FILTER ALBUMS
I hear a new world
The progfather of his generation ponders the enhanced perspectives of viewing the Earth from space. By Tom Doyle. Illustration by Laurie Greasley.
Steven Wilson
★★★★
The Overview
FICTION. CD/DL/LP
TWO YEARS ago, Steven Wilson curated an expansive 58-track box set compilation titledIntrigue: Progressive Sounds In UK Alternative Music1979-89. A partial reclaiming of the ‘progressive’ term that has in some ways dogged both his solo career and his long tenure as the bandleader of (the now fallow) Porcupine Tree, his selections also served to shine a light on the maverick studio dreamers of that era who’d so inspired him. Alongside widely acknowledged sonic adventurers Kate Bush, PiL, the Associates and The The, he found room for lesser-recognised production pioneers such as Bill Nelson and Rupert Hine who’d tended to operate on the margins while pushing the envelope.
If there’s been a sense that Wilson has spent many shou years trying to dig himself out of a prog-shaped hole that appla he first broke ground on as a bedroom-recording teenager in Hemel Hempstead in the mid-’80s, by creating the initially one-man fantasy band Porcupine Tree, then his subsequent parallel career as a surround-sound mixer of catalogue LPs for the likes of Yes, King Crimson and Jethro Tull seemed to cement a perception of him as what Robert Fripp called the “progfather of his generation”. Some of Wilson’s past solo records tried to shake that label through diversions into post-punk (2008’s Insurgentes) and synth-pop (2021’s The Future Bites), before The Harmony Codex in 2023 managed to fuse his competing styles while stretching out into the longform.