The Harmony Codex by Steven Wilson – Album Review

Wilson’s most eclectic album to date is ‘cinema for the ears’

*****

Steven Wilson has often said he would like to write a film score. He even wrote a screenplay with the film maker Mike Bennion, and they tried for a while to get the film made. When it became clear this probably wouldn’t happen, Wilson turned the project into Deadwing, the eighth studio album he wrote for his band Porcupine Tree. In September 2020, Wilson announced that he had rewritten the script with Bennion, and released a short film as a teaser to promote the project which was now called And No Birds Sing. The project doesn’t appear to have got any further at the time of writing, but it appears that Wilson’s passion for movies remains undiminished.

Wilson’s new album, The Harmony Codex his seventh solo studio album, follows the unexpected release of Closure/Continuation with Porcupine Tree last year, and his previous solo album The Future Bites in 2021. The new album is an eclectic soundtrack to Wilson’s rich imagination, and his love of cinema is shown by his ambition to create an album which he has described as ‘cinema for the ears.’

Wilson’s cinematic ambition manifests itself in various ways on the album. Like the European surrealist and art films that it he so admires, it has a loose structure, a series of sometime apparently unconnected scenes which are linked by a strong vision; the songwriter and musician as auteur. Like many films, the album is based on a short story, in this case The Harmony Codex written by Wilson and published in his 2022 book Limited Edition of One. Like many film makers, Wilson takes liberties with the story and doesn’t attempt to create a linear narrative that matches the events of his story, which does generally have a clear narrative and a sense of logic and realism even when it veers into science fiction and dream logic.

Within individual songs on the album, there is often a cinematic structure, as has often been the case in Wilson’s songwriting both as a solo artist and for Porcupine Tree. Wilson is perfectly capable of writing a rock or pop ballad with a conventional song structure, and even released a Christmas song in a conventional style, December Skies, much to the surprise of many (not least Wilson himself, who collaborated with an Artificially Intelligent lyricist to write the song). But many of his songs are much longer than the standard three to five minutes, have several different but connected sections and feel like short films or stories in themselves.

The other cinematic aspect of the album is the sound itself. Wilson has been working with surround sound, which was originally developed for the cinema, for many years. He began mixing Porcupine Tree albums and his own solo albums in 5.1 surround sound, receiving several Grammy Award nominations in the process. He has since remixed the work of several artists, including not only bands who share his prog credentials like King Crimson, Gentle Giant, Jethro Tull and Yes but also Black Sabbath and Tears for Fears. He has more recently adopted another surround sound format originally developed for the cinema, Dolby Atmos which adds additional height speakers to create a fully immersive soundscape. Although multiple speakers are needed to recreate the full effect at home, the technology is now available in Dolby Atmos-enabled Soundbars for TV, and some streaming services allow Atmos mixes to be experienced on headphones. Wilson moved to London a few years ago and built a new home studio equipped with the latest Dolby Atmos technology. The first album he mixed in this studio was The Future Bites.

Steven Wilson’s home studio

Wilson launched the new album in a series of surround sound playbacks using spatial audio mixes in Dolby Atmos or using the L-Acoustics multiple loudspeaker system. As well as smaller listening rooms, Wilson used an actual cinema in central London and a medium-sized theatre in the EartH arts centre in Hackney, London, creating ‘cinema for the ears’ in a large, dark room. For many in the audience it was an unexpectedly profound experience, and Wilson has said he would like to recreate that experience in a live context with a band, in intimate venues with surround sound. He has said that he hopes that The Harmony Codex will become the demonstration recording to show how effective spatial audio can be for music, just as The Dark Side of the Moon was for stereo systems. But he didn’t write the album to be heard only in spatial audio – it was only in the mixing process that he considered the spatial aspects of the mix, and he was careful to ensure it worked well in stereo too. As Polly Glass said in her review in the November 2023 issue of Prog magazine, ‘we’ve listened to it at a spatial playback, through a basic Bluetooth speaker and headphones – it sounded great on all three.’

The short story provides a loose concept that influences some of the songs, but this isn’t a concept album in the way that some of Wilson’s previous solo albums are. For instance, Hand. Cannot. Erase. (2015) has an immensely complex back story about the disappearance of a young woman, and the 2013 album The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories) is based on a collection of ghost stories.

