In the early years Steven Wilson’s band, Porcupine Tree, were often compared to Pink Floyd and Wilson himself admitted the importance of that musical influence. He later distanced himself from the Floyd, moving towards a more distinctive sound. It is not surprising that he came to be regarded as a new hero in the genre of Progressive Rock, even though again he has often tried to distance himself from that label.
Wilson grew up not only listening to TheDark Side of the Moon but also to Love to Love You Baby by Donna Summer, produced by disco and electronic dance music pioneer Giorgio Moroder. So the fact that his latest album The Future Bites™ heavily features electronics and very little electric guitar should not come as a surprise, although some of his fans have been upset by the change of direction.
Wilson announced a while ago that he would be working with producer David Kosten, who makes dance music and electronica under the name Faultline, which suggested that another change in direction was coming. Wilson doesn’t like standing still or repeating himself musically, which means that over his very long and varied career he has written music which could be defined as…psychedelia, space rock, trip-hop, jazz fusion, progressive rock, progressive metal, pop, ambient, art rock, alternative rock, pop rock, drone music and trance. What unites Wilson’s music in all these different styles is his searching musical intelligence, a gift for melody, the willingness to innovate even at the risk of alienating some of his fans, and the ability to write songs that sound sophisticated yet familiar. Like the film director Stanley Kubrick, one of Wilson’s cultural heroes, he likes each piece of work to be different from anything else he has produced.
What is rather surprising is that Wilson admitted in a recent interview to promote the new album that he is no longer inspired by the guitar,
I got to the point where I would sit with a guitar on my knee and I didn’t know what else I could do…I’ve done everything with this thing.
He has spent the last few years collecting vintage keyboards, which he installed in his new studio. Most of the songs on the new album are built around these keyboards, rather than around the guitars that feature heavily in most of his music to date.
Steven Wilson’s new studio (Twitter)
Wilson’s new album which feels very contemporary from a musical point of view; previous solo albums have sometimes been consciously nostalgic, such as the superb 2013 album The Raven That Refused to Sing which referenced the peak of 1970s progressive rock story-telling, and To the Bone (2017) which was influenced by 1980s art rock. His current abandonment of the guitar as his main instrument perhaps reflects its demise in the 21st century – and certainly the demise of the guitar band. It will be interesting to see whether the increase in guitar sales during lockdown will lead to new guitar bands being formed.
But if Wilson has moved on from the guitar at present, one of the themes of the album has troubled him for many years: the way that the human brain has evolved in the internet era. He first explored the possible negative effect of the technology 25 years ago, with Porcupine Tree, in the song ‘Every Home is Wired’ on the album Signify and on Fear of a Blank Planet in 2007.
The other major theme of the album is consumerism, the urge to buy vastly overpriced ‘designer’ products. He set up a website selling products branded with the TFB™ logo, mostly items which would usually be inexpensive. The site was a well-executed concept, a sarcastic joke, although some of the products were genuinely for sale such as volcanic ash soap. The branded toilet rolls suddenly took on an unexpected and highly ironic resonance during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic when there were shortages of toilet paper in the UK and elsewhere.
The opening pair of tracks Unself and Selfare a bitter commentary on self-identity in the age of social media. Unself, which is only a minute long, starts with a gently-strummed acoustic guitar, sounding distant as it’s drenched in echo, perhaps a nostalgic nod to Wilson’s past as a guitarist. The instruments fall away and his solo voice is brought sharply into focus with the words ‘the self can only love itself’, leading to the industrial funk and pulsating sequencers of Self, a fierce critique of the effects of social media,
Self sees a billion stars But still can only self-regard
Richard Barbieri, former keyboard player with Japan and Porcupine Tree provides atmospheric soundscapes on the track.
King Ghost is one of the most beautiful songs Wilson has ever written, with poetic lyrics, haunting synthesiser lines, and soaring falsetto vocals which create an atmosphere of sparkling luminosity perfectly matched by Jess Cope in the official video.
12 Things I Forgot shows that one of the things that Wilson has not forgotten is how to write simple, catchy pop songs just as he did with Porcupine Tree (‘Lazarus’ from Deadwing and ‘Trains’ from In Absentia), on his solo albums (‘Pariah’ from To the Bone) and with Blackfield (pick almost any song).
Eminent Sleaze is crisp, dystopian, industrial funk, similar in style to the equally satisfying ‘Song of I’ from his last album To the Bone. The song features very few electronic instruments. It includes cameos from Nick Beggs on bass and Chapman Stick, Adam Holzman on keyboards, and strings from the London Session Orchestra. Yet the production cleverly combines these elements to create an electronic sound. The central character, as shown in the official video, encapsulates Wilson’s fears that social media and technology companies have more power now than politicians; the title of the song is a play on the term éminence grise, the hidden power behind politicians.
Politicians don’t escape Wilson’s searching gaze either. In Man of the People he adopts the point of view of a member of the family of a politician who has been damaged by a scandal, the long-suffering partner who stands beside them with a fixed smile for the cameras. It’s a gentle, poignant song which shows some degree of sympathy for the victims who stay with the disgraced politician even though they know that the love and trust they receive are fake. The song includes some of the most powerful lines on the album,
Ambition froze me out
Like a demonic winter.
The centre-piece of the album, both in terms of concept and length, is Personal Shopper. It’s a powerful satire, urging us to buy things we don’t need and can’t afford, to ‘have now, pay in another life’. It has the melancholy disco feel of Steven’s most recent album with no-man, love you to bits.
The middle section of the track includes a list of pointless items which the modern consumer can buy, read out by perhaps the most famous shopper of all, Sir Elton John. The list of possible items to buy has been approved by Sir Elton himself – for instance he rejected a reference to ‘mobile phone skins’ as he doesn’t own mobile phone himself so wouldn’t buy a cover for it. The list includes obvious examples like ‘designer trainers’ and ‘monogrammed luggage’, but also ‘deluxe edition box sets’. Ironically, Wilson has released a deluxe edition of this album, limited to 5000. This is done with great self-awareness of course. Wilson has also admitted that he does enjoy shopping, including buying box sets…
In Follower the target is social media again, and in particular social media influencers. It’s the most direct song on the album, and the one that sounds most like a conventional rock song, showing Wilson’s anger at the influencers with their needy cry ‘Oh follow me, follow me’. These lines show Wilson’s view of the vitriol that the internet (or more accurately the people that use it) can generate.
Future biting
Millions spiting
Wilson has often ended his albums, both as a solo artist and with Porcupine Tree, with a transcendent ballad. For instance in 2002 he ended In Absentia, one of Porcupine Tree’s heaviest and most disturbing albums, with the beautiful solo ballad ‘Collapse the Light Into Earth’ (recently revisited in one his Future Bites Sessions recorded in lockdown). After the fury and satire of much of the rest of the album Count of Unease plays a similar role. Wilson plays all the instruments here, except for the ‘drone’ credited to co-producer David Kosten. It’s a lovely end to the album.
On The Future Bites, Wilson seems to have found a new musical language as he stares the future in the face. As is always the case with his work, the album is superbly recorded and produced. Where it differs from much of his previous work is that he has eliminated the signs of musical virtuosity that were so spectacularly and thrillingly present before, and has created music that serves his message as directly and compellingly as possible. Does that mean his music is no longer ‘progressive’? Perhaps in the narrow sense of the musical genre that is Prog Rock, this album marks a departure, but in terms of Steven’s musical journey, this album shows that he is continuing to make progress, constantly moving forward into the future.
This review was originally published at 7.16 pm on 29 January 2021, and republished with minor amendments on 12 January 2026 at 09.53 am to mark the fifth anniversary of the album’s release.
