Prog rock band still generating sparks in Manchester over 50 years on
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In one of those lovely disambiguations on Wikipedia, Van der Graaf Generator the rock band are not to be confused with the electrostatic machine the Van der Graaff Generator. Both are capable of creating electric sparks.
Founded 55 years ago in Manchester, the rock band fronted by singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Peter Hammill returned to Manchester – where they were formed in 1967 – with a mixture of more recent songs and some classics. The band were on hiatus for many years and at different times while Hammill pursued his solo career. Hammill’s back catalogue is massive – he has recorded around 50 studio albums as a solo artist and with the band. In the world of prog rock, perhaps only Steven Wilson has been as prolific, has maintained such a high standard of songwriting, and has remained as true to his own unique vision.
The latest line-up of the band features Hammill himself on guitar, keyboards and vocals and two members of the band who first joined in 1968, Guy Evans on drums and Hugh Banton on keyboards. Material was drawn mostly from the 60s and 70s and from this century, both from Hammill’s solo albums and the band’s records. When the band returned for an encore an audience member shouted ‘1976’ and Hammill smiled ‘earlier, actually’, going on to sing a sweet-voiced version of the anthemic Refugees from the 1970 album The Least we can do is Wave to Each Other.
Hammill came on stage wearing a loose-fitting white suit, looking like an avuncular housemaster from a minor public school who had just come off the cricket pitch. The capacious stage of the Bridgewater Hall, which can accommodate a full symphony orchestra, looked a little bare with only three performers and their equipment, and there was no light-show or video screens. All the drama was concentrated in the musical performances and the formidable but strangely moving songwriting.
Hammill’s voice is still a remarkable instrument, coloured by his phenomenal ability to act out a song. Sometimes it was conversational, sounding like the singer of a French chanson, at other times half-spoken like the sprechstimme used in German classical music in the early part of the twentieth century. At times it was pensive as in Do Not Disturb, at other times terrifying as in the cry that opened Nutter Alert; it was clear that Hammill has no intention of going gentle into that good night. Sometimes it was an instrumental texture, as in parts of Childhood Faith in Childhood’s End, going from a whisper to a roar in very short space of time.
Strong support to Hammill’s vocal was provided by drummer Guy Evans whose work was subtle, fierce, jazzy, military, busy, simple as required. Hugh Banton’s organ playing was bluesy, dreamy, contemplative, jazzy, funky, hymn-like. There was a remarkable range of tone, texture and dynamics from just three players. If there was the odd slip, absence from touring due to Covid was a good reason. Hammill announced Masks by saying that they had decided to play the song during the Covid lockdowns but were not sure if they could pull it off; spoiler alert – they could. The song took flight with a full prog instrumental passage and a wailing guitar. Poignantly, Hammill announced at the end of the concert that the band would not be able to meet the fans and do signings afterwards as they had to remain in a Covid bubble with crew. But despite the enforced lack of contact with the audience, the band had communicated through the music which was challenging, disturbing, cinematic, horrifying, intimate, dramatic, reflective, endlessly twisting and restless, always fascinating. And ultimately uplifting.
Classic Pink Floyd songs brought to life with an Australian twist
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The last time Pink Floyd played an indoor concert venue in Manchester was nearly 50 years ago at the Palace Theatre on 10 December 1974. It seems unlikely that the three surviving members will ever play live together again, although Nick Mason has already played the Apollo with his band Saucerful of Secrets and is returning next year to play more of the band’s early material. In the meantime, fans of the band can enjoy the Australian Pink Floyd Show, a chance to hear live versions of songs that are too good never to be heard live again.
The potential problem with a tribute band is that they can earnestly replicate the exact notes that the original band played without really capturing the spirit of that band. This can sometimes happen with the Australian Pink Floyd Show, but at their best they take flight and their passion and energy lift the songs so they become less of a high quality reproduction of an Old Master and more like the original, with all the depth of the brushstrokes and the subtlety of the colour intact. Guitarist David Domminney Fowler in particular is able to lift a song, both with his soulful vocals and the fluid grace of his soloing. And the vocals throughout were excellent – lead vocalist Chris Barnes (a Salford University graduate) was always passionate and polished, and Ricky Howard brought the rougher edge of Dave Gilmour’s vocals to life. And a special mention for Lorelei McBroom, Emily Lynn and Lara Smiles who provided warm and energetic backing vocals throughout and all shone in their solos in The Great Gig in the Sky.
The other dilemma faced by a tribute band is whether they should faithfully play every note of the original songs from the albums, or whether they should allow themselves to improvise when playing the songs live. Pink Floyd themselves, particularly in later years, added extended guitar solos and Money had a breakdown jam section that was absent from the Australian Floyd’s version and would perhaps have lifted it. So it was great to hear Another Brick in the Wall Part II in a longer version, with added guitar parts at the end, while the grotesque inflatable teacher nodded along menacingly. Another highlight was a modified version of One of These Days, which made great use of the guitars appearing at either side of the stereo picture. It also featured an inflatable, a pink kangaroo with a disturbingly rat like smile. There were several other witty references to the band’s Australian origin, including the famous image from Wish You Were Here of the man on fire shaking now shaking hands with a kangaroo, and the radio station browsing at the start of that song being replaced by TV channel-hopping shows including Neighbours. But there was more poignant imagery on the circular screen behind the band too, early pictures of the original band with the haunted face of Syd Barrett providing a moving backdrop to an excellent rendition of Shine on You Crazy Diamond.