The Harmony Codex story describes a visit made by Harmony (a 12-year-old girl) and her brother Jamie (16) to visit their father in the tower block where he works in Whitechapel, East London. They ascend the skyscraper to the 38th floor, but before they can meet their father there’s an explosion. They try to escape the building via the staircase and the story passes from being a hyper-realistic description of their journey on the Tube and up in the lift, followed by a description of the moment of the explosion that reads like a film script, to a science fiction story in which Harmony and Jamie get trapped on an apparently endless staircase. The story ends ambiguously – it’s unclear whose point of view we are seeing the story from, and whether any of it has been real,

‘Did he have a dream about his sister, Harmony? Or is Harmony dreaming him now?’

Wilson grew up reading science fiction that is more about inner space, an examination of the human psyche rather than outer space, the shape of things to come. His story is inspired by a short story written by the American science fiction writer Thomas M. Disch called Descending, published in 1968 in the collection Fun With Your New Head. The story begins with a realistic description of the un-named protagonist entering a department store, using his credit card to buy things he can’t afford. He takes the escalator down from the top floor to leave the building and at this point the story morphs into a dystopian science fiction satire like an episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. The protagonist becomes trapped on a never-ending series of descending escalators, which becomes a metaphor for the futility of life and pointless consumerism. There’s an interesting parallel with the video for Wilson’s song Personal Shopper, also a satire on consumerism, in which the protagonist is seen climbing an escalator in a shopping mall as Wilson himself descends an escalator on the other side.

The idea of an infinite staircase as a metaphor has fascinated Wilson for a long time. His second studio album for Porcupine Tree was titled Up the Downstair (1993) and it was originally going to include the single Voyage 34 (1992) which describes the 34th LSD trip of the protagonist, Brian. Spoken words on Voyage 34, sampled from an American documentary LP called LSD describe how Brian had pleasurable LSD trips until the 34th when he had a complete mental breakdown,

‘On Voyage 34 he finally met himself coming down an up-staircase and the effect was devastating.’

The staircase here is a literal description of what poor Brian experienced on his trip, but also becomes a metaphor for his complete existential confusion; his psyche is trapped in an infinite staircase, like the figures in the Dutch artist M. C. Escher’s print Ascending and Descending (1960). Wilson called the collection of unused tracks from Up the Downstair by another staircase-related name, Staircase Infinities (1994).

M. C. Escher’s print Ascending and Descending

In his short story, Wilson describes his protagonist trapped on an M. C. Escher staircase. On his new album, Wilson uses the staircase metaphor in a slightly different way, to describe the journey of life. This is another of Wilson’s recurring themes, dating back specifically to the Porcupine Tree song Arriving Somewhere But Not Here from Deadwing (2005). And the theme of pursuing a meaningful existence dates back even earlier to the albums Stupid Dream (1999) and Signify (1996).

The image of a staircase features in the album’s artwork, along with the skyscraper from the story. The German designer, illustrator, and photographer Hajo Müller has created a clever design to illustrate the infinite staircase, a bit like a 2-dimensional Rubik’s Cube, which is made up of ten bricks to represent the ten tracks of the album. A small version of the object features in the videos used to promote the album, and Wilson used a much larger version during his live show at EartH which concluded the surround sound playback of the new album.

Steven Wilson performing at EartH on 27 September 2023. Author’s photo.

The brief live show was the first time for decades that Wilson had come on stage without wearing a guitar around his neck, although he was joined by guitarist Niko Tsonev. Wilson has often played live keyboards both with Porcupine Tree and on his solo tours, but his main live instrument has always been guitar. His decision to play exclusively keyboards was influenced by the electronic nature of much of the new album. Wilson has always loved electronica and ambient music, and his side project Bass Communion uses those styles, but it was his purchase of various classic analogue synthesisers before he wrote his previous album that led him to change his writing style. Most of the songs on the new album were written on synths rather than on the more conventional guitar or piano.

The Harmony Codex does include guitar parts, but many of them are played by collaborators such as Niko Tsonev and David Kollar. In fact, the album is remarkable for the number of additional musicians, contrasting with the most recent Porcupine Tree album on which almost all the instruments were played by the three band members. But rather than going into the studio to record with his collaborators, as Wilson had done particularly on The Raven That Refused to Sing, the new album was recorded in a similar way to Wilson’s first solo album Insurgentes, where in effect a bespoke band was formed for each individual track. The album was recorded during lockdown in Wilson’s home studio, so he could call upon a much wider range of collaborators than usual via file-sharing.

There are around twenty additional musicians on the record, including regular contributors such as Adam Holzman on keyboards, Ninet Tayeb on vocals, Craig Blundell on drums, Nick Beggs on bass and Theo Travis on woodwind. New faces include Nate Navarro and Guy Pratt (from Pink Floyd’s live band and Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets) on bass, Nate Wood and Sam Fogarino (Interpol) on drums, Ben Coleman (ex no-man) on violin and Wilson’s wife Rotem on spoken word inserts. One of the reasons the album sounds more eclectic than his previous solo albums, particularly The Future Bites on which Wilson played almost all the instruments himself, is the wide range of collaborators used.

