Steven Wilson
Steven Wilson |
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Steven Wilson (born Steven John Wilson on November 3, 1967 in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, England) is the lead guitarist/singer/songwriter and the founder of progressive rock band Porcupine Tree. Wilson is also a self-taught producer, audio engineer, guitar and keyboard player (among other musical instruments).
Biography
Steven Wilson discovered his love for music around the age of 8. It began one Christmas when his parents bought presents for each other in the form of LPs. His father and mother received Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and Donna Summer's Love to Love You Baby, respectively. The young Steven spent much of his childhood listening to these albums in "heavy rotation", as he once commented. Both LPs would influence his future song writing. He claims "...in retrospect I can see how they are almost entirely responsible for the direction that my music has taken ever since." With Pink Floyd leaning him towards experimental/psychedelic conceptual progressive rock (as exemplified by Porcupine Tree and Blackfield), and Donna Summer with her trance-inflected grooves (which No-Man, Wilson's long-running collaboration with fellow musician and vocalist Tim Bowness initially adopted as its musical approach. Subsequently, the band's sound evolved and pursued a more meditative and experimental Talk Talk-esque approach).
As a child, Steven was forced to learn the guitar, but he did not enjoy it; his parents stopped paying for lessons. However, aged 11, Wilson rescued a nylon string classical guitar from his attic and started to experiment with it; or in his own words, "...scraping microphones across the strings, feeding the resulting sound into overloaded reel to reel tape recorders and producing a primitive form of multi-track recording by bouncing between two cassette machines." It was clear that the 11 year-old displayed an early fascination with different possibilities of arranging and playing with sounds.
It didn't take too long before he began to form bands with his friends from school and play live. However, the thing which kept him truly satisfied was experimenting with sounds and producing the recordings he made.
Between the years 1984 and 1986 he recorded material with underground bands Altamont and Karma. Some of those tapes have recently resurfaced due to the increasing popularity of Porcupine Tree. Wilson describes it as "...a bit like a painter having his nursery school paint blots on display..."
He was only 15 years old when he recorded a tape with Altamont, called Si Vockings. This particular work includes lyrics by Alan Duffy which Wilson later used for two Porcupine Tree songs: "This Long Silence" and "It Will Rain for a Million Years".
Around the same time he played with Altamont he was also in a band called Karma, which recorded two tapes: The Joke's on You (1983) and The Last Man to Laugh (1985), which contained the original versions of songs later used by Porcupine Tree, "Small Fish" and "Nine Cats" (though not "The Joke's On You," which was played live but not recorded).
Up to this point Wilson's diverse musical experiments contained avant-garde industrial, psychedelia (with Altamont) and progressive rock (with Karma). Steven's next step was forming two bands: No-Man and Porcupine Tree.
Afterwards he worked with Israeli rock star Aviv Geffen, with whom he created the band Blackfield. He splits his living time between Tel Aviv, Israel and London, UK.
Steven has also signed on to produce the next album of Israeli progressive metal band, Orphaned Land.
Side projects
Apart from Porcupine Tree and No-Man, these are other projects/collaborations Steven is currently working on or has been involved with in the past.
- Bass Communion plays host to Wilson's interests in drone and ambient music. For this project, he collaborated in the late nineties with Muslimgauze, and more recently with Vidna Obmana.
- Blackfield is the name of a recent collaboration with Israeli Aviv Geffen. Blackfield is similar to Porcupine Tree but is more pop-oriented.
- Wilson also releases under his own name. For this and other purposes he created his own record label Headphone Dust.
- Currently, he is planning to record a collaborative album with Swedish band Opeth's singer, guitarist and composer Mikael Åkerfeldt and Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy. According to his MySpace page this is "not looking very likely for a long time".
- He will be producing the next album of Israeli band Orphaned Land, titled The Never Ending Way of ORWarriOR.
- He produced and contributed backing vocals, guitar and keyboards for Opeth on the albums Blackwater Park, Deliverance and Damnation
- Has also worked with OSI, Marillion, Fish, Cipher and Anja Garbarek.
- Wilson played guitar on one track on the Spirits Burning CD New Worlds By Design.
- He is featured on the latest Fovea Hex EP "Allure" (Part 3 of the "Neither Speak Nor Remain Silent" trilogy of EP's) on bass guitar. The EP was released in April through Die-Stadt Musik.
- He made a guest appearance on Dream Theater's newest album, Systematic Chaos, as one of several musical guests recorded apologizing to important people in their lives for wrongdoings in the past.
- He made a guest appearance on Jordan Rudess' album, The Road Home, performing vocals on the track "Tarkus".
Equipment
Recording studio
- PowerMac G4 running Logic 6.4
- Digidesign Mix TDM system
- Neumann U87 microphone
- Mackie 32-8-2 mixing desk
- Line 6 Pod + Variax Modelling Guitars
On stage
- Paul Reed Smith Custom 22 guitars, Singlecut and Modern Eagle
- Babicz Acoustic Guitars and Octane Acoustic/Electric
- Bad Cat two tone distortion
- BOSS distortion
- Carl Martin compressor
- Line 6 Echo Pro
- Custom Audio Electronics switching system
- Bad Cat Hot Cat combo amplifier
- ESP Stratocaster (used onstage up until the In Absentia tour, where he switched to Paul Reed Smith guitars.)
- Boss DD-20 delay and RT-20 rotary twin pedal effects