Amongst all the ‘hits’, it was good to hear some slightly lesser-known songs. The second half opened with a superb version of Astronomy Domine which featured on ‘Ummagumma’in a live version recorded over 50 years ago in 1969. And there was a blistering version of Sheep from the 1977 album ‘Animals’, featuring the bizarre mangling of spoken words from Psalm 23, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, He converteth me to lamb cutlets.’
The show ended with two encores, a powerful version of Run Like Hell and a rousing Comfortably Numb for which the audience was on its feet, a thrilling ending to a very good evening.
Nick Holmes’ Porcupine Tree On Track provides an astute analysis of all Porcupine Tree’s studio albums and EPs and provides an illuminating insight into the band’s music for existing and new fans alike. (Burning Shed)
“Holmes’ book is a thoroughly entertaining and informative read for anyone with a lively interest in progressive rock, and an essential purchase for fans of the band.” (Jan Buddenberg, DPRP)
“It’s more than apparent that [Holmes] has fully immersed himself in the PT catalogue, and that he knows more about rather more about it than anyone outside the musicians concerned… for PT fans who want an abundance of gems, countless pertinent quotes from the band themselves, all the relevant album artwork and a generous helping of shrewd insight, this is as close to a one-stop Porcupine Tree shop as you can get.” (Dom Lawson, Prog October 2021)
“This is intelligently written by musician / writer Nick Holmes. It’s an easy read in straightforward language, which is a relief because it could so easily have been overblown with pompous art-rock language...
There is a growing amount of PT / Steven Wilson literature emerging – official and unofficial material. This book stands well amongst them because:
1. It’s easy to read as a book that can be dipped into at any part; 2. It’s not overly expensive like some PT literature; 3. It has detail about each track that even a long-time fan like myself didn’t know.
In conclusion: This is one of the better books in the On-Track series and if you like Porcupine Tree and / or Steven Wilson, I definitely recommend having this book.” (Joe Snow, Amazon Customer Review)
As someone who has all the PT albums from ‘Up The Downstair’ onwards I just had to have this book as soon as I learned of its existence. The book did not disappoint. Another reviewer mentioned that the author appears to be a fan. Sure that is probably true but it doesn’t take anything away from this very nicely detailed analysis of all the PT albums. Each album is described along with a track-by-track analysis. This includes the featured musicians, background stories to all the tracks and references where available to Steven’s own notes and comments from the recording sessions and other published sources. I said to a friend and fellow PT fan that this was a fascinating read and a bit of an out of body experience. That was because the author is explaining to you what you already knew (or thought you already knew) but in a way that transcends and enhances your own thoughts and interpretations of each track. My friend read the analysis of ‘Heart Attack in a Layby’ and messaged me back with just two words… Goose. Bumps. (Paul J, Amazon Customer Review)
Great book with lots of details about P Tree’s music, and the story behind the songs. Also a great reference for understanding where the various EP’s and compilations fit into the catalog. ***** (Chris Lira, Good Reads)
Marana Semkina (also known as Marjana Semkina), the vocalist from iamthemorning (her duo with pianist Gleb Kolyadin) released her debut solo album Sleepwalking last year. Previously based in St Petersburg, she now lives in England but unlike many artists she felt unable to take advantage of Covid restrictions to write new material, ‘I flew to Russia for a week and got stuck there when borders shut for half a year due to lockdown’. She describes how the depression she suffered as a result of feeling trapped only lifted on her return to England, where she was able to start writing again. The result is her new solo EP, Disillusioned, with three new songs and two traditional folk songs from Hungary and Iceland.
The opening track Friend has a sound world that is a departure from Mariana’s previous work. It begins with disturbing electronic drones and frenetic strings, with phased drums that contrast with the fragile vocals. The evocative video suggests that the protagonist of the song has lost her ‘only friend’. She drags her friend’s body through the woods, and when the music suddenly drops out there is an ethereal, distant wordless melody as she starts to bury him. A chillingly melodramatic and profoundly beautiful start to the EP, thematically it continues Mariana’s preoccupation with death, describing herself on Twitter as a ‘dead Victorian girl’.
Ne Hagyj Itt is the first of two tracks on the EP which reflect Mariana’s love of different languages and cultures. She says, ‘There is a Czech proverb that says “learn a new language and get a new soul”, and I certainly feel this way’. The song was written by the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók and published in 1935 as part of his 27 Two and Three Part Choruses based on traditional Hungarian folk songs. The title means ‘Don’t leave me here’, and the words describe the protagonist’s plea to the addressee to reveal the road she is taking so that he can plough it with a golden plough, sow the land with pearls and water it with tears. Mariana’s gorgeous, yearning multi-tracked vocals and beautiful harmonies sit on a bed of subtle electronics.
The title song Disillusioned refers partly to Mariana’s disillusionment with the music industry which has led her to release this EP herself via the bandcamp website. She says ‘having full control over your creations is quite precious and beautiful’. The song is superbly arranged, with warm strings and a gentle electronic wash bringing a bittersweet quality to Mariana’s subtle but heartfelt anguish.