Deluxe re-issue of Porcupine Tree’s 2005 album casts new light on a classic
*****
The cover of Deadwing by Lasse Hoile
Deadwing is the second album in a run of three classic releases from Porcupine Tree, starting with In Absentia in 2002 and ending with Fear of a Blank Planetin 2007. It was released in the middle of that sequence, in 2005. The Deluxe Edition, released on CD in March 2023, is housed in a handsome hardback book of around a hundred pages, including photos and artwork by Lasse Hoile and Mike Bennion, and detailed articles by Stephen Humphries.
In 2017, the band’s singer, guitarist and main songwriter Steven Wilson remastered the album for release on vinyl, and that mix was included for the first time on CD. The first CD contains the full album and the second CD includes five B-sides. The third has 13 demos, the first seven of which were recorded by Wilson, the eighth by Wilson and drummer Gavin Harrison and the rest by the full band with Richard Barbieri on keyboards and Colin Edwin on bass. The generous fourth disc is a Blu-Ray which includes: a new documentary Never Stop the Car on a Drive in the Dark – the Making of Deadwing directed by Jeremy George; the album and B-sides remastered in high resolution stereo (96/24 LPCM); a 5.1 surround sound mix including four B-sides; a concert video recorded for the German Rockpalast television series at Live Music Hall, Köln, Germany in November 2005.
The Deadwing film script
The cover of the Deadwing script by Steven Wilson and Mike Bennion. Source: Twitter/X @PorcupineTree
Many of the songs on the album relate to a film script of the same name, written by Wilson and the director Mike Bennion, with whom Wilson had previously collaborated, writing music for several TV commercials directed by Bennion. The film of the Deadwing script was never made, although it did resurface in 2020 in a new, simpler version called And No Birds Sing. A short teaser (featuring a brief cameo of Wilson as a rough sleeper) was released on YouTube in September of that year, but to date the film hasn’t been completed.
And No Birds Sing (Teaser). Directed by Mike Bennion, produced by Gaby Whyte Hart, sound design by Steven Wilson
In the meantime, the Deadwing album was released partly to help the film get made – Wilson and Bennion were having difficulty creating any interest in their script. The irony is that the album, as Wilson admits in the fascinating documentary included in this Deluxe Edition, is based on a script for a film no one has ever seen and on characters known only to Wilson and Bennion. Wilson enjoys the irony, but does admit that the problem – if there is one – is that the album is therefore impenetrable both ‘lyrically and conceptually.’ What has made the album even more difficult to interpret – until now – is that it has never been entirely clear which of the songs on the album relate to the film script. Wilson admits that around half of the nine tracks on the album are taken from the script, including the title track, Lazarus, Open Car, and Arriving Somewhere But Not Here. He gives tantalising glimpses of the film’s plot, admitting to Humphries, for instance, that the eerie spoken words on the title track ‘Like a cancer scare/In a dentist’s chair’ are taken directly from the script. The images and photography, which are extensively and beautifully presented in the lavish book, are also almost entirely based on the film script.
In the documentary, Wilson refers to the two main characters in the script, David and Elizabeth. David works in a sound studio in Soho, London. The first 15 pages of the Deadwing script were posted online, and can now be found here. In those pages, David is seen working on the sound for a video and is horrified when he glimpses a small boy who appears mysteriously in one of the scenes he is editing. He later meets Elizabeth on a Tube train platform – it’s unclear who she is, although we are told that she is a young woman in her late twenties, with a long red coat and red high heels.
A fascinating revelation made by Wilson in the documentary is that David is the only survivor of a religious cult after the rest of them died in a mass suicide twenty years before the start of the film. He fled the cult as a child, and the opening scene of the film script shows a three-year-old boy running, barefoot, through the woods at night wearing a nightshirt. Just before this, we see the boy’s mother singing a lullaby to him; are we to assume that his mother was a member of the cult and died in the mass suicide? The song Lazarus seems to be a dialogue between the boy and his dead mother – David is mentioned by name in the song, ‘My David, don’t you worry.’
Wilson has often written about religion in his lyrics for Porcupine Tree, and Halo on this album is about the holier-than-thou attitude of a born-again Christian,
I’m not the same as you Cause I’ve seen the light
Wilson has also had a fascination with religious cults. The track Last Chance to Evacuate Planet Earth Before It Is Recycled (Lightbulb Sun 2000) features real spoken word footage from the leader of the Heaven’s Gate religious cult, 39 of whom committed suicide in March 1997 in the tragic belief that they had left their bodies to return to the ‘Level Above Human in Distant Space.’
Wilson revisited the theme in The Blind House (The Incident 2009), which is again based on a real-life case, when a police raid in 2008 on the Yearning for Zion ranch in Texas led to the release of 400 children, some of whom had married the polygamist cult leader who is now serving a lengthy prison sentence for sexual activities with minors. It’s intriguing that, in the interview with Humphries, Wilson says the ghosts of the dead cult members are now returning to reclaim David. This combines Wilson’s scepticism about religion (inherited from his scientist father, as Wilson says in his book Limited Edition of One (Constable 2022), with his love of ghost stories – as shown on his solo album The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories) from 2013, which is based on a series of ghost stories that Wilson wrote.
Despite the revelation about David and the cult from which he escaped, Wilson admitted to Humphries that using a film script that very few people have ever seen (although Barbieri and Edwin did read it when recording the album) could make the album ‘a little unrelatable.’ He said that ‘nobody knew who David was’. We may have to wait until the film is released to find out more about him.
But the film script is not crucial to an understanding of the album and an appreciation of its emotional resonance. In a revealing section of the documentary, Wilson says that songs like Lazarus have universal themes, such as childhood nostalgia and regret, lyrical themes which have continued to haunt his solo albums including The Raven … and Hand. Cannot. Erase. (2015). He modestly fails to mention the fact that the success of Lazarus (with over 26 million plays on Spotify it’s the band’s third most popular song, and Wilson has played it live around 500 times) is partly due to the gorgeous melody and the vocals which are delivered with sweet sincerity. Critics may agonise over the exact meaning of a lyric, whereas listeners may respond to the emotional truth of a song which is revealed as much by the music as by the words.
The demo tracks
Another revelation – perhaps more startling – is that Lazarus originally contained extra material as can be heard on the demo version on CD2. From around 2:25 to 3:10 there’s a very strange bridge section which sounds completely incongruous, much more like the early psychedelic pastiches of Porcupine Tree when the band was still Wilson’s solo project. It’s a very unusual lapse of judgment on Wilson’s part – most of his demos are very similar to the final versions, but in this case Andy Karp from the record company said that the demo version of the song ‘suddenly went haywire with a real curveball of a middle part.’ Karp and the band’s manager Andy Leff shared the same reaction to the middle section. Their role was to turn a good piece of art into a great piece of art, just as the poet Ezra Pound did when editing T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece The Waste Land (1922).
Another, more subtle but equally important difference between the demo and the final version of a song is Arriving Somewhere But Not Here. The demo begins with two minutes of ethereal choirs and the sound of a church organ. As Barbieri says in the documentary, Wilson asked him to add his distinctive sound design to the opening of the track, replacing the demo version with a ‘slowly building backdrop’ that leads much more effectively to the ‘dramatic moment’ when the main guitar theme first appears. Barbieri adds the ticking of a grandfather clock, electronic bleeps, backwards piano and a synth patch called Arab Soft Synth to create a richly enigmatic soundscape which creates, as he told Humphries, a ‘serene but portentous mood.’
