If there were some kind of award for the "hardest working person in the music industry," London-based Steven Wilson would definitely be up for it. In 2008 and 2009, Wilson has (amongst other work) completed and toured the latest No-Man album Schoolyard Ghosts, mixed the resulting live DVD, worked on the new Bass Communion CD, toured with his Blackfield collaborator Aviv Geffen and remixed the entire King Crimson back catalogue in surround — an area in which Wilson has become somewhat renowned. His work on 2007's Fear of a Blank Planet, the ninth studio album by his band Porcupine Tree, was nominated for a Grammy in the "Best Surround Sound Album" category. Having toured on keyboards in the No-Man live band in 2008, I can confirm that Wilson is not only a talented and all around nice guy, but his obvious enthusiasm for music and recording is infectious. He has the geek's grasp of detail and in-depth knowledge of his subject, yet without any of the personality problems that can manifest amongst those whose factual outpourings dig deep into the obscure corners of their chosen oeuvre. Wilson is much in demand as a producer and his work has ranged from the lilting jazz-tinged tunes of Anja Garbarek, the meatier Opeth and progressive survivors Marillion. But it is with Porcupine Tree he has made his mark, and the band goes from strength to strength, garnering fans, friends, excellent reviews, albums sales and sellout concerts in many parts of the world. In between his busy schedule, Wilson has also found time to record his first proper solo album, Insurgentes.
"The name comes from the longest street in the world, which is in Mexico City," says Wilson. "When you are there you're never very far away from a sign to the street. I kept seeing this word and it became a kind of constant when we were traveling around the world — and of course I wrote some of the music for the album there." The word itself wasn't just a sightseeing inspiration though, as Wilson also sees it as a metaphor for his musical career so far. "Insurgentes literally means rebel or uprising (insurgent, rebel, revolutionary, golpista, revolter, seditionist) and in a sense this is the way that I make music and the way I have chosen to conduct my musical career, such as it is. Without wishing to sound melodramatic, it's been a very unconventional career and so, in a way, I did feel some resonance with the word. It seemed like a perfect title as I've been going against what the music industry expects and what you are supposed to do to be a successful professional musician — which is a convoluted way of saying why I thought the title was appropriate."
The album is very much an international project. Wilson received recordings from his collaborators around the world and also journeyed afield to make location recordings using nothing more than his trusty Neumann U87 microphone, laptop and a MOTU Traveler FireWire interface. "There is a sense where you go and travel and work with local musicians that the music can take on that slightly 'world atlas' sense, but there are some precedents that it is possible to work in this fashion and produce music that is definitively your own," says Wilson. "Peter Gabriel [Tape Op #63] has very much used an international cast list for his records, but has stamped his personality onto it so it sounds very much like himself. I think if you have a strong enough personality it will come through. The guys who make so-called 'world music' are often actually attempting to create a kind of geographical musical encyclopedia. I wasn't trying to do that — I was more interested in how these wonderful musicians could enhance and contribute to my existing vision."
Wilson has become renowned over the years for musical collaborations, first with singer Tim Bowness in the band No-Man, right through to his current work with Blackfield and Porcupine Tree (which is Wilson on vocals and guitar, Richard Barbieri on keyboards, Gavin Harrison on drums and Colin Edwin on bass). Insurgentes is however the first album to sport Steven Wilson's name on the cover — so is it a true "solo record"? "My first album was in 1992 with No-Man and I don't have a fantastically articulate answer as to why this is a "Steven Wilson" record — it just felt right," he says. " This album has aspects of every other project I've been involved in, and while I could say that others in the past have been representative of me as a musician, I feel that this one is more so than any before — because it really does touch on everything I like — It is very much a reflection of every side of me. Some of my other solo projects, such as Bass Communion and I.E.M. [Incredible Expanding Mindfuck] have some aspects of my musical tastes and personality, but somehow, as I was writing this album everything that people might associate with me as a musician came to be on there — industrial noise, prog rock, ambient music, songs, instrumentals and orchestral textures, all wrapped up in this one beautifully ambitious record. So it seemed like this was finally an album I could put my name to. It does kind of represent, for me, one album, which is a complete presentation of my musical personality. It's not just a compilation of the things I've done in the past, as there are things on the record that people won't have heard from me ever before — for example, the use of extreme noise. It's kind of summarising what people already know about me, but moving into new waters as well. When you collaborate you are aware that there are parts of your musical personality that don't overlap with the people you are working with. For example, when I work with Tim [Bowness — No-Man], he really doesn't like rocky, heavy stuff, so the music tends to lean to the more orchestral, ethereal, romantic side — you won't hear metal riffs and the rockier elements! When you collaborate it takes you in directions you might not think of by yourself, and on the new record I didn't have anyone to bounce ideas off. Sometimes there were almost too many possibilities and I found it hard to make decisions. In some senses, making a solo record is more stressful in that you don't have that sounding board — that other opinion to rely on."