Land Míns Föður is the second song on the EP to feature another language and culture. As Mariana says, ‘each language is special and works differently and beautifully with music’. This Icelandic folk song is a patriotic and imaginative celebration of the land of the poet’s father. The melancholy yearning of the song is captured in the multi-tracked vocals, drenched in echo. At only 90 seconds long, this is a little gem.
With a bass line that provides a gently-beating heart An End provides an uplifting end to the EP, moving from introspection to an epic chorus. The song concludes with an unresolved chord that fades into nothingness, perhaps casting doubt on the hope that it had raised. Throughout the EP, Mariana’s songwriter and abilities as an arranger show an even greater depth of maturity than on previous releases. Her voice continues to develop and grow, ranging from crystalline beauty to a more robust tone when required. The addition of electronics makes the sound world even richer and more evocative than before, creating a haunting listen from an exceptional talent.
Some very strong songs were left off Porcupine Tree’s ten studio albums for reasons of space, changes of style … or in at least one case due to what the band’s leader Steven Wilson now regards as a mistake on his part.
I discovered some of these while writing my book On Track … Porcupine Tree, a detailed analysis of the band’s songs. Many fans will already know them all, but to others I hope they will provide unexpected moments of joy.
The Sound of No-One Listening
This song starts with ominous soundscaping and sound effects, including the sound of an ice cream van, which has become a common horror film trope, though it may have a sense of nostalgia for some listeners. Although the band may have changed style by the time it was recorded, it’s an excellent track that stands up very well in retrospect, with a simple compelling bass riff and a lovely flute motif. Synth arpeggios provide a glittering, hopeful backdrop, as the song reaches a climax with very energetic drumming before falling back into a darkly disturbing noise-scape again.
Men of Wood
Steven Wilson said he found it difficult to find a home for this track. It was considered for two albums and as a single, but didn’t quite fit the band’s changing style, ‘It was almost a throwback to (the band’s) psychedelic pop, and that just wasn’t quite right – it was a context thing.’ The theme is the vacuity of modern society, sharing a sentiment with T. S. Eliot’s poem, ‘The Hollow Men’. The song begins with a dirty-sounding guitar, then heads for a memorable chorus with a nicely psychedelic key-change, giving it a rather wistful feel.
Buying New Soul
This track was recorded in writing sessions at Foel Studios, Wales, in March 2000, just after Porcupine Tree’s sixth studio album Lightbulb Sun was completed. It’s a gorgeous, poignant song with a haunting chorus. It follows the theme of the band’s fifth album Stupid Dream, the difficulty of balancing artistic integrity and commercial success. A highly personal song, it reflects Steven Wilson’s continuing fight against the music industry – ‘I still rage and wage my little war’ – but it ends with the depressing concept of selling out, of buying a ‘new soul at the start of every year’. The circling synthesizer motif that opens and closes the song perfectly matches the melancholy lyric and jazz-like upright bass. There is one moment of rage, but the feeling is generally one of resignation.
Cure for Optimism
This is a Steven Wilson solo performance at his home studio, No Man’s Land. The meaning of the song is just out of reach, but the track is still very evocative, with ghostly echoed piano motifs and subtle acoustic guitars. Mental health appears to be a theme here. The reference to a ‘serpent on a mobile phone’ could suggest a record company executive.
Drown With Me
In an interview in 2020, Steven Wilson told Lasse Hoile that he thought this song was going to be ‘one of the highlights’ of In Absentia, the band’s seventh studio album. He replaced it with ‘Prodigal’, ‘which I think is one of the weaker songs’, although he stressed this was a very personal opinion that others might disagree with. The reason for the substitution was that he felt ‘Prodigal’ was a better recording, although he regretted the decision later. ‘Drown With Me’ is a gorgeous, upbeat song in which the music contrasts sharply with the lyrics. The protagonist’s plan to drown the song’s addressee and her family seems to refer to the world of serial killers, one of the main themes of In Absentia.
Futile
This is the strongest example of the band’s interest in the music of Swedish heavy metal band, Meshuggah. The band’s drummer Gavin Harrison told Lasse Hoile that he wanted to write a Meshuggah-inspired track, that he could use as a challenge at his drum clinics, as he was finding it hard to play heavy metal. Gavin invited Steven Wilson to add guitar parts to the demo, resulting in ‘one of the heaviest pieces we ever recorded’. Lyrically, we may be back in the world of the serial killer that is so strong on In Absentia, ‘You were the one that made her cry … the world went black … lost my head.’ The chorus is fiercely dark, the metallic guitars almost burying the vocals. What makes the song remarkable is the contrast between the main guitar riff’s ferocity and the yearning delicacy of the backing vocals.
Nil Recurring
This and the next song were recorded during the sessions for Porcupine Tree’s ninth studio album Fear of a Blank Planet, which many fans consider to be their best. Both tracks feature on the band’s 2007 EP Nil Recurring. The title track of the EP is an instrumental featuring King Crimson’s Robert Fripp on lead guitar. After two minutes of guitar tapping and heavy riffing, a lovely, spacious breakdown highlights Colin Edwin’s bass and Richard Barbieri’s keyboards. Then, at around 3:20, the track gathers momentum, and a lovely riff cuts across a punchy one-note bass section. At around five minutes in, the opening echoed tapped-guitar theme returns, with a manic guitar solo and further heavy riffing, until the track suddenly dissolves.