1 Inclination

The opening track was written during the recording sessions for Wilson’s previous solo album The Future Bites. Wilson had originally intended to include the song on the bonus tracks for that album but decided it was too good. It opens with the sound of a trumpet, played by the Norwegian trumpeter and composer Nils Petter Molvær. An intriguing beginning to the record, it has some of the ornamental majesty of the first few bars of JS Bach’s famous organ piece Toccata and Fugue in D minor, drenched in echo as if being played in a large church like the Bach piece.

Bubbling synths lead to a heavily martial electronic rhythm track played by Pat Mastelotto of King Crimson, similar to the aggressive percussion pattern in Portishead’s Machine Gun from Third (2008). Ominous, rising keyboard washes are joined by feral, sampled breathing and a spidery trumpet solo that sounds more like a guitar. Shortly, the trumpet tone softens and sounds like Mark Isham who played trumpet and flugelhorn on albums by art rocker David Sylvian like Secrets of the Beehive (1987).

The track grinds to a halt at three minutes in and fades out with evocative soundscaping and it appears it has come to an end. Then, in a coup de théâtre that was particularly effective in the surround sound playback in the dark at EartH arts centre in London to launch the album, Wilson’s solo voice appears, sweet, almost tender but with an ominous undercurrent. He draws us in immediately, inviting us to, ‘Come see the fool.’ At first, it seems that the fool could be a figure who commands respect, a wise Fool like the court jester in Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear (1606); a Holy Fool with the gift of prophecy or deep religious insight; or the Tarot card that represents hope for the future. But in the next line it becomes clear that the fool is a swindler like the protagonist in Eminent Sleaze from the previous album, ‘He’ll swindle you out of the game.’

The protagonist is extremely combative, like the main character in the Radiohead song You And Whose Army from Amnesiac (2001); even the language is similar – compare ‘One at a time I will take you all on’ from Inclination with ‘Come on if you think/You can take us on’ from You And Whose Army. Wilson seems to be writing about a fictitious character, whereas Thom Yorke’s lyrics for the Radiohead song are much more political. In the June 2001 issue of Mojo, Yorke told Nick Kent the song was addressed to Tony Blair who was then Prime Minister.

The title of the track recalls the adage, ‘If you’ve got the time, I’ve got the inclination‘, which apparently refers to a joke in which the Leaning Tower of Pisa is addressing a clock in Westminster, London – possibly Big Ben, although the exact origin is obscure. In the context of the song, a jocular comment which possibly contains innuendo is turned into an aggressive threat.

2 What Life Brings

This song is about the journey of life, and embracing whatever life throws at you. It’s unusually positive for Wilson, whose work often embraces the darker and more depressing side of life. It ends with the positive sentiment, ‘Love it all and hold it in your hands.’ There may be an autobiographical element to the song, in that his life journey has taken an unexpected – and happy – turn in recent years. In January 2017, in a rather poignant interview with Jarrett Bellini on YouTube, Wilson announced that, ‘I’ve sacrificed family for music.’ In September 2019 he got married, announcing on Instagram that it was the, ‘Happiest day of my life marrying the love of my life!’ He immediately gained a family, with two stepdaughters, and he seems to have embraced family life with all the enthusiasm he has always given to his musical projects.

The opening bars of the song, with languid drums and gently strummed acoustic guitars have a similarly dreamy, slightly melancholy feel to the opening of the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola’s film The Virgin Suicides (2000) written by the French band Air. On his website, Wilson described his song as ‘steeped in sun-dazed autumnal acoustics’, and this could also describe the Air soundtrack and the atmosphere of the film itself. In an interview with Jonathan Horsley of Decibel magazine in May 2012, Wilson expressed his admiration for the film’s soundtrack.

The beautiful, delicate imagery of the ‘oscillating sunset’ fading in a previous autumn evokes the nostalgic feel of many of Wilson’s solo works. There’s another important image in the lyrics, which links to The Harmony Codex short story. The word ‘haze’ is used to describe the ‘haze of smoke and dust’ caused by the explosion in the story. The ‘dream fog’ of the song relates to the fog of smoke in the story. The protagonist of the song is lost in the fog, just as Harmony and her brother Jamie are in the story, and Harmony is addressed in the fourth song, Impossible Tightrope. The ‘black freighter’ in the next song Economies of Scale is also lost in fog. The ‘dream fog’ of What Life Brings also relates to the ‘lucid dream’ experienced by Jamie’s character in the short story, and the final image of Harmony and Jamie wondering if they are dreaming about each other in the story.

