STORM CORROSION
Storm Corrosion KSCOPE
Mesmerising one-off from nu prog luminaries gets a deserved reissue.
There are some albums where lightning strikes. Storm Corrosion –a collaboration between Steven Wilson and Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt, originally released in 2012 –is one such album. The pair had worked together before – the Porcupine Tree leader produced Opeth’s breakthrough Blackwater Park album and their Deliverance/Damnation twinset. At the time, Wilson was establishing himself as a solo artist of note, while Åkerfeldt was coming off the back of Heritage, Opeth’s most classically progressive album to date, which Wilson had also mixed. Yet Storm Corrosion was an unexpected left-turn for both, an album that stands out as something rather special in both artists’ back catalogues. Recorded sporadically over a period of 18 months at Wilson’s No Man’s Land home studio, the two hung out together as friends as well as collaborators, watching Euro art films and consuming copious amounts of red wine. Their musical reference points for the project stretched from the avant balladry of Scott Walker to the folk horror of Comus, and while they had no preconceptions about its direction, an atmosphere of spectral unease permeates the album.