What Happens Now?
This song’s protagonist seems to be suffering an existential crisis, rather like the main character in Fear of a Blank Planet. Material possessions mean nothing to him and they bore him, ‘So I got all these things, but so what?’ As he says, ‘You can’t take them with you’, and instead he seeks meaning through religion, asking the song’s mystery addressee, ‘You think you can save my soul?’ The answer – given in verse 2 – seems to be that he could die as a result of a suicide bombing, although the link between verses one and two is oblique. He boards a plane, in which somebody has concealed a bomb in a briefcase, as a result of which, ‘My body will spread through the heavens, across the sky/And my ashes will fall through the cloudburst.’ It’s a surprising and poetic image, despite its bleak suggestion that the answer is oblivion. Instrumentally, the track is very strong. Of particular note is the rhythmic illusion: beginning at about five minutes in, becoming much clearer at around six minutes, when the drums appear to move at half the speed of the other instruments, before the whole track slows down to an epic feeling of finality.
On Track: Porcupine Tree…every album, every song, published by Sonicbond is available to order now at Burning Shed and other good bookshops.
Sources:
Sleeve notes to Stars Die: The Delerium Years 1991-1997 (2002)
Interviews with Steven Wilson and Gavin Harrison filmed for the In Absentia Deluxe Edition of 2020 by Lasse Hoile
Drummer Craig Blundell, keyboard player Adam Holzman and bass player Nick Beggs began playing together on Steven Wilson’s Hand. Cannot. Erase tour in 2015. They also joined Steven on his To the Bone tour in 2018 and 2019. When Steven went off for a cup of tea after a brief soundcheck, the three others would remain on stage to jam together, creating what they described as a ‘jazz club’. They recorded each other on their phones as they played, and decided to use these recordings as the basis of some of the songs for the new Trifecta project. The result is a version of jazz rock fusion, almost entirely instrumental, in a style described by Nick Beggs as ‘Fission! It’s like Fusion but less efficient and more dangerous … with fall out.’ The outcome is an explosion of joyful, melodic virtuosity.
Beggs and Holzman were due to tour with Steven Wilson again but tours due in 2020 and again in 2021 were cancelled due to Covid-19. Like many artists, the three members of Trifecta collaborated remotely during lockdown – Beggs and Blundell in England and Holzman in New York. But whereas the work of another Steven Wilson alumnus Richard BarbieriUnder a Spell described darkly trouble dreams in lockdown, Trifecta cast a genial spell on tracks that they each completed at home before Holzman mixed the heady brew in his home studio. Further magic was sprinkled by expert mastering engineer Andy VanDette (who also worked on some of the Porcupine Tree albums). The light-hearted nature of the collaboration is shown by some of the tiles of the 15 ‘fragments’ that make up the album, such as ‘Clean Up On Aisle Five’ and ‘Nightmare In Shining Armour’. But don’t let that distract you from the serious levels of musicianship on display here.
Nick Beggs’ dry humour is evident on the only track that features vocals, the gently enticing Pavlov’s Dog Killed Schrodinger’s Cat, the lyrics of which he describes as ‘written from the perspective of a layman trying to understand quantum mechanics … and failing’. They include such memorable lines as ‘Wrestled to the ground by your quantum theory/ I’ve listened to your talk until my eyes grew weary’.
Despite the consistently high level of inventiveness and virtuosity shown by all three players, planting them firmly in prog rock territory, none of the songs are prog epics in terms of length; all of the 15 tracks are beautifully-crafted miniatures of around 3 minutes. The whole album is only 45 minutes long. Steven Wilson has recently called for a return to the shorter-form album, and his latest release The Future Bites lasts 42 minutes.
Opening track Clean Up On Aisle Five with its swirling keyboards, strong melody and powerful drumming is reminiscent of another prog rock supergroup, U.K. (John Wetton, Bill Bruford, Eddie Jobson and Alan Holdsworth) on their track ‘In the Dead of Night’, although without the impassioned vocals.
Other highlights include Proto Molecule with its amazingly funky bassline – worthy of Jaco Pastorius – evocative keyboard lines, syncopated jazz-funk riffing, and a delightful interplay between both instruments. There is more Jaco-style bass at the start of Nightmare in Shining Armor.
The Enigma of Mr Fripp cheerfully acknowledges its debt to Robert Fripp of King Crimson. It encapsulates all that is great about that band in less than three minutes. Nick Beggs plays Chapman Stick with Fripp-like intensity, the lines spiralling around each other. There are dystopian drums, sudden key changes, warm mellotron washes and rhythmic illusions. A complete King Crimson album in miniature. The track suddenly stops, delightfully segueing into the ultra-cool jazz keyboards of the next track Sally Doo-Dally.
Have You Seen What the Neighbours are Doing refers to the house next to Adam Holzman’s in the North Bronx, left empty when the man living there disappeared. It could easily have come from the soundtrack to a 1970s movie like Shaft. It begins with a disturbing film-noir scenario, with a looping funky bassline and luminous synths. There’s dirty distortion on the Fender Rhodes-like solo, adding to the sleaze. Holzman uses a similar sound on his recent live album The Last Gig.