The other demos are mostly versions of tracks which appear on the final album or as B-sides which are already reviewed in detail in On Track … Porcupine Tree. The B-sides on CD 2 are also covered in the book, mostly as tracks on the Stars Die compilation (see pages 130 – 132). There are however four new demo songs in the Deluxe Edition which aren’t reviewed elsewhere:
Godfearing (Wilson) [04:57]
This track has been available for about ten years on Wilson’s SoundCloud account, where he says that he’s not sure which album it belongs to, ‘while it shares lyrical themes with the songs on In Absentia, one of the melodies seems to relate to another piece from [the] Deadwing era.’ It now seems he has decided that it belongs to Deadwing.
This is an archetypal Porcupine Tree track from the band’s later era, with opening metal riffs that could have been written by the Swedish prog metal band Opeth (with whom Wilson was working around this time); lovely delicate vocals in the verses contrasting with an epic earworm of a chorus; a very heavy riff that could have come from Deadwing; a contemplative section with heavily echoed piano; imaginative use of hammered dulcimer and a taste of Mellotron … all beautifully combined into less than five minutes. It’s good that the track has finally found a home on an official release.
Vapour Trails (Wilson) [03.53]
Not to be confused with the single Vapour Trail Lullaby which was written before the sessions for In Absentia but wasn’t released until 2010, when it was given away as a single with copies of Wilson’s solo DVD Insurgentes.
The song is a reminder (if one is needed) of Wilson’s supreme ability to write a simple, heartfelt ballad – recent examples include 12 Things I Forgot from his solo album The Future Bites(2021), Of The New Day from the Porcupine Tree album Closure / Continuation (2022), and What Life Brings from his solo album The Harmony Codex(2023).
Its status as a demo is shown by the slightly strained vocals, and the very simple arrangement mostly based around strummed acoustic guitar. But there’s some lovely George Harrison-like guitar later in the song, and at 3:30 there’s a heart-stopping moment when the instruments briefly drop out, leaving emotive multi-layered vocals hanging in the air like perfume.
Instrumental Demo 1 (Porcupine Tree) [05.19]
This is one of five demos featuring the complete band. Wilson had previously presented the band with songs as completed demos on which he played and sang all the parts, but on Deadwing, he was beginning to relax control a little and allow other band members into the writing process. On the main album, Halo and Glass Arm Shattering are written by the whole band, and The Start Of Something Beautiful is co-written with Gavin Harrison.
This song is notable for a typically melodic, wide ranging bass line from Colin Edwin in the verse, robust and intelligent drumming from Harrison, some spacious soundscaping from Barbieri, and rocky guitar from Wilson.
Instrumental Demo 2 (Porcupine Tree) [05.23]
Harrison says that the danger of a whole band writing together in a room is that they end up playing for half an hour in E major, but this song features an uplifting and imaginative sequence of key changes from around 1:15 which lift the song beyond the most basic of demos. With more work, this could have been turned into a classic Porcupine Tree song. From around 3:30 Wilson shows off his skills as a guitarist and at 4:00 Barbieri adds evocative keyboards.
The surround sound mix
The Deluxe Edition provides an opportunity to hear Deadwing in a surround sound mix in 5.1 only – it was much later that Wilson began to mix in the more immersive and sophisticated Dolby Atmos format. The first Porcupine Tree album to benefit from 5.1 surround sound was In Absentia, mixed by Elliot Scheiner. Wilson worked with Scheiner on the 5.1 mix of Deadwing and by the next album Fear of a Blank Planet (2007) he had learned the art so well that his surround sound mix was nominated for a Grammy award, as was his mix of the next album The Incident (2009). Wilson has since become the go-to surround sound mixer for classic albums by bands such as King Crimson, Roxy Music, Jethro Tull, Yes, Gentle Giant, XTC and Tears For Fears. More recently he mixed his latest solo album The Future Bites (2021) and the new Porcupine Tree album Closure/Continuation (2022) in Dolby Atmos as well, adding more precise placement of instruments in the surround sound picture and height information as well.
The 5.1 mix provides a coherent, immersive experience that creates a unique sound world, strengthening some of the weaker tracks by drawing them into a creative whole. Backing vocals become much better defined in the surround sound image. Heavy metal guitar riffs are visceral. Fizzing synths that are hidden in the stereo mix lurk menacingly. Excellent use is made of the rear speakers, with the spoken word passages in the title track leaping out to startle the listener.
Two tracks in particular benefit from the mix. Mellotron Scratch brings out the song’s beauty and pain. The bass drum at the start is much more prominent, the syncopated rhythm creating a deliciously uneasy effect. The harmony voices are gorgeous. Later in the song, guitars and drums join in a sudden, robust moment as the bass drum returns.
The final track, Glass Arm Shattering, offers a gentle easing of tension after the visceral onslaught of much of the rest of the album. In stereo, the simplicity of the track is what is most noticeable after the proggy polyrhythms of the previous track, Start Of Something Beautiful. The surround sound mix turns the track into more of an epic, a climax like Eclipse, the closing track of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon. The track begins with nostalgic vinyl crackles, which lead to lush drums and electronics. Slide guitars in the rear speakers add to the richness of the picture, and the multi-layered vocals take the listener to a new heights of emotion. The track ends with a touch of subtle humour, the sound of a stylus in a crackly groove on a record circling around the surround sound image turning the whole room into a vast record player.
Conclusion
Deadwing is a transitional album. It consolidated the distinctive Porcupine Tree blueprint, a hybrid of progressive metal riffs, melodic strength and rich vocal harmonies that had been a feature of the previous album, In Absentia. What Deadwing lacks compared to that album is conceptual coherence. The next album, Fear Of A Blank Planet, used the same musical formula and added a very strong concept, making it the band’s masterpiece. But Deadwing does include two classic Porcupine Tree tracks, Arriving Somewhere But Not Here and Lazarus, and most of the other material is strong. The Deluxe Edition adds a great deal to the enjoyment of the album, an insight into the creative process and an excellent surround sound mix.
This post was originally posted on 10 April 2023 and updated and reposted at 12.46 on 20 December 2025
1 Deadwing [09:46] 2 Shallow [04:17] 3 Lazarus [04:19] 4 Halo [04:39] 5 Arriving Somewhere But Not Here [12:02] 6 Mellotron Scratch [06:57] 7 Open Car [03:44] 8 Start Of Something Beautiful [07:43] 9 Glass Arm Shattering [06:08]
CD2 B-Sides
1 Revenant [03:05] 2 So Called Friend [04:49] 3 Shesmovedon [04:55] 4 Mother And Child Divided [05:00] 5 Half Light [06:38]
CD3 Demos
1 Arriving Somewhere But Not Here (demo) [13:03] 2 Godfearing (demo) [04:57] 3 Lazarus (demo) [04:10] 4 Open Car (demo) [05:08] 5 Vapour Trails (demo) [03:53] 6 Shallow (demo) [04:15] 7 Deadwing (demo) [10:35] 8 Mother And Child Divided (demo) [05:02] 9 Instrumental Demo 1 [05:19] 10 Halo (demo) [04:50] 11 Instrumental Demo 2 [05:23] 12 So Called Friend (demo) [05:01] 13 Glass Arm Jam [04:19]
Blu-ray
Documentary Film, Rockpalast Broadcast & Extras 1 Never Stop the Car on a Drive in the Dark (Deadwing documentary [54:20] 2 Lazarus (promo video) [04:19] 3 Deadwing (remastered album 96/24 LPCM stereo) [59:37] 4 Deadwing B-sides (96/24 LPCM stereo) [25:25] 5 Deadwing 5.1 surround sound mix (including 4 bonus tracks) 48/24 (2005 by Elliot Scheiner and Steven Wilson) [59:37] 6 Additional 5.1 mixes of B-sides Revenant, Mother and Child Divided, Half-Light and Shesmovedon [19.47] Rockpalast WDR TV broadcast: 7 Intro [00:35] 8 Blackest Eyes [04:33] In Absentia 9 Lazarus [03:58] Deadwing 10 Futile [02:31] In Absentia bonus track 11 Interview [06:02] 12 Mother And Child Divided [04:50] Deadwing B-side 3 So Called Friend [05:00] Deadwing B-side 14 Arriving Somewhere But Not Here [12:24] Deadwing 15 Sound Of Muzak [05:06] In Absentia 16 Interview 2 [01:20] 17 Start Of Something Beautiful [07:24] Deadwing 18 Halo [05:03] Deadwing 19 Interview 3 [03:35] 20 Radioactive Toy [06:05] On The Sunday Of Life 21 Trains [07.18] In Absentia
References
Never Stop the Car on a Drive in the Dark – the Making of Deadwing directed by Jeremy George Deadwing: The History and track-by-track by Stephen Humphries (Deadwing book) Twitter/X @PorcupineTree – first draft of Deadwing Script Limited Edition Of One – How To Succeed In The Music Industry Without Being Part of The Mainstream by Steven Wilson with Mick Wall (Constable, an imprint of Little, Brown April 2022) Godfearing on Steven Wilson’s SoundCloud account
The Cover of The Overview by Steven Wilson, designed by Hajo Müller
His Eighth Solo Album
The Overview is Steven Wilson’s eighth solo album, released on 14 March 2025. It charted at number three in the UK, the fourth of Wilson’s albums (as a solo artist or with his band Porcupine Tree) in a row to reach the UK top five. On his website, Wilson described the album as ‘a Kubrickian journey into the darkness of outer space.’