On his website, Wilson described the song as a ‘perfect entry point’ to the world of the album, but on Twitter he said that at first he was reluctant to put it on the record as it sounds like something he had written in the past on an acoustic guitar in the old-fashioned way, finding the right chords and then writing a melody to go with them. He had similar misgivings about 12 Things I Forgot on his previous album, as he felt it didn’t match the more electronic style of the other songs. But the truth is that both songs are simply too good to have been left off the records, as they demonstrate Wilson’s ability to write wistful, gorgeously melodic pop songs.

3 Economies of Scale

Economies of Scale was the first track to be released as a single, in late August 2023, a month before the album’s release. Wilson introduced the track on Twitter, saying it was ‘an obvious choice to be the first taster for the album.’ That may be the case from a musical point of view, as the track is heavily electronic like much of the rest of the album, but lyrically the track is a challenge to listeners, beginning with the words ‘Black freighter regale’ which are rather obscure. The ‘black freighter’ appears to be a pirate ship, as referenced in the song Pirate Jenny from Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, ‘a black freighter/
With a skull on its masthead.’ The song has been covered by, amongst others, Nina Simone, Lotta Lenya, Judy Collins, Marianne Faithfull and Marc Almond. The imagery fits with the nautical themes of many of the songs on the most recent Porcupine Tree album, Closure/Continuation.

Musically, the track continues the electronic style of Wilson’s previous solo album, The Future Bites. On Twitter, Wilson explained that the track began as a ‘weird modular synth loop’ provided by his regular keyboard player Adam Holzman. The loop can be heard at the start of the song, with added percussion which Wilson described as a ‘semi-electronic trap-beat.’ The arrangement of the song is very sparse, featuring Wilson on all instruments except Holzman’s loop. Wilson told Graham Fuller of the arts desk in December 2023 that he tried to add more instrumental parts too it, but each time he did so he felt he was making the song worse, ‘the less I added to it, the more emotional it felt.’ Wilson’s soulful vocals and rich backing vocals contrast with the skittering electronic backing track. There’s also a nod to the staircase concept, with a rising piano motif that suggests climbing stairs.

4 Impossible Tightrope

In his book Limited Edition of One, Wilson entitled chapter 21, ‘The Impossible Tightrope’ to describe trying to please both himself and his fans, concluding that he must satisfy his own musical integrity first and hope that his fans will follow him. Later in the book he uses the same metaphor to describe working with his other band members in Porcupine Tree, and his desire not to, ‘jump permanently back on the tightrope’ of having to keep everyone in the band happy while maintaining his own artistic vision. 

This instrumental track is one of three on the album which are around ten minutes long, the others being the title track (also an instrumental, with some spoken word inserts) and Staircase (track ten). The ten tracks on the album are over an hour long in total. This contrasts with the previous album, The Future Bites, a tight electronic pop record only about 40 minutes long with only one ten- minute song, Personal Shopper. Wilson has said that each of his solo albums is a reaction to the previous ones, and this album to an extent marks a return to long-form progressive rock songs, although Wilson himself has always resisted the term as it doesn’t really reflect the breadth of his vision; instead it reflects the depth of his ambition in that he is always trying to progress.

On Twitter, Wilson described the track as a mix of ‘progressive rock, spiritual jazz and electronica.’ It opens with sweet, cinematic violins played by Ben Coleman, who was the third member of art-rock band no-man before the group became a duo consisting of Wilson and Tim Bowness, most recently releasing Love You to Bits in 2019. Fiercely syncopated drums are joined by a vigorous guitar and bass riff which crescendo into explosive guitar chords. The bass line, played by Wilson himself from around 2.00 is based a single repeated low C, creating a driving, pulsating energy rather than the virtuosic, melodic part that a player like Nick Beggs might have created. The track breaks down and the explosive guitar chords are recreated by a jazzy acoustic guitar, beautifully played and recorded. The jazzy theme is continued by Theo Travis’ virtuosic and frenetic saxophone stylings, recalling his work on Wilson’s second solo album Grace for Drowning (2011).

About half-way through the song, there’s an ambient section featuring Wilson’s solo falsetto voice manipulated via software to create a melody, rather than Wilson singing the melody himself. This a technique often used in urban music – a single sung or spoken note can be processed via Auto-Tune or similar software to create a range of pitches. In August 2023, Wilson told Stephen Humphries of Under the Radar that he was probably influenced by a much earlier song, Godley & Creme’s I Pity Inanimate Objects from their 1979 album Freeze Frame. Kevin Godley, ‘sang the whole lyric in a monotone… and then programmed the Eventide Harmonizer to pitch shift up or down.’