The whole album is an unexpected lockdown delight that reveals its deep treasures with repeated listening. Two important questions remain. Are Trifecta working on new material, and will they ever tour? Hopefully the answer to both questions is yes!
Requiems in music come in many forms, from the operatic grandeur of Giuseppe Verdi, to the serenity of Gabriel Fauré, and the fiercely anti-war War Requiem of Benjamin Britten. These all use Latin words from the Requiem Mass, but a wordless requiem can also be effective. The Italian composer, multi-instrumentalist and visual artist, Giancarlo Erra has now released Departure Tapes, an instrumental album which is not a formal requiem but is dedicated to his father, who passed away from cancer recently. Perhaps the nearest musical comparison is not the formal requiems of Verdi, Mozart and Fauré but The Disintegration Loops by the American composer William Basinski, dedicated to the victims of 9/11. Basinski’s music was created using tape loops that gradually deteriorated as they passed over the tape heads. Erra’s music shares some of that rich analogue sound world. As he charmingly notes on the CD sleeve, ‘Please note, unusual loud vinyl noise, skips and distortions, are part of the samples I created for this album and are not audio problems.’
Giancarlo Erra began the band Nosound as a solo studio project and later expanded it into a full band to play his music live (exactly as Steven Wilson did with Porcupine Tree). He released his first solo album Ends in 2019. He had already started thinking about his second solo album, which he was planning to make more experimental, when, ‘my father suddenly got ill…and everything changed.’ His father had left the family when Giancarlo was 14. The two of them spent more time together during the final few months than they had done for years. Giancarlo found the experience, ‘hard but at the same time healing’, bringing a sense of closure. This is reflected in the music, which is uncompromising, deeply personal but also strangely uplifting. The album was written when Giancarlo was travelling between his home in England and his father in Italy. Most of the material was improvised live in the studio, with Giancarlo playing all the instruments.
The opening track, Dawn Tape, features a melancholy repeated piano figure, with vinyl static, a long synth pad and a slowly evolving bass drone. Shimmering strings describe the sun rising slowly as the dawn creeps in.
The short Previous Tape is a simple, evocative, slow-moving melody over gentle arpeggios. The track has a nostalgic feel, with the sound of a horn heard from a distant mountain top.
169th Tape features cinematic strings which distort and decay sadly, like Basinki’s Disintegration Loops, the number of the tape perhaps suggesting that it has been through several iterations which have gradually worn it out. The key change in the chords around half way through suggests a moment of hope in the weary feeling of resignation.
Departure Tape
By far the longest track on the album (the video is an extract). Like the album itself, the video is dedicated to Giancarlo’s father. He recorded the song after his first visit to his father in Italy, after finding out about his father’s illness. He describes how he was ‘exhausted and down.’ He began playing live, experimental music in his studio as he tried to face his conflicted feelings which came out as a, ‘free subconscious stream of thoughts.’
The song begins with a haunting solo voice, sounding rather like Jónsi from Icelandic band Sigur Rós. It feels like an incantation, a wordless prayer, or a plainsong chant. It is soon accompanied by the sound of a harmonium, the closest we get on the album to the sound of a requiem sung in a church. The voice is gradually overwhelmed by a sea of ambient strings.
The piano then takes on the central role, filling a cathedral-like space with resolute chords. The piano melody then searches for meaning, gradually finding hope as it accelerates until it begins to lose confidence; eventually it falls over itself in a tumult of grief.
The solo voice returns, appearing out of a haze of buzzing strings, before the track ends in ambiguity with uncertain piano motifs, fading into obscurity.
The closing track, A Blues for my Father, finally pays direct tribute to Giancarlo’s father. The video for the song features nostalgic, happy family scenes, shot mostly in black and white, interspersed with contemporary autumn leaves which seem to be sodden with tears. The music gradually resolves into another haunting theme, melancholy and contemplative, a bittersweet and moving tribute to a lost father.
Impeccable live jazz-rock from former Miles Davis music director and Steven Wilson’s keyboard player
*****
On 12 March 2020, keyboard player Adam Holzman and his band Brave New World drove to the Nublu club to soundcheck for a gig that night. The global pandemic was about to close New York City. Broadway had just shut down, but as Adam said later, ‘we decided to play anyway. Something big was coming, and who knew when we’d be able to perform again?… Only about 18 hardcore fans showed up.’
Adam Holzman has been Steven Wilson’s regular keyboard player since he joined the Grace for Drowning tour in late 2011 in support of Steven’s second solo album.
But Adam’s musical pedigree goes back much further than that; most notably he was with Miles Davis’ band for nearly five years, eventually becoming Miles’ musical director. And going back further still, Adam’s father is Jac Holzman, founder of Elektra Records (who signed The Doors) and Nonesuch Records (who began by specialising in European Early Music, but also commissioned the pioneering electronic album Silver Apples of the Moon, by the American composer Morton Subotnick in 1967). Adam tells stories of when he was a boy and Jim Morrison came to the house, and Adam showed Jim his toy keyboard and tape recorder; quiet moments when Jim was far from his rebellious and controversial public persona. Young Adam was also hugely influenced by The Doors’ keyboard player Ray Manzarek.