Steven Wilson. Image credit: Kevin Westerberg
The Overview Effect
The album takes its title from the Overview Effect, a term coined by author and space philosopher Frank White in his book The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution to describe the cognitive shift experienced by astronauts looking back on the Earth from space.
“[The Overview Effect] is the experience of seeing first hand the reality that the Earth is in space, a tiny, fragile ball of life, “hanging in the void,” shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. The experience often transforms astronauts’ perspective on the planet and humanity’s place in the universe. Some common aspects of it are a feeling of awe, a profound understanding of the interconnection of all life, and a renewed sense of responsibility for taking care of the environment.”
Frank White
The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution (First Edition Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1987)
White, who interviewed astronauts about their experiences, wrote that during the initial stages of the Space Program, it was thought that, ‘All the astronauts have religious or spiritual experiences and that they all had their lives fundamentally changed… The reality is far more complex than that.’ He quoted the astronaut Don Lind, who said that having spoken to many other astronauts, he concluded that space travel would intensify previously held religious convictions but wouldn’t make someone religious.
The Blue Marble. The Earth Seen from Apollo 17. Source: Wikimedia Commons
One of the most strikingly negative reactions to travelling into space, mentioned by Wilson in several interviews, was – ironically – from Captain Kirk, the actor William Shatner. In his 2022 book, Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder, he wrote that when he was in space, he experienced profound sadness and grief. Eventually, this became a profound feeling of hope, inspiring him to say that we should ‘rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us.’
“There was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death. I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing… Everything I had expected to see was wrong… The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness.“
Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder (Atria Books, 2022)
William Shatner as Captain Kirk. Source: NBC Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wilson coined his own phrase for the Overview Effect, ‘cosmic vertigo’, meaning a sense of the fragility of the Earth, and the insignificance of our lives in relation to the vastness of the cosmos. The existential struggle to make something of our lives, to make them signify something, is a recurring theme in Wilson’s lyrics, going back to Signify (Porcupine Tree, 1996). He told Dave Everley of Prog that ‘Religion is a classic manifestation of cosmic vertigo.’ As an atheist, he said that to give life meaning, humankind had invented religion.
‘The Earth doesn’t matter, our life doesn’t matter, and it’s a beautiful thing to accept this idea and enjoy the ride.’
Steven Wilson
Wilson’s solution to the apparent futility and insignificance of our lives, and of the Earth in relation to the vastness of the universe, is not to embrace religion or misery. He told Musicwaves magazine that, ‘The Earth doesn’t matter, our life doesn’t matter, and it’s a beautiful thing to accept this idea and enjoy the ride.’
Frank White wrote, ‘ The impact of the [Overview] Effect is not limited to space travellers alone.’ Wilson described the profound awe and sense of insignificance he experienced when he visited the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in the Atacama Desert, Chile, in early 2025. At the album launch at IMAX in London in February 2025, a photo of Wilson standing next to the telescope was exhibited on the vast screen, and Wilson was a tiny orange dot wearing a hi-vis jacket. Reflecting on the Overview Effect led him to consider our insignificance and how it shapes our sense of perspective. During the roundtable discussion at the album launch, he said he could have called the album ‘Perspective … but it’s not as good a title as The Overview.’
The Gap Between Releases
The gap between the release of Wilson’s previous album, The Harmony Codex, in September 2023 and the release of The Overview was just under 18 months, a relatively short period considering the gap between his previous solo albums was around two to three years. He told Paul Sinclair of Super Deluxe Edition that there was a pragmatic reason for this. The Harmony Codex was his first album after COVID, and he felt that the previous album, The Future Bites, had been ‘very divisive amongst my fans.’ He didn’t book a tour supporting The Harmony Codex because he wasn’t sure how people would react to the album. By the time he realised that the album had gone down well, it was too late to book a tour for 2024. He decided that in the meantime, he might as well make another record.
The Concept
While he was looking for a concept, Wilson met up with Alex Milas, Editor-in-Chief of Metal Hammer and founder of Space Rocks. This organisation describes itself as ‘a celebration of space exploration and the art, music, and culture it inspires.’ Wilson’s original idea was to collaborate with Milas on an exhibition or an installation for which he created the music. Then Milas mentioned the Overview Effect.
The idea immediately appealed to Wilson. As a teenager, he had a fascination with space. He used to go out on summer evenings to gaze up at the stars. He enjoyed space films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Solaris (1972), and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). He wrote tracks about space on some of his previous albums, particularly for Porcupine Tree. At the IMAX album launch, he said that in a ‘split-second moment’ during his conversation with Milas, he had the title and the concept and heard the music in his head.’ He saw it as a ‘piece of cinema for the ears.’
He told Stephen Humphries of Under The Radar that he had written several albums about ‘planet Earth and human beings and the way we engage with each other.’ It was time to ‘write an album about something bigger than us.’
Humphries asked him why he was ‘asking these bigger questions’ now. Wilson admitted that perhaps he was having ‘my own existential crisis… of wanting more perspective on my own life’. Even so, he found it ‘fascinating’ to consider the vast numbers and distances in the universe. He told John Earls of NME that having a concept for the album before he started writing it led him to produce something that ‘intuitively felt like something long-form, analogous to a novel or a film.’
‘This record is definitely more informed by the genre hitherto referred to as progressive rock.’
Steven Wilson
Wilson told Dave Everley, ‘This record is definitely more informed by the genre hitherto referred to as progressive rock.’ Wilson has an uneasy relationship with the genre. His previous three albums certainly strayed from prog rock. To the Bone was an art-rock record with only one long track, ‘Detonation’; it also contained a happy pop song, ‘Permanating.’ The Future Bites was resolutely electronic. Its longest track, ‘Personal Shopper’, was more like dystopian disco than prog. That album brought some of the best reviews of his career, ‘from the more indie, hipster people that hadn’t really paid attention to me before’, but it also lost some of his core prog audience. To an extent, he has always enjoyed challenging his prog audience, but he also respects that audience. Although the album does mark a return to prog rock, it’s far from the loving, nostalgic homage to prog of his 2013 solo album The Raven that Refused to Sing (and other stories).