A full choir – presumably from a sample library as no credit is given to a real choir in the sleeve notes – joins, giving the track a cinematic feel. It reaches an instrumental climax with a repeat of the unison bass and guitar riff heard earlier, followed by a spacey section which is shortly graced by virtuosic, jazzy soloing by Adam Holzman on electric piano, and some whimsical almost scat singing reminiscent of Wilson’s performance on Harridan, the first track on Porcupine Tree’s Closure/Continuation. The song ends with an invigorating analogue synth solo, creating counterpoint against a running bass line, before it finally dissolves into a reprise of the opening string section. An intriguing end to an epic song that is cinematic in its musical sweep.

5 Rock Bottom

This song is a power ballad, written by Wilson’s regular vocal collaborator the Israeli singer Ninet Tayeb, who also sings backing vocals on the first two tracks on the album. Tayeb’s soulful, earthy mezzo-soprano voice has graced some of the most emotional songs on Wilson’s solo albums such as Routine from Hand. Cannot. Erase. (2015) and Pariah from To The Bone (2017). Wilson told Mark Millar of the XS Noize Podcast, ‘there’s something magical about the way we work together.’ He said Tayeb had written the track as an indie guitar song, but that – in keeping with the cinematic theme of the album – he asked her permission to turn the song into something with, ‘a big John Barry [James] Bond theme type of sound.’

Despite the rich arrangement and soaring guitar solo from Niko Tsonev, the sentiment is very simple, similar to that of Pariah where the female voice tries to console the male voice. It’s Tayeb’s singing that gives the elemental lyrics their emotional depth and resonance. The addressee is urged to ‘break apart’, having reached rock bottom, and to embrace the hope of new life that will result.

6 Beautiful Scarecrow  

Beautiful scarecrow is the second track on the album to feature a controlling, aggressive protagonist, the first being Inclination (track one). Here the protagonist is a charlatan, a fraudster or ‘racketeer.’ The title of the track is an oxymoron, or contradiction in terms – scarecrows are known for wearing tatty old clothes as they hang around in fields frightening birds. They are not known for their beauty.

Superficially, the protagonist may have a certain charm, but beneath the façade he is ‘deep in debt.’ It’s a strange image compared with the other more positive images of life’s journey elsewhere on the album. Perhaps there’s a warning here; this is how life could end up if you take the wrong path.

The song begins with an image of the protagonist pulling off the legs and wings of the person addressing him. The image of the human being as an insect may have been inspired by the character of Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis, the 1915 novella by the Czech absurdist writer Franz Kafka. When he was a teenager, Wilson and his friend Malcolm Stocks used to go to London together to buy novels by the likes of Kafka and the German-Swiss writer Hermann Hesse. Another literary image that may be appropriate is the lines from Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606), expressing the power that the gods exert over helpless humans,

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.

Wherever the image originates, it suggests that the protagonist addressed in the song is in complete control, pulling the strings. At the end of the song, the protagonist and the person addressing him become one, ‘No longer slaves/We’re just the lonely souls that take their place.’ The subtle grace with which Wilson sings the vocals suggests a degree of empathy with the protagonist, whatever he has done.

The video for the song, directed by frequent Wilson collaborator Jess Cope of Owl House Studios in Harrogate takes the story in a different direction, indirectly inspired by the song. Co-directed by Venkatram Viswanathan, it’s a gothic horror story set in a post-pandemic world in which humanity is divided.

The track features the evocate sound of the duduk, a wind instrument which has a large double reed, originally from Armenia. The double reed is much larger than that of an oboe or bassoon, and the instrument itself looks like a recorder, with finger holes along one side but sealed at the bottom end. Here it is played by Theo Travis, a frequent collaborator with Wilson. The instrument can be heard clearly at around 2.00 minutes into the track.

7 The Harmony Codex

The title track is one the most unusual tracks Wilson has recorded under his own name, as opposed to his ambient experiments under the name Bass Communion, or the material he collected for his compilation Unreleased Electronic Music (2004). To create a title track that is largely ambient, consisting of a long series of repeated, arpeggiated synth chords, is a brave move.