The album opens with Intro – The Age of Fear with dystopian synth noises, and ominous voices intoning, ‘The age of fear; the creative spirit must fight to stay alive’, words that take on a poignant significance in this context. But since the 1980s, Adam has made music under the title ‘Optimistic music in the time of fear’, so perhaps there is hope, and the vigorous drum solo from Gene Lake, with bubbling analogue synth sounds suggest that there is still life in music.
On the tour to support Steven Wilson’s third solo album, The Raven That Refused to Sing, Adam began to do piano improvisations each night at the start of Deform to Form a Star, a song from Steven’s second solo album Grace for Drowning. He collected them together on The Deform Variations in 2015. The second track Pianodemic is another in that tradition, a moment of optimism despite the reference to the Pandemic in the title.
The next three tracks are taken from Adam’s 2018 album Truth Decay. As is often the case with jazz, the live versions have more power and energy than the studio versions, good though they are. The first of these, Ectoplasm,bursts into life with fierce drumming and cool Fender Rhodes keyboards. On the NewEars Prog Show podcast Adam described the Fender as ‘the electric guitar of jazz’, and it plays an important role on this album (although the instrument Adam plays is a Korg SV1 Stage Vintage piano). Throughout the album, Adam gives space to the other players in the band rather than just showing off his keyboard skills, virtuosic as they are, so the album feels like a true band album.
The next track, Phobia has a lovely, spacey, open feel with an atmospheric main theme with evocative harmonies. It gives all the band their chance to shine above the backbeat – first Adam with some distorted Fender Rhodes sounds, then Ofer Assaf, with evocative saxophone, then Jane Getter on heavily echoed guitar. An excellent track.
Growing up as the son of a record company executive, Adam could easily have had a very cynical view of the music industry, the kind of view expressed by a relative who might have said, Good Luck with your Music, in the way that we might say, ‘good luck with that.’ But Adam’s father has been supportive of his son, and it seems that Adam has retained his joy in music making. This is a seriously funky track with an earworm for a chorus, featuring excellent rumbling bass playing from Freddy Cash jr.
Adam originally recorded Maze, a Miles Davis song in 1985, live in the studio just before the sessions for Miles’ 1986 album Tutu. The track finally appeared on the Rubberband album released in 2019. Adam described the track as having, ‘a killer groove…with a flat-out burning solo.’
The final song, Abandoner is a cover of a track from Steven Wilson’s first solo album Insurgentes. The original track begins with a lovely, introspective quality, and Steven’s plaintive vocals are replaced here with soulful saxophone playing from Ofer Assaf. As the title suggests, the song is about loss and abandonment, and Adam’s version perfectly captures this. Steven’s song descends into terrifying noise, perhaps reflecting bitterness and anger at being abandoned. Adam’s version takes a slightly quieter, but equally effective approach.
This is a stunning live album, although it often sounds like a studio album both because of the quality of the playing and the recording, and the fact that the audience is small due to the Pandemic. Holzman says, ‘As of now, it’s still the last gig’. Let’s hope it’s not too long before he is able to tour again.
When No Man’s Land Studio finally gets the Blue Plaque it deserves in recognition of the artistic endeavour that took place there, the people who arrive to mount it on the wall it won’t find a palace like Paisley Park. They will find a suburban bungalow in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, England. Unlike Prince, who was able to record in any room in his Paisley Park complex, Steven Wilson had one room in which to record – his childhood bedroom.
The original No Man’s Land studio (Sound on Sound magazine 2010)
It was in No Man’s Land Studio/Steven’s bedroom that the first two Porcupine Tree albums, On the Sunday of Life and Up the Downstair were recorded in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But as the decades progressed and the band began to record in better and better studios – Foel Studio in Wales, Avatar Studios in New York, and AIR Studios in Lyndhurst Hall, London – Steven still returned to his childhood home to record and mix Porcupine Tree’s albums. It was not until the summer of 2009 that he moved his studio into his own house, and even then, it was an in an ordinary room. Steven told Sound on Sound magazine in 2010 that, ‘People always ask if they can see or photograph my studio and I say, ‘you might be disappointed.’
The professional studio
What is remarkable about No Man’s Land is that Steven continued to work in his bedroom studio despite its obvious limitations. Technology now allows very high-quality recordings to be made in bedrooms using laptops and highly sophisticated software, mixing ‘inside the box’ as the sound engineers say.There was a time, before mixing desks became automated (able to replicate the engineer’s skilled finger on the fader with ghostly precision) when a small orchestra of musicians used to line up along the length of the mixing board to do the final mix, which was a performance in itself. But in the late 1980s when Steven started writing and recording music the technology was primitive and most aspiring musicians craved a record deal, partly because it meant that they had access to a decent recording studio.
Eventually, by the time of Porcupine Tree’s seventh studio album In Absentia, Steven did get a deal with a major American record label and did have access to a major American studio (Avatar in New York) but didn’t achieve the sales that he and the record company expected (and frankly deserved).
But the fact that Steven continued to use a bedroom studio so much, even when Porcupine Tree became increasingly successful, says a great deal about him as a musician and producer.