The album’s structure
The album is divided into two long tracks of about 20 minutes each, ‘Objects Outlive Us’ and ‘The Overview.’ Wilson told The Prog Report that an album with only two long tracks was ‘a wilfully uncommercial gesture’ and that ‘the reason there are two pieces is I’m old and I still think in terms of vinyl.’
Wilson referenced other records with the same structure, such as Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells(1973), Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way (1969) and Tangerine Dream’s Rubycon (1975). He told Tobias Fischer of Tonefloat Magazine that he has always liked ‘great double albums with just one track per side.’ He referred to Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973 UK, 1974 US) by Yes, which he remixed in 2016, as a ‘much maligned record, but I love it.’
Writing the Album
Wilson told Anil Prasad of Innerviews that ‘the idea and title came before I had written a single note of music… It’s nice when something this strong falls into your lap.’ The album almost wrote itself. Wilson wrote it in the order we hear it, and the lyrics came last.
At a Q&A session at Cultplex in Manchester in February 2025, Wilson told John Robb that ‘one doorway led to the next’, and that the album flowed out of him, ‘it doesn’t always work that way.’ It took Wilson only eight weeks to record the album at his home studio. The process was quite different from recording The Raven That Refused to Sing in a studio, surrounded by other musicians. He played all the bass parts, as he did on the most recent Porcupine Tree album, Closure/Continuation(2022). When he toured with Porcupine Tree, Nate Navarro played the bass parts. When he toured The Overview, the bass parts were played by Nick Beggs.
The Musicians
As with all his albums, except the very early ones with Porcupine Tree, Wilson used real drummers rather than using electronic drums or playing them himself. For the first side of the record, he used Russell Holzman, son of his regular keyboard player, Adam Holzman. Wilson said he wanted a drummer with no apparent connection to progressive rock, or even to rock music in general. Holzman plays drums for the American singer Caroline Polachek. Wilson had seen his renditions of classic drum and bass breaks on Instagram. On the second side, Wilson brought in his regular drummer, Craig Blundell, partly because of his experience as a prog rock drummer with Steve Hackett, but also because of his wide-ranging knowledge of multiple musical genres.
OBJECTS OUTLIVE US
No Monkey’s Paw
The opening describes an eerie meeting on a misty moor. Wilson refers to two ghost stories that may have occurred on the moor (recalling the ghost stories on which his 2013 album The Raven that Refused to Sing is based) but says that neither happened here.
First, there is ‘no ghost on the moor’/no open window’. This appears to reference Kate Bush’s 1978 song Wuthering Heights, set ‘Out on the wily, windy moors’, when the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw haunts Heathcliff at his window. Bush, of whose music Wilson is a huge fan, memorably sings,
‘Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy I’ve come home, I’m so cold Let me in your window.’
Second, there is ‘no monkey’s paw’. The Monkey’s Paw is a ghost story by the English author W.W. Jacobs, first published in 1902. It describes a magical monkey’s paw, which provides three wishes that lead to unforeseen and terrible consequences. According to the story, the holy man who put the spell on the paw, ‘wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow.’
The Alien on the Moor. Image courtesy of Miles Skarin/Crystal Spotlight
Instead, Wilson’s protagonist looks beyond Earthbound ghost stories and into space, encountering an alien on the moor. The alien pointedly says, ‘Did you forget I exist?’ The protagonist blames the alien for playing ‘too hard to get.’ In the BFI roundtable discussion to launch the album, Wilson said the reference to the alien is ‘a bit tongue in cheek’, but that there was a ‘serious point’, which is that we spend too much time looking down at our digital devices, and not enough time looking up ‘with a sense of awe’ at the sky and the stars, as he did when he was a child. We have lost our sense of curiosity and wonder and are obsessed with chasing likes and followers on social media, a central theme of Wilson’s 2020 album The Future Bites. The theme that technology has changed the course of human evolution, and not necessarily for the better, goes back to Fear of a Blank Planet, the 2007 album Wilson wrote for Porcupine Tree.
The track opens with Wilson singing in a gorgeous falsetto, showing how strong his upper register has become since he started developing this part of his vocal range on The Future Bites. His voice is bathed in echo, evoking the ethereal rather than the Earthbound. His voice is gentle and intimate, beautifully contemplative, enriched by the sound design and spacey effects created by Randy McStine, who also plays guitar and sings backing vocals on the album. Wilson plays the soft-edged bass line on an acoustic bass. The alien’s voice is Wilson’s own, transposed to a lower register using the same effect as on ‘King Ghost’ from The Future Bites.
The Buddha Of The Modern Age
The Buddha of the title refers to Siddhartha Gautama, better known as the Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. According to Buddhist teaching, the Buddha will be succeeded by Maitreya, sometimes referred to as ‘The Buddha of the modern age.’ Wilson’s lyrics refer to a contemporary Buddha, who is ‘barely paid minimum wage’ for doling out ‘truth and healthy karma.’ Wilson says his teaching is ignored. In a poetic line, he refers to humanity ignoring the truths revealed by the wise men of the past, who are now mere shadows to us, ‘the blurred photos of the ghosts of men’.
The lyrics in this section are the most personal on the album. Wilson is rarely so open and direct. He told Anil Prasad of Innerviews, ‘I’ve always been slightly wary of being too preachy or holier than thou,’ but he feels so strongly about the effect of meat eating not just on animals but on the planet that he’s ‘becoming a little more forthright about my veganism.’
‘Slaughter our sacred cow To stuff our stupid mouths Already fit to burst Still the insatiable thirst To kill over and over’
Wilson is highly critical of what he sees as the failure of our stewardship of the planet, which we regard as ours to treat however we want. The phrase ‘insatiable thirst’ refers to our appetite for food, our obsessive consumerism, and our destruction of the planet, ‘We interlopers, the inferior species/Wallow in our own faeces.’
The Destruction of our Planet. Image courtesy of Miles Skarin/Crystal Spotlight
The track begins with a resolute piano motif which matches the stridency of Wilson’s opinions, soon joined by drummer Russell Holzman on icy cymbals – the first time we hear him on the album. Randy McStine and Willow Beggs soon join him on rich, layered backing vocals. Willow is a singer-songwriter and the daughter of bass player Nick Beggs. The backing vocals are reminiscent of those on Porcupine Tree songs like ‘Heartattack in a Layby’ from In Absentia (2002), which ends with 38 tracks of multi-tracked voices. The song builds to a climax, with thundering drums, then drops away on the word ‘try’, creating a moment of compassion for humanity as a gentler piano melody ends the track.
Objects: Meanwhile
Steven Wilson – Objects Outlive Us: Objects: Meanwhile. Video by Miles Skarin
The lyrics for this section were written by Andy Partridge of the English rock band XTC, who also wrote the lyrics for the title track of Wilson’s 2017 album To The Bone (2017) and for his 2018 single How Big the Space. Wilson’s admiration for Partridge dates back to XTC’s formation of the fictitious band The Dukes of Stratosphear, which inspired Wilson to form his own fictional band, Porcupine Tree, which eventually became a real band.
Wilson has said that Partridge and Ray Davies of the Kinks are the best at describing everyday lives in their lyrics. While writing The Overview, he was remixing XTC’s 1984 album The Big Express in surround sound. The Big Express is a concept album about life in Swindon, a town in Wiltshire in the southwest of England. The song that interested Wilson particularly was ‘The Everyday Story of Smalltown’. Partridge told Todd Bernhardt of XTC’s Blogs that ‘there’s a little vein of [Welsh poet] Dylan Thomas in there.’ Wilson told Stephen Humphries of Under the Radar that the song has ‘some of the most divine Little England observational lyric writing.’
