Steven Wilson – The Overview – Album and Film Launch with Q & A Session – Review

Tuesday 25 February 2005

BFI IMAX, London

“It’s about death… in the nicest possible sense of the word.”

*****

To celebrate the 50^th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, the album has been touring the UK’s planetariums, reaching Jodrell Bank in Cheshire late last year. The showings have been immersive, with surround sound and visuals of scenes from outer space, replicating the original album launch in 1973 when it was played to journalists at the London Planetarium.

This evening, Steven Wilson launched his eighth solo album, The Overview, in another immersive experience. He launched his last solo album, The Harmony Codex, at EartH in London, but tonight’s show was very different. His previous album was ‘cinema for the ears’; we listened in reverential darkness.

The new album is cinema for the eyes as well as the ears. There’s a remarkable new film from Miles Skarin, who worked on the visuals for the most recent Porcupine Tree album Closure/Continuation and the accompanying tour, as well as Wilson’s solo albums The Future Bites and The Harmony Codex.

Skarin’s film looked pristine on the massive IMAX screen, and the sound matched the quality of the visuals. The drums were particularly impressive, and Wilson’s voice sounded incredibly intimate.

The opening scene depicts an alien who asks, ‘Did you forget about us?’ As Wilson later admitted, he was slightly tongue-in-cheek when he wrote those words. But there is a serious point here; he is concerned that rather than looking up at the stars in wonder, we have become so obsessed with technology and with ourselves—particularly with smartphones and social media—that we have forgotten to look up at the sky and marvel at the universe.

Wilson says that his lifetime has seen the most rapid evolution of the human race during the 300,000 years of our life on earth due to the development of technology. He has been concerned about the possible adverse effects of this for a long time, dating back to ‘Every Home is Wired’, a song he wrote for the Porcupine Tree album Signify nearly 30 years ago. In 2007 he wrote a whole album about it, Porcupine Tree’s Fear of a Blank Planet. But as he said in the discussion, this is the first time he has looked at the problem ‘in a cosmic way.’

Wilson was keen for the images of space that accompany his new album not to replicate those that we have already seen in films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey or Interstellar, impressive as those images are. His brief to Skarin was to create something new, and Skarin has met the brief and even exceeded it. Sometimes, the imagery was concrete, as in the climate change imagery in the first half of the album, Objects Will Outlive Us. At other times, it was abstract and pattern-based, as when it accompanied the electronica at the start of the album’s second half, which forms the title track. On the IMAX screen, it appeared to have a depth to match the soundtrack, even though it was in 2D.

Musically, this could be Wilson’s strongest album since Hand. Cannot. Erase. from 2016 although further listens may change that view, The Overview has been described as Wilson’s return to prog rock, as it only has two long tracks and a powerful concept – the perspective that space travel gives on our lives. Wilson hasn’t denied that the album could fit into that genre, but it seems very accessible on first listen, and although the musicianship and production are  superb it doesn’t feel self-indulgent in any way. It says what it needs to say – and the concept is possibly the most existential subject Wilson has ever tackled – and then ends. Highlights include the drumming of Russell Holzman (son of Wilson’s regular keyboard player Adam Holzman), the guitar solos of Randy McStine and Niko Tsonev, Adam Holzman’s keyboard solo, Wilson’s acoustic bass solo and Theo Travis’s soprano sax at the very end.

The album playback and film were followed by a fascinating discussion about the concept of The Overview, the Overview Effect – the cognitive change that many of those who left the Earth to travel into space often report. This can be positive or negative – William Shatner of Star Trek fame only saw death when he travelled into space, but others have had a spiritual experience seeing the ‘small blue dot’ of our planet from a distance that provides perspective.

Alex Milas, founder of Space Rocks, an organisation that promotes collaboration between space scientists and artists, chaired the panel discussion. Wilson explained that when the two of them had lunch together, and Milas explained the Overview Effect to him, he saw the album’s concept and heard the music ‘in a split second.’

Miho Janvier wowed us with her research into the sun – a spacecraft is about to provide us with views of the sun’s poles, which have never been seen before. She showed us a massive image of the sun and a tiny image of the Earth, which showed how insignificant our planet is. Mark McCaughrean baffled and delighted us with statistics about how big space is and how we have now seen images from only 290 million years after the Big Bang! The images we can now see are 13.5 billion years in the past, or 50 billion light years away. Miles Skarin said that when he put those numbers into his computer software to create scientific accuracy, the computer said ‘no.’

Wilson said the album is ultimately about human beings rather than science fiction. His wife Rotem’s voiceover provides incomprehensible statistics about the vastness of space, but the abiding image from the film is of Wilson as an astronaut, a lonely human floating in space. As Wilson says, our insignificance – the universe doesn’t care about us – means that we may as well at least ‘enjoy the ride.’  And if space is scary, it’s also beautiful. Wilson concluded that space gives us a sense of perspective: “It’s about death… in the nicest possible sense of the word.”

Panel members

Steven Wilson musician and producer

Alex Milas Space Rocks founder,

Miho Janvier astrophysicist and solar physicist at The European Space Agency,

Mark McCaughrean; senior scientific advisor for human and robotic exploration at the European Space Agency (retired), and James Webb Space Telescope mission scientist & professor at the Max Planck institute.

Miles Skarin filmmaker