If The Guinness Book of World Records had a category for "most prolific musical artist," Steven Wilson would have a lock on it.
Best known as the singer-guitarist-songwriter-producer of Porcupine Tree — a progressive rock band in the truest sense of the term — Wilson also lends his multi-hyphenate, multi-tasking skills to side projects such as No-Man (art rock), Bass Communion (ambient electronica), and Blackfield (indie pop rock). And that's when he isn't producing bands such as Opeth or remastering the King Crimson back catalogue in 5.1 surround sound. When a fan recently updated the British musician's complete discography, the PDF file totaled 750 entries across 369 pages.
In short, Steven Wilson makes the likes of Ryan Adams and Van Morrison look like laggardly slackers.
"I think Frank Zappa at his peak, possibly, was as eclectic and was as prolific," says Wilson in a recent phone call from his home outside London. "Here's a guy who could make anything from a serious classical record to a kind of doo-wop record to a rock 'n' roll record and, quite often, would do everything in the same year. I flatter myself to include myself in his company."
Somehow, the 41-year-old human gyroscope has carved out additional time to create his first solo record, "Insurgentes" (K-Scope), an album with more diversity than the Periodic table of Elements. Over the course of 55 minutes, "Insurgentes" encompasses plaintive piano ballads, metallic industrial noise, mathematical progressive rock, giddy pop, metaphysical psychedelia, and fuzzy shoegazer anthems. As Wilson puts it, "This really is the first time I can say this can be an album under my own name because this is the first time I can say, 'This is every aspect of my musical personality.'"
The miscegenate melange on "Insurgentes" coheres surprisingly well. Rolling Stone hails the album as "among the best" of Wilson's many records. The Wall Street Journal calls it "majestic" with a "scope and intensity that reflect Mr. Wilson's out-sized musical ambitions."
Despite his rising media profile, Wilson is hardly well-known in mainstream music. That's rapidly changing. Wilson now has the clout to call up David Sitek of TV on the Radio and commission a remix of a track from "Insurgentes."
"He's passionate about music and he wanted to do it," says Wilson, who adds that Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails is another "production hero" he'd love to work with.
Wilson's rising Q score can be chalked up to the success of Porcupine Tree's ninth album, 2007's "Fear of a Blank Planet" (Atlantic), a concept piece about teenage alienation amid the long-tail era of information overload. (Here's a prog band that, refreshingly, takes its literary cues from Bret Easton Ellis rather than Tolkien.) Featuring guest musicians such as King Crimson's Robert Fripp and Rush's Alex Lifeson, "Fear of a Blank Planet" entered the Billboard charts at No. 59 and has since sold over 250,000 copies worldwide, boosting the band to theater and arena-sized venues.
Porcupine Tree doesn't easily fit into any one genre, as evidenced by how fans at its concerts wear T-shirts ranging from Tool to Radiohead, from to Yes to Opeth, from Nine Inch Nails to Muse. But on "Insurgentes," Wilson delves into realms outside even the wide perimeters of Porcupine Tree. Though the solo album is a showcase for Wilson's love of melody and hooks, he also explores the musical possibilities of dissonance, texture and noise.
"It's not something I could ask members of, say, Porcupine Tree or Blackfield or even No-Man to embrace," says the musician. "Pure noise is something that some people don't even think of as music. I never made a distinction, really, between music and sound. Let me explain what I mean by that. I grew up near to a train station and the sound of the trains became a very important part of my world. It was a very musical sound to me. And when I hear that kind of a sound, the sound of a train, it sets off all kinds of feelings in me. Nostalgic feelings. Is that not what music does?"
That's Wilson in a nutshell: a cheerful iconoclast.
As a self-styled insurgent, Wilson is infamous for waging a one-man war on the iPod. Among other things, the artist believes MP3s have usurped appreciation for high-fidelity audio. In protest, Wilson created a series of YouTube films in which he devises cruel ways to destroy iPods, their burnt and twisted corpses serving as effigies for what he derisively dubs "download culture."
"We used a sledgehammer, blowtorch, shotgun, wood chipper," recalls Wilson. "We ran over one in a car. We tried to make it funny."
Needless to say, Wilson isn't exactly holding his breath for a party invite from Steve Jobs.
"What concerned me is that no one was really raising the problems of iPods," says the perfectionist craftsman. "The best analogy I can come up with is the idea that, if you took someone to see a beautiful painting in an Art Gallery, and you stood them in front of the painting so they could see the texture of the paint, the colors coming off the canvas, the power and the depth, of that masterpiece, and then you took them out of the Art Gallery and you showed them a photocopy of the same painting. Now, the thing is, you can still appreciate, even from the photocopy, that it's a masterpiece. It's the same with an MP3, you can still appreciate it's a great piece of music and you can still enjoy it, but the quality of experience is so much lower."
As someone who grew up gazing adoringly at gatefold sleeves of Yes albums during the 1970s, the idea of a postage-stamp-sized album cover on an iPod screen is similarly abhorrent to Wilson. While he concedes that people are listening to more music than ever before thanks to the iPod revolution, he's concerned that the devices have ushered in a "jukebox mentality."
"I put a lot of thought into the idea that someone will listen to my record from beginning to end and I can take them on a kind of musical journey," says Wilson. "So, the idea that somebody might program my music in a play list, or they might have their iPod on shuffle and hear a track from 'Insurgentes' after a Coldplay track, and then followed by a Britney Spears track, or whatever it is, again is an ugly idea to me."
Wilson has a radical solution to such a scenario: The next Porcupine Tree album will consist of 55 minutes of continuous music.
"That's going to be one disc," confirms Wilson. "We've also got some short pieces, which we may put on a second disc." says Wilson, who is currently recording the album, due this fall.
"It's kind of a brave or a stupid thing to do. But, you know what? I think the climate is better now than ever to make those kind of gestures because singles, radio, video are more and more irrelevant as every month goes by."
Warming to his theme, Wilson says "That, in a way, is a return to the '70s and I'm very happy about that."
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