Record Store Day exclusive remix album completes the Harmony Codex trilogy
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Steven Wilson’s Harmony Codex trilogy is complete. The original album was released in September 2023. The Deluxe Edition of The Harmony Codex included a remix album, Harmonic Distortion. The new remix album, Harmonic Divergence was released on 20 April 2024 as a limited-edition Record Store Day exclusive on vinyl only. According to the Discogs website, only 2200 copies were released, and purchasers in England had to queue up on an unseasonably cold Saturday morning to buy it from their local record store, or hope that it would be available to buy online a few days later. As Wilson said on his website,
One of the most fun and rewarding aspects of The Harmony Codex has been the opportunity to have the music remixed by so many other artists and musicians I admire. The material seemed to lend itself so well to reinterpretation.
Wilson adds a small amount of his own material, in the form of the short Codex Themes #10, #4 and #13, just as he does on the previous remix album.
Time Is Running Out Remix – Ewan Pearson Remix (9:20)
Ewan Pearson is an English producer, mixer and remixer. His remix of ‘Inclination’, another track from the original album, was released as a single on 19 January 2024. In January 2024, Alexis Petridis wrote in The Guardian that Pearson’s joyful remix ‘sprinkles sunlit Balearic euphoria’ on the original.
Wilson describes Pearson’s remix of ‘Time Is Running Out’ as a, ‘euphoric and propulsive reworking.’ It begins with bells, like the opening of ‘High Hopes’ from Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell (1994). The bells in both songs are metaphors for the passing of time, and the ephemeral nature of human life. The Pink Floyd song describes nostalgia for childhood, a common theme in Wilson’s work, a time when ‘the grass was greener’ before, ‘ a life consumed by slow decay.’ On his Harmonic Distortion remix, Mikael Åkerfeldt, lead singer of Opeth, replaces Wilson’s vocals with his own yearning, nostalgic vocals, but Pearson’s remix retains the original vocals.
An electronic voice at the start and the end of the track gives a time and date; the date appears to be 4/29/92, or April 29th 1992. It’s easy to fall down an internet rabbit hole trying to find out the significance of the date, but it was the day when the Los Angeles riots began following the acquittal of four LAPD officers who were charged with using excessive force in the arrest of Rodney King. The American rock band Sublime wrote a song about the riots called ‘April 29, 1992 (Miami)’ from their album Sublime (1996). The lyrics refer to 26th of April but apparently when the band realised their mistake, they decided to keep the take as it was so good. In April 1992, Pearson was 20 years old (he was born on 1 April 1972), and Wilson released the first ‘official’ Porcupine Tree album, On the Sunday of Life around that time (12 May 1992), but although these were important times in both men’s lives the dates don’t seem precise enough.
Pearson develops the clattering rhythm track of the original song and turns it into a joyous dance song. He completely abandons the piano introduction and adds rich synths, followed by a hefty kick drum and a pulsating single-note bass line. An ethereal synth melody floats above, giving the track a hopeful feel as additional percussion is added. A delicious percussion breakdown features Wilson’s voice tuned down to create a human beatbox, which appears a couple of times on the original track. Pearson makes the beatbox theme much more of a feature, tuning it up and down and massively extending it. It’s unclear whether there are any decipherable words here, but the heavily processed voice is still strangely moving. Pearson’s remix is almost twice as long as Wilson’s original, giving it a 12- inch single extended remix feel; it’s not until five minutes in that the first verse arrives, accompanied by metallic keyboards rather than the original piano. Pearson sensibly retains the complete guitar solo by Niko Tsonev, a highlight of the original track.
The Harmony Codex Remix – David Kollar & Arve Henriksen Remix (5:10)
This is the first of two remixes of the title track, by Norwegian jazz trumpeter Arve Henriksen and the Slovakian guitarist David Kollar, who provides guitar solos on ‘Inclination’, and ‘Actual Brutal Facts’ on the main album. It’s not so much a remix as a complete rewriting or radical re-imagining; all that remains of the original track is the voice over by Wilson’s wife Rotem. It becomes a contemplative duet between trumpet and acoustic guitar, with what sounds like Kollar on bowed mandolin about half way through. Henriksen’s trumpet is soft-grained, similar in style to the playing of Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær on the opening track of the main album, ‘Inclination.’ As Nate Chinen said in an article in The New York Times on 18 June 2009, the two trumpeters, ‘share a fondness for fragile lyricism and rippling atmosphere, building on a 40-year tradition that began with the Miles Davis album In a Silent Way [1969]’, although he goes on to say that their live performances are very different. The remix provides a very different perspective on Rotem’s spoken words. Whereas on the original track it appears that the music is beamed from a distant galaxy, here we sit much closer, and the words feel much more intimate as if we are sitting with the protagonist rather than hearing her from afar.
Actual Brutal Facts Remix – Craig Blundell Remix (5:09)
Craig Blundell plays drums on most of tracks on the original album. He was also Wilson’s drummer on the To the Bone tour in 2018 and 2019. This was Wilson’s most recent solo tour as the tour to support the 2020 album The Future Bites was cancelled due to Covid. Blundell is also a member of Trifecta, which was formed with two other Steven Wilson band members, Nick Beggs and Adam Holzman (who has remixed ‘What Life Brings’ – see below) were sound checking during the tour. They have released two albums to date – Fragments in 2021 and The New Normal earlier this year.