It would have been much easier to write a set of lyrics which are a summary of the short story Wilson wrote that provides the title for the track and build the music around that. Instead, with the confidence that comes from over 30 years of songwriting, Wilson decided to write a purely electronic track based on synth loops, reflecting his love for this style of music which he has largely ignored in his songwriting on his solo albums and for Porcupine Tree. He has often recounted the story of his mother getting Donna Summer’s album Love to Love You Baby (1975) for Christmas, and how he grew up loving the hypnotic disco sounds which she, Giorgio Moroder and producer Pete Bellotte created for the masterpiece that is the title track of that album. Wilson told FaceCulture in October 2023, ‘I love simplicity in music. I love atmosphere. I love texture in music.’

As befits the simplicity of the song, Wilson said on Twitter (X) that it was the ‘easiest and quickest to write’ as there is ‘very little to it.’ He kept adding to the song, but any extra layers detracted from the song that he had written in about 24 hours rather than the ‘months’ it often takes him to craft a song. On YouTube he showed how he built the foundations of the track with various vintage synths – an ARP 2600 to create bleeping noises and white noise, and arpeggiators on a Prophet-6 and a Moog, adjusting the filters on both keyboards in real time to vary the texture of the sound.

The result is spellbinding. The words of the German poet Stefan George, ‘I feel air from another planet’ (quoted by the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg in his Second String Quartet) come to mind. During the surround sound playback at EartH arts centre in Hackney to launch the album, the trance-like nature of the track was deeply enhanced by the immersive sound; it truly felt as if the music was being beamed from a distant planet or from a dying star, creating a feeling of deep nostalgia for lost worlds but also a profound sense of joy.

The track does however give a tantalising glimpse of the Harmony Codex short story. Wilson chooses the most ambiguous part of the story, the final few paragraphs on the last page (p. 359 in the hardback edition). He takes the thoughts of Harmony’s brother Jamie, seen from a third person point of view in the story, and puts them instead into the first person, spoken on the track by his wife Rotem. He places the protagonist in the song ‘miles above the Earth’, gazing out not just over London where the story is set, but beyond to see the lights from ‘a thousand cities’, the ships and seas beyond them, and ‘a trillion stars in a billion galaxies.’ The crucial word comes at the very beginning of the passage, ‘It seems.’ It’s unclear whether this is reality or imagined, and even whether Jamie or Harmony is dreaming the other person. The short story makes the ambiguity even more profound, ending with the words, ‘It was how all their games ended’, casting doubt on the whole story; has it all just been a game?

8 Time is Running Out

This is another song about the journey through life, probably the most autobiographical song on the album. In Chapter 24 of his book (entitled ‘60’), Wilson, then in his mid-fifties, describes the decade between 50 and 60 as only ’16 per cent’ of his time on Earth, showing how time seems to speed up as you get older. He also addresses the irony that just when you have worked out what to do with your life, you realise ‘time is running out.’ 

Verse one compares the short existence of the human soul to ‘a cigarette on a summer night’, that burns out all too quickly. The image of the burning cigarette recalls Macbeth’s famous speech from Shakespeare’s 1606 play of the same name, beginning with the words, ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow’,

Out, out, brief candle! /Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, /That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, /And then is heard no more. 

The second verse addresses the protagonist as a ‘startled deer in the headlights’, imagery which is reminiscent of a much earlier Porcupine Tree song about life’s journey, Arriving Somewhere But Not Here from Deadwing (2005), ‘Never stop the car on the drive in the dark.’ The chorus of the earlier song expresses the same sentiment as verse two of Time is Running Out,

‘All my designs simplified/ And all of my plans compromised/ All of my dreams sacrificed.’

It’s remarkable that Wilson, writing only in his mid-to late-thirties, was able to express the sentiments of the song he wrote 20 years later.

The existential crisis suffered by the protagonist is illustrated by the panic attack he suffers ‘mid-way through the flight.’ The lyrics recall the Radiohead song Burn the Witch from their 2016 album A Moon Shaped Pool, ‘This is a low-flying panic attack.’ Another song on the same album, Glass Eyes, finds the protagonist getting off a train in a panic, finding it, ‘a frightening place’, with the cold glass eyes of the other passengers whose faces are ‘concrete grey.’

There’s a nostalgic element in verse three, Wilson name-checking the works of various bands and artist from the late 1970s when he was in his early teens. The Future Now is a 1978 album by the singer, musician and songwriter Peter Hammill, also a member of prog-rock band Van der Graaf Generator. In his book, Wilson describes the ‘twisted and nihilistic’ prog of Hammill and his band as being one of his ‘absolute favourites.’ The ‘Poison Girls’ were an English punk band formed in 1976, and their first album Hex was released in 1979. The Kick Inside was Kate Bush’s first album, from 1978. Wilson has often spoken of his admiration for her work. Finally, ‘a war of worlds’ refers to Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds (1978) based on H.G. Wells’ novel of the same name published in 1898. Wilson discussed the album with Tim Bowness in their podcast The Album Years. Wilson described it as ‘an absolute masterpiece.’