He told Dave Everley of Prog that he rang Partridge with a challenge, ‘I want smalltown soap operas juxtaposed with cosmic phenomena.’ He wanted to put our ordinary lives in perspective – a central theme of the album – by providing links or contrasts with what was happening ‘meanwhile, on the other side of the universe.’ The two men entered a productive dialogue. Wilson was fascinated by Partridge’s comment that the lyrics make a significant difference in how you produce a track, particularly the vocals.
A Teenager with his First Telescope. Image courtesy of Miles Skarin/Crystal Spotlight
Partridge fulfilled the brief perfectly. Events on Earth are sometimes linked with cosmic events,
‘As you queue at the bank for an hour ’Cause a solar flare blew out the power.’
Sometimes people on Earth are oblivious to the effect of cosmic events,
‘The driver in tears ‘bout his payment arrears Still nobody hears when a sun disappears In a galaxy afar.’
Sometimes the link is metaphorical,
‘Her shopping bag broke, sending eggs and flour crashing Down to the ground like star clusters smashing.’
One of the verses refers to a ‘teenager with his first telescope’, which reflects Wilson’s nostalgia for his own teenage years, looking up at the sky, fascinated with space, before smartphones were invented. Robert Smith of The Cure shares that nostalgia. The track ‘Endsong’ from Songs of a Lost World (2024) was inspired by his memories of looking up at the sky with his father around the time of the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969. In another verse, a young man cleaning cars wonders, ‘Is there life on Mars?’, the title of David Bowie’s 1973 single.
Some of the politics from To the Bone creeps in. That album addressed what some have described as a ‘post-truth’ world. Partridge’s lyric describes humans bickering about ‘fences’ – petty disputes between neighbours, and about ‘borders’ – between countries, often leading to war. The lyric wryly states that it’s best not to think about those disputes, an understandable reaction to the conflicts that have blighted the early years of the 2020s. There is deep sarcasm in the line, ‘It’s better to live without facts.’
The track begins with a clear statement of a central musical theme. It’s a 19-note piano motif that restlessly snakes back on itself, returning every three beats to the same note (F#). It sounds straightforward when broken down into three-note segments, but the complete theme helps restore Wilson’s prog credentials due to its length. Wilson told Prasad that the basic melody is like a Shepard Tone, ‘in that it constantly ascends in whole tones.’ A Shepard Tone is an auditory illusion in which a repeated musical pattern appears to be constantly rising even though it remains in the same octave. Examples are the end of Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’ from Meddle (1971) and Hans Zimmer’s score for Christopher Nolan’s 2017 film Dunkirk.
‘A bit of a masterpiece.’ Variations by Andrew LLoyd Webber
Wilson said the 19-note motif returns in different musical forms throughout Objects Outlive Us, like the use of the leitmotif (leading motif) in Richard Wagner’s operas or the musical formula in the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, such as his massive opera cycle Licht (Light) (1977 – 2003). Wilson also referred to repeated themes in Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells(1973) and Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’. He told Humphries that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1978 album Variations, which repeatedly used a theme by the composer Niccolò Paganini, was ‘overlooked… [but] I think it’s a bit of a masterpiece, actually.’ The second track on the album was used as the theme tune for the television arts series The South Bank Show, which ran on ITV from 1978 to 2010, before moving to Sky Arts.
After three statements of the 19-note theme, the central song of Objects Outlive Us begins, with an earworm of a melody. It’s decorated with Floydian sliding guitars and a plucked string theme played by Wilson. McStine provides gorgeous backing vocals that evoke the sound of Electric Light Orchestra (ELO).
At around 3:30, there’s a blistering bass solo in the unusual time signature of 12/8. Each beat in the bar is divided into three semi-quaver (sixteenth note) triplets instead of the more usual two quavers (eighth notes). Perhaps surprisingly, Wilson plays it on an acoustic bass guitar. It’s heavily distorted and put through an amp with lots of overdrive. As Wilson repeats the bass riff, the track takes flight in the proggiest section of the album so far, as McStine adds an extra guitar line above the bass in the style of the new wave of British heavy metal (NWOBHM) bands of the late 70s and early 80s, such as Iron Maiden and Saxon. At around 4:45, the track stalls as a metaphorical handbrake is applied, then rouses itself with a drum flourish into a spacey instrumental before the vocals return. At 6:00, the 19-note theme returns, now in a driving, much heavier version for full band, followed by a gentle piano version that takes us back to the beginning of this section.
In the sleeve notes, Wilson describes Theo Travis’ saxophones in the track as ‘Jaxonsaxes’, named after David Jackson, who played saxophone with Van der Graaf Generator, often playing two at once. His nickname is ‘Jaxon’. He worked on many of their albums, including a long run of classic albums in the 1970s.
The Cicerones/Ark
The archaic word ‘cicerones’ is from the word ‘cicerone’, meaning a tour guide, derived from the name of the great Roman orator, Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC). The track’s title comes from a short story, The Cicerones, by the English writer Robert Aickman (1914 – 1981). The protagonist, John Trant, visits the Cathedral of Saint Bavon (presumably Saint Bavo) in Belgium. He begins a self-guided tour using a guidebook but soon meets various strange figures who act as his guides to the increasingly macabre sights of the cathedral. There’s a creeping sense of unease and the surreal. The eerie atmosphere builds in the same way as in Thomas M. Disch’s short story Descending, which inspired Wilson’s previous album and short story The Harmony Codex. The Cicerones was filmed for Film Four in 2002, in a short starring Mark Gatiss (The League of Gentlemen, Sherlock, Bookish). In the context of the track, the title refers to the guides who lead the remnants of humanity into space, following the planet’s destruction so graphically described earlier in ‘The Buddha Of The Modern Age.’
Leaving the Planet. Image courtesy of Miles Skarin/Crystal Spotlight
The Ark represents a new start, like Noah’s escape from the Flood in his ark with two of each animal. Compared with the relaxed rhyming couplets of Partridge’s lyrics in the previous section, the lyrics of this section are breathless, broken up into short sections. It’s a technique that goes back to ‘Open Car’ from Porcupine Tree’s Deadwing (2005). After the withering invective of ‘The Buddha Of The Modern Age’, only a few who warned about Earth’s destruction survived. It’s easy to miss the story – and the message – here amongst the turbulence of the lyrics. Humanity is leaving the Earth, which is now destroyed and reduced to dust. Ironically, when Prasad asked Wilson if he would rather live on Mars, he replied, ‘Mars is a planet of red dust. Earth is incredibly diverse, geographically, ecologically, and climate-wise.’
Wilson plays all the guitar parts at the beginning of this section. It starts with a gently contemplative acoustic guitar part, gorgeously recorded, that wouldn’t have been out of place on one of his early solo albums. After a rich keyboard wash, at about a minute in, the 19-note theme returns in a version for band and piano, and the section builds to a climax with repeated melody, with a similar feel to ‘Eclipse’, the epic finale to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973). It’s also the emotional climax of the album’s first half, sung with gathering, hymn-like intensity, marking the historic significance of our decision to leave Earth after destroying it. The epic guitar solo marks the beginning of our journey to the stars, to begin a new life on the other side of the universe.
Cosmic Sons of Toil
The title of this instrumental section is intriguing. Wilson told Stéphane Rousselot of Amarok Magazine that it’s just a play on words. Perhaps he was thinking of the phrase ‘Horny-handed sons of toil.’ That phrase was first used by Lord Salisbury, three times British Prime Minister in the nineteenth century. The manual labourers described by Salisbury, with their horny (calloused) hands, have now been replaced by cosmic labourers. Perhaps that interpretation is incorrect, but as Wilson told Rousselot, ‘That’s the fun of analysis.’