The autodidact
Steven Wilson is an autodidact and he was lucky enough to have a father who was an electronics engineer who when Steven was an early teenager helped the young adventurer by building him eccentric electronic delights; a sequencer that divided the notes into units of three when most rock songs have four beats in each bar, maybe instilling in the young Steven an unconscious love of the unusual time signatures that kept the world of Prog Rock turning for the last 50 or 60 years; a four-track recorder on which the erase head didn’t work so everything had to be recorded in one take . He told Sound on Sound that he would play his father a record and say, ‘Dad, how do you make that sound? And he’d go off and figure it out.’ Steven’s dad was also a musical influence on his son, as was his mother. He recalls hearing his father listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, and his mother to Donna Summer’s Love to Love You Baby, two albums that had a huge musical impact on him at the age of eight.
Re-Mixing
What is remarkable about Steven is that he has built up a reputation as a producer and re-mixer of some of the greatest prog rock bands ever while still working in his studio at home. It probably didn’t do any harm that his surround sound mix of 2007’s classic Porcupine Tree album Fear of a Blank Planet was nominated for a Grammy. The list of artists he has remixed in stereo and/or surround sound is impressive, including Gentle Giant, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Marillion, Roxy Music, Rush, Simple Minds, Tangerine Dream, Tears for Fears, XTC and Yes. He told Sound on Sound that his work on these classic records was ‘The equivalent of polishing the Sistine Chapel’; to continue his metaphor no paint fell off the ceiling, and the colours were brighter, the lines clearer but still true to Michelangelo’s original vision. His remixes are respectful, revealing the beauty of what is already there rather than imposing his own personality.
No-man’s Land studio (Sound on Sound magazine 2010)
Storm Corrosion
Steven Wilson has had a long association with Mikael Åkerfeldt from the Swedish heavy metal band Opeth, producing several of the band’s albums starting with Blackwater Park in 2001. The partnership between Steven and Mikael bore musical fruit in 2012 with their Storm Corrosion collaboration and the album of the same name, recorded at No Man’s Land. The album includes the remarkable song ‘Drag Ropes’, a disturbingly, bewitchingly, discordantly melodic epic with some of the most gorgeous vocals ever recorded by either of them. Its terrible beauty is matched by the official video made by Jess Cope, who also created some of best videos for Steven’s solo work for songs such as ‘Routine’ (from Hand.Cannot.Erase) and ‘Drive Home’ and ‘The Raven That Refused to Sing’ (from the album of the same name).
The video for Drag Ropes, directed by Directed by Jess Cope
Steven’s 5.1 mix of the Storm Corrosion album was nominated for Best Surround Sound Album in the 55th Grammy Awards. So how has he achieved all this often without going into a professional studio? He has admitted that he often found it confusing to go into a professional studio with a proper mixing desk and speakers. He got worse results in the studio rather than recording and mixing at home because as he told Sound on Sound he had, ‘no idea what I was hearing’. Getting to know how his room sounds is the most important thing, even though it doesn’t have state of the art acoustic treatment and an analogue mixing desk with 384 faders (in 2005 the Harrison installed a console with 384 inputs which was over 30 feet long into Universal’s Dub Room 4 a.k.a. Alfred Hitchcock Theater, but it looks more like a stadium than a home studio). Having a consistent internal audio reference point is more important to him than using an expensive studio, because although it will sound impressive it will also sound confusingly different from what his ears are used to.
Loudness Wars
Steven has often mastered his own mixes, and one reason he has avoided sending them to a mastering engineer is that audio compression is often applied by the engineer. This evens out the differences between quiet passages and loud passages so that the song sounds consistently, excitingly loud throughout. A member of Deep Purple can be heard saying to the sound engineer on the iconic Made in Japan live album, ‘Can I have everything louder than everything else?’ And this witty comment sums up the problem; if everything is louder, then nothing is louder. The so-called Loudness Wars began; ears bled, brains fried and for some listeners the music was ruined. Metallica’s fans complained that the 2008 album Death Magnetic sounded compressed and lifeless. In response to the criticism, the band’s drummer Lars Ulrich said the album was designed to sound loud in your car; he had listened to it in his car and in his view, it sounded ‘smokin’.
Compression can make songs cut through on the radio, but the point about many of Porcupine Tree’s songs is that they are often long-form stories, with dynamic contrast between loud and soft parts throughout, more like a piece of classical music than a radio-friendly pop song. Perhaps a better comparison is a song like ‘Echoes’ from Pink Floyd’s 1971 album Meddle, which at over 23 minutes fills the whole of side two on vinyl. This starts with the gentle sound of Richard Wright’s amplified piano passing through a Hammond Organ speaker, leading to beautifully delicate vocal harmonies, a monumentally funky section with a raging distorted guitar, an abstract stormy section with anguished seagull cries, finally returning to the opening piano motif, via an explosion of sunlit hope, then a nostalgic return to the beautiful vocal harmonies, rising finally into the stratosphere with a repeating theme that rises forever and ever. The longer songs of Porcupine Tree share some of Pink Floyd’s epic length and ambitious journeys.