9 Actual Brutal Facts

Unusually, this track features Wilson speaking rhythmically – not quite rapping – rather than singing. He told Stephen Humphries of Under the Radar that he was strongly influenced by Jack Dangers of the electronic group Meat Beat Manifesto, who did programming on this and other tracks, to write a track ‘in a hip-hop rhythm or at least trip hop.’ The vocals recall the quietly ominous rapping on Risingson from Mezzanine by Massive Attack (1998) provided by 3D (Robert Del Naja) and Daddy G (Grantley Evan Marshall).

Wilson created a similar sound by pitching his vocal down a few semitones; some listeners didn’t initially recognise his voice. There is a precedent for the use of spoken word/rapping in Wilson’s work – the title track of Deadwing (2005) includes a rhythmically vigorous contribution from Mikael Åkerfeldt of Opeth. And on tracks like King Ghost from The Future Bites Wilson heavily manipulated his voice to make it go much lower (and higher!) showing a new confidence in his vocal delivery that began with that album, partly due to the encouragement of his co-Producer David Kosten. The new confidence Wilson has in his voice is reflected in the supreme rhythmic precision with which he delivers the lyrics.

The protagonist of the song is the third of the despicable characters addressed on the album (the other two appear on Inclination and Beautiful Scarecrow; or perhaps it is the same character?). The opening line, ‘condescending will as condescending does’ is a clever reversal of the old expression, ‘handsome is as handsome does’, meaning that true beauty is revealed by a person’s deeds rather than physical beauty. There is also another reference to life’s journey and the significance that living a valid existence can bring (one of the themes of the Porcupine Tree album Signify from 1996). In this case, the protagonist’s past weighs heavily on him, ‘You drag the passing years behind you on a ball and chain.’

Beatriz G Aranda of the Spanish newspaper El País suggested to Wilson that the chorus lyrics, ‘when you turn the shit to gold it’s not appreciated’ could be autobiographical. Wilson modestly replied, ‘I don’t consider myself that good at making gold!’ He also said, however, that if he had been born ten years earlier, he would probably have found it easier to achieve recognition. But a more likely protagonist is the ‘gold man’ described in Harridan on the last Porcupine Tree album Closure/Continuation, like the mythical King Midas whose every touch turned objects into gold – at first seen as a blessing when he touched roses but then as a curse when food and even his daughter turned to gold.

10 Staircase

The final track on the album adopts the central staircase image, representing life’s journey. Wilson told Stephen Humphries that the staircase in this song represents the pressures of ‘growing older in this modern world; such as providing for your family, getting on the property ladder’, dealing with stress, anxiety, illness, your children’s health, and social pressures. In July 2022, over a year before the album’s release, speaking to Jonathan Cornell of Immersive Audio Album, Wilson said Staircase was a ‘pretty generic title’ and he was thinking of changing it, but he obviously decided not to, perhaps as the characters from the short story, Harmony and Jamie, became less important to the album than the staircase metaphor itself.

Wilson told Mark Millar of The XS Noize Podcast that the track was the last one to be written, and that he had agonised over writing it because he knew it was going to be the closing track, ‘I wanted it to feel like the final scene in a movie… the climax to this movie.’ Wilson has solved this problem, both by making the final track one of the strongest on the album, and by creating a track which has a complex structure like a short film over nearly ten minutes.

To add to the complexity of the track, there are two drummers playing at once. Wilson chose Craig Blundell who joined him on the To The Bone tour and plays on most of the current album. Blundell also played with other members of Wilson’s touring band – Nick Beggs and Adam Holzman – on the excellent jazz-inflected Trifecta. The other drummer is Sam Fogarino from the American rock bank Interpol. Wilson told Millar that Blundell played a very busy, technical part whereas Fogarino played in a more direct indie style. The result, which Wilson said took him weeks of trying different things to get right, is amusingly described by Wilson as a, ‘kind of composite Frankenstein drum pad.’

The track begins with a sparkling synth loop written on a Moog arpeggiator, in what sounds like a complex polyrhythm but is in fact in standard 4/4 – Wilson shares a love of rhythmic complexity with Gavin Harrison, Porcupine Tree’s drummer. The deep voice at around 0.45 is Wilson’s own, tuned down using vocal processing of the kind used extensively on the previous album. The bubbling bass line that arrives at around 1.15 could also have come from that album. The track springs gloriously to life at around 1.40, after some joyfully sarcastic backing vocals on the words ‘congratulate yourself’ which amplify the central theme of the first section of the track, the pointless accumulation of wealth.

