Music For The Head
After a short pause, Steven Wilson is back with his unexpected seventh solo record, The Harmony Codex. Across 10 new tracks, the musician-turned-producer harnesses the very latest in cutting-edge technology to make an audiophile’s must-have album of the year and his most progressive release yet. Prog finds out more about the journey that led to its organic creation.
Words: Dave Everley
Steven Wilson is focused on making music that’s outside defined genres.
Images: Hajo Mueller
“For the first time it feels like I’m at the forefront of something that’s changing.”
Steven Wilson has heard the future, and it sounds incredible.
“Over the next three to five years, we’re going to see a massive change in how records sound and how people listen to them,” he says. “The developments in audio are incredible right now. Atmos and spatial audio is going to succeed where things like quadraphonic did not, because the technology is there and it’s relatively affordable. You can have a soundbar or a pair of binaural headphones and you can listen to spatial audio. For the first time it feels like I’m at the forefront of something that’s changing.”
It’s a sunny morning in late August, and we’re sitting opposite each other on wicker sofas in the back garden of Wilson’s north London home while his two small rescue dogs run around our feet. Wilson moved here with his family before the pandemic, and spent much of the next two-anda-half years working on his seventh solo album, The Harmony Codex, which is the jumping-off point for his impassioned speech.
Talking multi-channels and waveforms isn’t usually the stuff that great interviews are made of, but this is different. The Harmony Codex is a shape-shifting, darkly dreamlike album, one that forgoes Wilson’s normal approach of staying on one set of musical rails and switches between electronic prog and crepuscular jazz to pop-adjacent piano balladry and even a warped take on hip hop over the course of its 10 songs.