Although it bears the Wilson moniker, Insurgentes indeed boasts some impressive collaborators such as Gavin Harrison, bassist Tony Levin and pianist Jordan Rudess of Dream Theater. "Some of them I've known over the years, but not had a chance to work with before — like Jordan who is a fantastic pianist from New York — he's played with everyone from Bowie and Prefab Sprout," says Wilson. "The one thing about making a solo album like this is that it's a great opportunity to work with people whom it's not possible to work with in a band format. There, the question of 'who are we going to get to play on this record?' never comes up. Making a solo record gives you this wonderful opportunity — in a sense the world is my oyster and I can decide whom I want to play with. I invited a few friends and contacted a few people I didn't know personally at that point. There's a Japanese musician, Michiyo Yagi, who is an incredible koto player who has worked with John Zorn and is very much part of the avant- garde jazz scene. I just loved the way she played her instrument, so I got in touch with her and asked her to play on the record. It was the same with Clodagh Simonds from Fovea Hex who sang on one of the tracks."
While Wilson was laying down tracks and recording contributions from his eclectic cast of players, Danish filmmaker Lasse Hoile was filming the process for a DVD documentary. "Everywhere we went to record, Lasse, filmed it — and not just the making of the record, but other stuff that we made up on the spot and some weird shit — some surreal stuff. We talked to other musicians and producers and asked them what it's like to be in the music business in the 21st century — obviously it's changed beyond recognition in the last five years alone because of download culture. So we questioned them about downloading and MP3s and how it has affected what they and we do." The film makes up part of the variety of the impressive packages for the release which also include vinyl, high resolution and surround sound mixes — all of which should go some way to reducing the amount of piracy of the album. Wilson's projects often include a bag of extras and beautiful artwork and this 'added value' could be why his musical output still sells where others see only decline.
Wilson is known as a bit of a sonic wizard, and his work is often name- checked in various hi-fi and audiophile publications. His recordings are often considered amongst the best sounding contemporary productions and commonly compared to masters of the genre such as Pink Floyd and Steely Dan. So it may come as somewhat of a surprise to find that the aforementioned MOTU interface isn't the only way in which his work breaks the barriers of what might be considered "high quality" in the recording world. "I used mainly Apple's Logic 7 running on a G5, and that along with the MOTU is about it really!" he says, at least for the location recordings — though he does use Apogee and Pro Tools hardware in his home studio. For Wilson, the sonic nature of the source material is more important than the equipment it was captured with. "One track was recorded in Mexico City in the middle of the night in a convent," says Wilson. "There was a grand piano there — it wasn't a great one, but it had a character within the room it was located. That was recorded with the laptop and MOTU and the mono U87." Wilson is aware of the high regard in which he his held for his audio skills — which is why he is much in demand as a producer — but he's not obsessed with capturing and presenting all his sounds at the highest quality. "I'm obviously aspiring to make records that sound very good, but within these you can have very lo-fi sounds. When you are working with lo-fi though, it's because you want to produce a certain sound rather than because it's only the best you can do — that's the difference. I think people appreciate that there is a certain artistry in that. It's interesting that the whole idea of lo-fi has come back, starting with artists like Portishead, Nirvana and Beck who, after years of the arrival of the CD age and very shiny sounding records, were obviously recording in expensive studios on expensive systems, but choosing to make their records sound like, or at least incorporate, very lo-fi elements by using samples from old vinyl and accentuating the fact that there was surface noise and crackles — and I love all that shit! I love lo-fi sounds — but in the context of great sounding records. There are a lot of very fucked up, fuzzed out sounds on the Insurgentes record. There are guitar tones where I've got the guitars going through E- Phonic's LOFI plug-in, reduced to 3 or 4 bits to get that crunchy, fizzy tone — which is in some respects the antithesis of 192 kHz, 24-bit surround sound. But in context it sounds fantastic and gives it an edge."