The guitar solo, beautifully played by Niko Tsonev on a Fender Strat with some lovely David Gilmour string bends, breaks all the usual structural rules by appearing at just over two minutes into a nine and a half minute track. A breakdown section at around 3.00 leads to the chorus which begins with a reference that will delight Porcupine Tree fans, ‘a train set’. The song Trains from the 2002 album In Absentia is a fan favourite, with over 32m plays on Spotify at the time of writing. And Wilson got a train set for his birthday in 2019, as he excitedly announced on Instagram – nearly 50 years since his parents bought him his first one! Whether he ever got a ‘daguerreotype’ (a type of photograph popular in Victorian times) for his birthday is unknown. Like many of the words in the chorus, it appears to be there for its rhythmic punch rather than a deeper meaning.

The muscular bass solo by Nick Beggs on Chapman stick at around 5.00 is a highlight of the track, and indeed the album as a whole. The track drops away again at around 5.40; most artists would have ended it there, but Wilson instead plays some lovely contemplative piano chords that take us to the sound world of Hand. Cannot. Erase. (2015). Adam Holzman provides an evocative Moog solo that recalls the work of Swiss keyboard player Patrick Moraz, who played for Yes and the Moody Blues and worked closely with Robert Moog in the 1970s. As the track ends the Moog solo continues and we are transported again to the distant view of the Earth that we visited during the title track, via Rotem Wilson’s spoken words. A transcendent ending to a superb track.

CONCLUSION

It seems strange to classify The Harmony Codex as a lockdown album, compared for instance with the album Under a Spell by Porcupine Tree’s Richard Barbieri, which Barbieri described as a ‘weird, self-contained dream-state album’ reacting to ‘all this strangeness going on outside’ during the pandemic. In some ways, although it was written and recorded before lockdown, Wilson’s previous album The Future Bites has more of a lockdown feel to it. That album somehow reflected the intense inwardness of being trapped at home, with its concentration on electronics and heavily processed vocals and percussion. The postponement of the album’s release and cancellation of the accompanying tour because of the pandemic, with all the promotional interviews done on Zoom rather than in person, also strengthened the sense of it being a lockdown album.

Ironically, Wilson used the extra time he had at home during the pandemic to collaborate much more with other musicians, whereas the previous album had comparatively few collaborators – although it’s worth mentioning Sir Elton John’s spoken word contribution on Personal Shopper from that album. While writing The Harmony Codex, Wilson took the time to revisit his complete creative landscape, adding the richness of his solo albums before The Future Bites to the spiky electronics of that album.

The result is an album that is more eclectic than any of his previous work, more ambitious in scope, a cinematic treat for the ears and food for the soul. As Wilson approaches middle age (he was 56 last November) he uses his vast experience as a musician, songwriter and producer to create new worlds with each project. After over 30 years in the music industry, many artists (and their fans) would be very happy to repeat the same musical formula they perfected early in their career. It’s to Wilson’s immense credit that he continues to progress, sometimes deliberately alienating some of his fans, but constantly surprising and delighting those who are prepared to stay with him.

Sources

Kent, N. HAPPY NOW? Songs are coming easily, confidence has returned. After the paranoia and angst, Radiohead talk to Nick Kent about Amnesiac, love of music and a way out of the woods (Mojo, June 2001)

Horsley, J. INTERVIEW: Storm Corrosion’s Steven Wilson (Decibel, 21/05/20120

Fuller, G. the arts desk Q&A: Steven Wilson on Porcupine Tree, ‘The Harmony Codex’ and electro-dominance (the arts desk 12/12/23)

Humphries, S. Steven Wilson on “The Harmony Codex” (Part 1) The Staircase Infinities of Modern Life (Under the Radar 29/08/2023)

Millar, M. Steven Wilson: Unlocking The Harmony Codex (The XS Noize Podcast 14/09/2023)

FaceCulture Steven Wilson interview – ‘The Harmony Codex’, creating his own universe, ambiguity +more! (YouTube 02/10/2023)

Aranda, B.G. Steven Wilson, the wizard of progressive rock: ‘125,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify every day. It’s absurd’ (El País 16/10/2023)

Cornell, J. Q&A WITH STEVEN WILSON: MUSICIAN, PRODUCER & GRAMMY AWARD-WINNING IMMERSIVE MIX ENGINEER (Immersive Audio Album 10/07/22)

On Track … Steven Wilson which includes a more detailed version of the above review and an in-depth analysis of Wilson’s other seven studio albums will be published in early 2026