project blending progressive rock with synth pop, subsequently moving towards art-pop when singer/lyricist Tim Bowness joined the project the following year. The second project was "Porcupine Tree", which was originally intended to be a full-on pastiche of psychedelic rock (inspired by the similar Dukes of Stratosphear project by XTC) carried out for the mutual entertainment of Wilson and his childhood friend Malcolm Stocks.
1993 saw Wilson consolidating his initial success with albums from both Porcupine Tree (Up the Downstair) and No-Man (Loveblows And Lovecries – A Confession). At the end of 1993, Porcupine Tree was launched as a four-piece live band featuring Wilson, Barbieri, bass player Colin Edwin and former No-Man live drummer Chris Maitland.
From this point onwards, Wilson would alternate between Porcupine Tree and No-Man releases. Although No-Man retired from live performance in 1994 (and would not return to the stage until 2006), the band continued to release a steady stream of albums featuring guests such as Barbieri, Steve Jansen, Robert Fripp, Theo Travis and Pat Mastelotto, and has maintained a healthy cult following as well as continued critical acclaim. Porcupine Tree, meanwhile, toured frequently (steadily gaining credibility as a consistent band) and passed through various overt phases of different musical stylings (including psychedelia, progressive rock, modern guitar rock and heavy metal) while retaining the core of Wilson's sonic imagination and songwriting. By the mid-2000s Porcupine Tree had become a successful rock band with albums on major labels such as Atlantic and Roadrunner, with Wilson's singing, songwriting and frontman skills increasing by the year. Also by this time, Wilson had become in-demand as a producer and was being cited as an influence by various up-and-coming musicians.
During the late 1990s 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.
Having established himself as a skilled producer with a very high standard of sound engineering, Wilson 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.
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. It was also voted #3 album of the year by Sound And Vision. Wilson is currently working on several other surround sound projects, including remixing the Jethro Tull, Yes and King Crimson back catalogs.
source: wikipedia
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