This section is more up-tempo after the stately, anthemic pace of previous sections. The spacey electronic noises, sounding like a cosmic ray gun, are provided by the ARP 2600 analogue synthesiser. In a YouTube Reel, Wilson described it as ‘perfect for a space-themed album… It sounds like Hawkwind in 1973.’ The track begins with a tumbling, repeated piano theme, soon joined by jerky, melodic bass and frenetic guitar. The guitar solo at around 0:45 is the first of two on the album by Randy McStine. The solo is agitated, fragmented and unusual. McStine also plays guitar on the rest of the track. At around 2:00, there’s a funky, jerky, distorted guitar riff, a variation on the fuzzy bass theme we heard earlier, with agitated drumming from Russell Holzman. At around 2:45, the track becomes so frenzied that it falls over itself. The whole section describes an out-of-control spacecraft hurtling through space. It’s reminiscent of the scenes in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar, where the spaceship struggles to fly as it creaks, groans, and shudders, reminding us that interstellar travel is difficult.
No Ghost on the Moor/Heat Death of the Universe
The first part of this section, ‘No Ghost On The Moor’, is a reprise of the opening section, with the same lyrics and melody, but we are now on the other side of the universe. The alien has taken us as far away from Earth as possible, and in this new context, Wilson is joined by a conventional rock band. The lyrics take on a new meaning, becoming achingly tender and emotional. Wilson’s recurring nostalgia for childhood has been replaced by an existential nostalgia for the Earth we have left far behind. His previous anger about the reckless destruction of the Earth has been replaced by deep empathy for the human condition and the fragility of life
The Heat Death of the Universe. Image created by AI.
The second part of this section is an instrumental. The ‘Heat Death of the Universe’ – also known more prosaically as the Big Chill or the Big Freeze – refers to the scientific hypothesis about the ultimate slow demise of the universe. Eric Betz of Astronomy.com described it as a,
‘Long and frigid affair… the day when all heat and energy is evenly spread over incomprehensibly vast distances. At this point, the universe’s final temperature will hover just above absolute zero… the existence of our entire species registers as but a brief ray of sunlight before an infinite winter of darkness.’
The guitar solo at around 2:00 is McStine’s second on the album. Wilson told McStine that he didn’t want a classic rock solo of the kind played by David Gilmour on ‘Comfortably Numb’ from Pink Floyd’s 1979 album The Wall. This is no reflection on the quality of Gilmour’s playing – he told Roie Avin and Geoff Bailie of The Prog Report that the ‘Comfortably Numb’ solo is the ‘greatest guitar solo of all time.’ McStine’s solo sounds like a synthesiser rather than a blues guitar, and the tone breaks up intermittently rather than constantly as it would with conventional distortion. Russell Holzman’s languid drumming creates a feeling of gravitas beneath.
A Scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick. Source: Wikimedia Commons/Touring Club Italiano
At around 2:45, there’s a lovely harmonic turn and some filigree decoration reminiscent of the great Guthrie Govan. As the guitar solo fades to nothing, the track descends into noise. Wilson told Rousselot this was a nod to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and the use of ‘very atonal music’ to describe both ‘wonder’ and the feeling that the universe is ‘terrifying… an immense void of death and nothingness.’ He told John Robb at the launch of the album in Manchester that there was a ‘nod to Ligeti’. Wilson is referring to the orchestral piece Atmosphères (1961) by the Hungarian composer György Ligeti, used by Kubrick in the film. The piece uses the technique he called micropolyphony, with large numbers of tiny musical themes woven together to create a constantly shifting composition with no discernible rhythm or melody. This music reminds us of, in Wilson’s words to Humphries, ‘the blackness and death of space… So you get an orchestra.’ The track ends with a wall of noise, a technique he uses compellingly on his first solo album, Insurgentes (2008), when noise rock brutally obliterates the end of various tracks. The track ‘Get All You Deserve ends with Ligeti-like noises. Wilson told Prasad that sounds from the most recent record by Bass Communion (his ‘ambient/noise /experimental project’), The Itself of Itself (2024), fed into this section of the track.
THE OVERVIEW
Steven Wilson – The Overview: Perspective (Official Video) by Miles Skarin
Perspective
Perspective begins with radio transmissions from deep space. They sound like the opening of another space rock song, ‘Astronomy Domine’ from Pink Floyd’s 1967 album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. In March 2024, Wilson said in a YouTube interview with Rick Beato that one of his favourite albums, by Pink Floyd – ‘still my favourite band’ – is Ummagumma (1969), which includes a live version of the song (although without the spoken words). When The Piper was released, Pink Floyd were managed by Andrew King and Peter Jenner. The latter read out the names of planets, stars and galaxies through a megaphone.
‘Perspective’ includes spoken word commentary from Wilson’s wife Rotem, just like the two previous albums, The Harmony Codex and The Future Bites. She names various cosmic phenomena and their sizes. Wilson used a website called scaleofuniverse.com to provide scientific facts.
A megametre = 10^6 = 10⁶ = ten to the power of six = ten with six zeroes = 1,000,000 m = a million metres
A gigametre = 10^9 = 109 = ten to the power of nine = 10 with nine zeroes = 1,000,000,000 m = a billion metres
According to the Scale of the Universe website, Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System, over twice as big as our moon. It’s 5,268,000 metres in diameter. Callisto is Jupiter’s second largest moon, 4,821,000 metres in diameter.
Size beyond one megametre Ten to the power of six Ganymede, Callisto
A still from The Overview Film by Miles Skarin
Rotem’s voice is tuned down in pitch. Wilson told The Rockonteurs podcast that he wanted her voice to sound dispassionate, and ‘emotionally flat… to recite these scientific facts.’ He had in mind HAL, the talking computer in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the spacecraft Discovery One, who memorably says, ‘I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.’
The red camera eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Source; Wikimedia Commons
What intrigues Wilson is not just the scientific facts about the space phenomena that Rotem describes, but also the effect such facts have on human consciousness. In the BFI roundtable discussion to launch the album, he said that the sense of perspective shows who and what we are in relation to the vastness of the universe. He referred to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series and the Total Perspective Vortex. This machine allows the user to take in the whole universe, by extrapolating ‘the whole of creation… from one small piece of fairy cake.’ Built to annoy his wife, when the inventor turned the machine on, she saw ‘in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it… to [the inventor’s horror] the shock completely annihilated her brain.’ Despite this, the inventor had proved to his satisfaction that ‘the one thing [we] cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.’ The machine was later used as a punishment; the first person to survive it was the Betelgeusian, Zaphod Beeblebrox, who promptly ate the fairy cake.
The opening music is the most electronic on the album, following on from the more electronic sound of parts of The Future Bites and The Harmony Codex. Wilson told John Earls of NME that it’s something that the English electronic duo Autechre might have produced. Wilson isn’t the first musician to use electronic music on a prog rock album. Pink Floyd opened The Dark Side of the Moon with ‘On the Run’, which used the VCS3 analogue synthesiser to create the electronic sequence. Roger Waters can be seen manipulating the synth sounds, cigarette in hand, on Pink Floyd’s Live at Pompeii (1972; re-released in 2025 as Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII with new mixes by Wilson).
EMS Putney VCS 3 Synthesiser, of the Type Used by Pink Floyd on The Dark Side of the Moon. Source: Wikimedia Commons
The fiercely rhythmic, jerky synth tracks and electronic drums – all played and programmed by Wilson – contrast with Rotem’s deadpan delivery of scientific facts. At the same time, they create a futuristic soundscape that suggests that science is more dominant on the second side of the album. Wilson told Dave Everley of Prog that Objects Outlive Us is more of a ‘human’ story, whereas in Everley’s phrase, the title track ‘evokes the sparseness and coldness of space.’ At around 2:00, slower, more human-sounding chords begin to take over. We hear Wilson’s voice at around 2:30, albeit partly stripped of its humanity in a wordless vocalise, transposed up an octave, so that it sounds more like a synthesiser than a human voice.