Blundell’s remix is fairly subtle, more of a reworking than a complete re-imagining like some of the other tracks on the two remix albums. It retains the structure of the original song, although the introduction is slightly longer.
The track begins with the original guitar introduction, but the surrounding instruments are distorted and manipulated to create a sense of dread. There’s a disturbing added bass drum, like an irregular heartbeat, and creepy whispering voices as if from a nightmare or a horror film. A slightly eerie synth or mellotron sound hovers above, like something from the soundtrack of a 1950s sci-fi movie. When Wilson’s voice enters, Blundell adds very heavy compression, a vocal effect Wilson often uses on earlier Porcupine Tree tracks.
At one minute in, the track suddenly opens out and Wilson’s vocals return to normal. The original bass line is replaced by a heavy dubstep bass throughout the rest of the song. The use of dubstep in a prog rock song is reminiscent of ‘Unsustainable’ by Muse from their 2012 album The Second Law, which combines elements of classical music, dubstep and prog rock. The overall effect is to increase the already aggressive feel of the track, and Blundell sensibly retains the brutal guitar solo from David Kollar to enhance this feel.
Economies Of Scale – Manic Street Preachers Remix (4:03)
The Manic Street Preachers’ remix of ‘Economies of Scale’ was released as a single on 24 November 2023. It also appears on the first remix album, Harmonic Distortion, released as part of the Deluxe Edition of The Harmony Codex. It’s the only track from Harmonic Divergence which is currently available to stream.
The Manics’ lead singer/guitarist, James Dean Bradfield, quoted by Jerry Ewing of Prog, said the original track reminded him of The Police in the early 80s – the ‘bareness of the vocals, the steely percussion and slight detachment’ of tracks like ‘Walking in Your Footsteps’ and ‘Murder by Numbers’ from Synchronicity (1983), and Police drummer Stewart Copeland’s soundtrack to Rumble Fish (1983) released in the same year. He said that the Manics’ bass player, Nicky Wire, ‘immediately sought to push the second half of the track in more of a Holy Bible [the Manics’ 1994 album] direction.’
Wilson told Graham Fuller of the arts desk in December 2023 the original song is an ‘electronic soul ballad’, whereas the Manics’ version is a ‘rock guitar anthem.’ It’s fascinating to compare the two versions, particularly as they both use the same vocal melody and the complete set of lyrics (unlike some of the other tracks on this album) showing what a huge difference the chords and instruments used beneath a melody can make. The Manics’ version adds a lovely extra set of guitar chords at 1.50 and a driving earworm of a riff in the chorus, effectively creating a new track which stands up very well on its own.
Rock Bottom – Adam Holzman Remix (5:01)
Adam Holzman has been Steven Wilson’s regular keyboard player since he joined the Grace for Drowning tour in late 2011 in support of Wilson’s second solo album. He has his own band, Brave New World who released a live album The Last Gig (2021). Holzman played with Miles Davis’ band from 1985 to 1989, eventually becoming Davis’ musical director. He can be heard on Davis’ Tutu (1986) and Live Around the World (1996), and the live DVD That’s What Happened: Live in Germany 1987 (2009).
Miles Davis died in 1991 when Wilson was in his mid-twenties and just finding his musical feet with Porcupine Tree, so the prospect of the two artists working together was always extremely remote. But Holzman convincingly channels the keyboard sounds of Davis’ backing band, from the late 1960s onwards when he moved from an acoustic band to an electric band, beginning with A Silent Way in 1969.
The track begins with a jazzy hi-hat rhythm, spacey electric piano and syncopated bass. Holzman retains the original vocals sung by Ninet Tayeb which still soar above, but the track has much more laid-back feel than the cinematic epic on the main album. The demo version that Tayeb first sent to Wilson was much more downbeat, so this version gives us some sense of what a low-key version of the song might have sounded like.
The original track develops into an epic power ballad, and Holzman’s remix also has a sense of movement towards a climax. A pulsating bass line is added, with full drums, and towards the end of the track fiercely rhythmic, driving synths add to the momentum. Appropriately, the guitar solo by Niko Tsonev is replaced with a sparkling synth solo.
The Harmony Codex – Mogwai Remix (9.51)
On his website, Wilson described this remix by Stuart Braithwaite, guitarist of Scottish post-rock band Mogwai, as a ‘claustrophobic treatment of the title track.’ The remix retains most of the original elements, but it has a very different feel. As Wilson says the mix, ‘adds layers of sheet noise to the original.’ The pristine clarity of the original synth chords is gradually buried beneath a sea of noise and feedback, plunging us into a dark and disconcerting world of storms at sea rather distant stars. The track begins with a juddering sound which continues as the original track fades in. A guitar wails nervously in the background. Mournful, ponderous drums are added. The only respite comes at the end with a gentle piano theme. The overall effect is as if Mogwai have taken one their atmospheric pieces written for a film score such as ‘Ghost Nets’ from the soundtrack for Before the Flood (2016) and overlaid it on top of Wilson’s song. Wilson himself has previously flooded his crystalline sound worlds with noise, particularly on his first solo album Insurgentes (2008) on tracks such as ‘Salvaging.’