Home demos
Steven’s early albums under the Porcupine Tree name were largely solo efforts, but even when Porcupine Tree became a proper band a lot of the material began as very detailed demos recorded in his home studio. He created the drums, bass and synthesizer parts using computer software, then added piano, guitars and vocals over the top. When the band could eventually afford to go into world-class recording studios, he would then ask them to replace the parts he had programmed into his computer with real drums, bass and synthesizers. It’s a very unusual band dynamic, and what is more remarkable in some ways is the fact that despite the amount of control he had over the whole process Steven had the musical intelligence to allow the other superb musicians in the band to bring their own personalities to the recordings – all of them are distinctively themselves but also fit perfectly into the band’s overall dynamic.
While preparing the demos in his home studio, Steven took the very prescient step of recording everything in the highest possible quality, particularly the vocals. He kept most of the vocals from the demo versions because at the time he wrote the song he felt closest to it emotionally. The poet William Wordsworth took a very different approach, ‘Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ Steven didn’t need to recall the raw emotion he felt in the white heat of creativity; he had already recorded it on tape. By doing so, he was able to solve the problem that many bands have, of trying to capture the raw emotion of the initial demo that somehow slips through the fingers like an eel. A possible way round that is to do what 1980s band T-coy did with their song Cariño. Lacking a master tape of the song, they simply pressed copies straight from the original demo they had recorded on cassette.
The new studio
Steven Wilson’s new home studio
Steven Wilson recently moved house and has had a lovely new home studio built. The studio can be seen in several home recordings he made during lockdown of classic Porcupine Tree songs on the Future Bites sessions, released on YouTube. He now has the facility to mix in Dolby Atmos surround sound, which is more sophisticated than the 5.1 sound system he had in his previous home studio. His most recent album The Future Bites is available in a Dolby Atmos mix, and he has just completed a tenth-anniversary surround sound mix of the Storm Corrosion album in both 5.1 and Atmos. He has also brought hope to fans of the project by telling Jerry Ewing of Prog magazine that he may make another album with Mikael Åkerfeldt, but only if they can work together in his home studio again.
References:
Tom Flint, Steven Wilson: Recording & Marketing Porcupine Tree (Sound on Sound magazine, June 2010) Jerry Ewing, Steven Wilson discusses possible Storm Corrosion II (Prog magazine)
Many lockdown albums will be released in the next few months. Some of the recent highlights include Richard Barbieri’s Under a Spell , and Steven Wilson’s The Future Bites, recorded before lockdown but released in January. Now Dutch musicians Remy de Wal and Karel Witte have recorded Isolated Dreams, their first album together as Ghost Echo, with almost all the music being made by the two musicians remotely. The album was written and recorded between March last year and February this year in their home studios. Remy and Karel exchanged demos and did all the mixing and production themselves, an impressive achievement.
The album opens with Black Era with Eighties-sounding drum machines and synths, an anthemic chorus and vocals that are slightly reminiscent of the pure tones Morten Harket of the Norwegian pop group A-ha (although without reaching his stratospheric heights). But this is not a straightforward pop song; although it starts in that style, it soon embraces an almost prog metal style with metallic guitars and screeching synth lines. It is a promising and mature start to the album, immediately demanding the listener’s attention.
Dust begins with a gorgeous keyboard motif, influenced as the band admit partly by the soundtracks to both of the Blade Runner films. The song features lo-fi trip hop beats and a lovely, introspective vocal line delivered with great emotion.
Late Night is the highlight of the album, an atmospherically dystopian tale of a man haunted by demons in the small hours of the night. The band openly acknowledge the song’s debt to the more recent electronic work of Steven Wilson, but the gorgeous harmonies in the chorus also hark back to Wilson’s earlier work with his band Porcupine Tree. The disturbing animated video, with a touch of psychedelia, was created by Tiago Araújo; it also has an indirect link to Steven Wilson in that it is similar to the work of Jess Cope in her animation for The People Who Eat Darkness from Wilson’s solo album To The Bone.
Tiago Araújo’s video is based on a script by Karel Witte
Null Void begins with a dark trip-hop soundscape and heavily compressed vocals, like the soundtrack to a bleak science fiction film, perhaps set in the dystopian near future when the planet has been devasted by some cataclysmic event and an oppressive regime has come to power. The song ends with a prog rock style epic guitar solo, and the repeated words ‘I see you watching me’, suggesting the protagonist is now living in a totalitarian state, before the track stutters to a halt.
Another stand-out track is Pitfalls which closes the album, beginning with a slow-burning ambient sound, building to another epic guitar solo, accompanied by Giorgio Moroder-style synth chords and prog metal guitar chords, with emotionally wrought vocals; a powerful climax to the album.
It is to the band’s credit that even at this early stage in their career they have sequenced an album of emotional highs and lows, and taken the listener on a journey of discovery. They even left off the song Conspiracy Leader described by the band as ‘a dark synthpop-goes-progmetal track featuring acoustic drums (!) by Kay Ketting’, as they did not feel that it fitted into the sequencing of the album, a brave but important artistic decision so early on.
It would be hard to tell that the album was recorded in lockdown except for the reference in the title to ‘isolated’ dreams. It is an accomplished and bold debut, immediately establishing an exciting new voice, a very effective combination of pop, prog, metal and trip-hop. Apparently, they are already writing new material which provides hope for the band’s future when they can get together in person.
Ghost Echo are:
Remy de Wal – Guitars, synthesizers, programming and backing vocals
Karel Witte – Lead vocals, guitars, synthesizers and programming