A Beautiful Infinity I/ Borrowed Atoms/A Beautiful Infinity II
The protagonist is now on the other side of the universe, reflecting on his life back on Earth. He considers the time it takes light to travel long distances across space to reach the Earth; we see stars as they were hundreds or thousands of years ago. There’s a strong parallel with Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar. The line ‘Each moment for me is a lifetime for you’ could apply to the film’s plot. It stars Matthew McConaughey as Joseph Cooper, a widowed former NASA test pilot who leaves a devastated Earth on a mission to find other habitable planets, leaving his young daughter Murph behind. Cooper and his crew travel remarkably close to a black hole called Gargantua. The scientific adviser to the film, Kip Thorne, wrote in his 2014 book The Science of Interstellar that time reaches a complete halt at the surface of a black hole.
When Cooper travels near Gargantua, he ages only a few hours while Murph, on Earth, ages eight decades. There’s a profoundly moving moment when he receives a transmission from his daughter, and he realises that he has missed 23 years of his daughter’s life. They are now the same age. When he left Earth, she was a child. Wilson encapsulates the emotion of this moment in the simple but deeply poetic line, ‘Back on Earth, my loving wife’s been dead for years.’ Although the title track concentrates on science, there is room for humanity, too. The protagonist’s distance from Earth puts everything in perspective: ‘what seemed important [is] now like dust inside the squall.’ There’s perhaps an echo of the dust storms in Interstellar, which make Earth uninhabitable.
‘A Beautiful Infinity I’ is the first time we hear Craig Blundell on drums. He plays in a more robust, rockier style than Russell Holzman on Objects Outlive Us; both drummers are superb. Wilson’s vocals are treated with a delay effect; the final part of each phrase is repeated, ‘from here… from here… from here.’ Pink Floyd used this effect on ‘Us and Them’ from The Dark Side of the Moon to add emotional depth. Wilson used the same effect on ‘Arriving Somewhere But Not Here’ on Deadwing (2005).
The slide guitar adds to the Floydian feeling of the track, but the guitar solo isn’t Gilmour-esque. Wilson asked Niko Tsonev to play the solo – his only solo on the album – in a style that combined the classic with the contemporary. The acoustic guitar, played by Wilson, is an Ovation in Nashville tuning. He used the same guitar and tuning on ‘Chimera’s Wreck’ from the 2022 Porcupine Tree album Closure/Continuation. He told Amit Sharma of Total Guitar that he used his Ovation guitar in Nashville tuning – the lowest four strings are tuned up an octave, creating ‘a very crystalline, musical box kind of tone.’
‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’
The ‘Borrowed Atoms’ section begins at around 2:40 with a piano break. The delicate musical backdrop of piano and synthesiser accompanies one of the most poetic moments on the album, with the words ‘The clouds have no history’, and ends ten lines later with the words ‘Is this a dream?’ Wilson’s lyrics express profound complexity in simple language. He reverses the ‘pathetic fallacy’, a poetic device where human emotions or characteristics are attributed to nature. (A good example is I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth, which describes the daffodils as human dancers, ‘tossing their heads in sprightly dance.’) Wilson does the opposite, stressing that nature has no human emotion: ‘The clouds have no history/And the sea feels no sorrow.’ This is another aspect of the album’s perspective theme. Nature ignores us, so we shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously. Wilson says our atoms are just ‘borrowed’; when we die, they return to the universe. This is ambiguous – if our atoms are only ‘borrowed’, we are insignificant, but we should also take good care of our atoms, as we only have temporary stewardship. Wilson’s meditation on the nature of selfhood ends with a moving expression of existential angst, warmly sung, ‘Is this a dream?’
‘A Beautiful Infinity II’ begins at around 4:00 with the words ‘There’s no reason for any of this.’ Wilson’s personal view – with which some would disagree – is that the universe was created out of chaos, not by design or by a supreme being,
‘There’s no reason for any of this Just a beautiful infinity No design and no one at the wheel Just an existential mystery.’
The idea of no one being at the wheel is reminiscent of ‘The Creator has a Master Tape’ from the Porcupine Tree album In Absentia (2002). We discover that ‘the creator had a master tape’, which suggests design, only to find that – ironically – ‘he left it in a cab.’
After the massed backing vocals of Wilson and Randy McStine, there are some whimsical, almost scatting vocals from Wilson at around 4:05, in the same style as on ‘Harridan’, the opening track of Closure/Continuation. At around 5:00, McStine closes the track with a richly analogue Moog solo.
Infinity Measured In Moments
This section is the climax of side two. Rotem Wilson returns, reciting another list of space statistics to create a further sense of awe about the vastness of the universe. Blundell’s drumming here is impressive. He adds subtle shifts to the rhythmic patterns, building the track’s epic feel and bringing a human element to the electronic parts. The track is built around arpeggiating analogue synth patterns, just as Wilson built up the title track on The Harmony Codex. Wilson’s vocals are warm and rich, multitracked in unison rather than complex harmonies, as often in his Porcupine Tree songs. McStine provides backing vocals and a guitar solo at 2:15, combining an angular, modern feel with a classic, uplifting rock solo.
The Inner Sleeve of In Absentia by Lasse Hoile
It’s followed by handclaps (Wilson) and ukulele (McStine). Porcupine Tree fans may recall a similar effect on ‘Trains’ (In Absentia, 2002), a fan favourite with over 39 million plays on Spotify at the time of writing. There is some very Peter Hook-style bass in this section. Wilson is a massive fan of Hook’s former band Joy Division, listing the band’s debut single Transmission (1979), in his book Limited Edition of One as one of his top 100 tracks. At around 3:20, the track reaches a climax with Adam Holzman’s Moog solo, the first real opportunity Holzman has on the album to show the warmth and virtuosity of his jazz-tinged playing, which was a highlight of The Overview Tour that came to London in May 2025.
Permanence
The final section of the album is a contemplative instrumental, beautiful, ambient and ethereal. We are now floating in space, billions of light-years away from Earth. The encounter with the alien on the moor at the beginning of the album now seems an infinite time ago.
Theo Travis. Photo by Mariia Korneeva
Theo Travis plays the soprano sax solo. Travis worked on some of Wilson’s solo albums, and the two worked together on Travis’ 2024 solo album Aeolus. That album is a one-hour Theo Travis piece for duduk; the instrument Travis played on ‘Beautiful Scarecrow’ on The Harmony Codex. Wilson produced the recordings and created soundscapes from Travis’s alto flute playing. The album is gentle, meditative, introspective and quietly mesmerising. Travis’s playing has the same effect on ‘Permanence.’
The section begins with the evocative sound of the electric piano, processed through a reverse echo. Two new instruments are added. The first is the celeste or celesta, a keyboard instrument that looks like a small upright piano. Like a piano, a hammer is operated by pressing a key, but instead of striking strings, the hammer hits a metal plate like that of a glockenspiel. Appropriately, in the context of this track, the name means ‘celestial’ or ‘heavenly.’ The second instrument is the Moog synthesiser on which Wilson created a sound like the theremin.
In the film by Miles Skarin, we move gradually closer to a green shoot of life. An out-of-focus creature gradually comes into focus. Our old friend, the alien from Objects Outlive Us, intently investigates the green shoot. We hadn’t forgotten that the alien exists. There is hope after all.
This post was updated at 17.27 on 29 December 2025 to correct the explanation of the terms megametre and gigametre, which had incorrectly referred to kilometres (km) rather than metres (m)
This post was further updated at 14.00 on 30 December 2025 to add details of the relative sizes of Ganymede and Callisto
Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Omnibus Edition, Boekerij 2018) Avin, Roie and Bailie, Geoff, Steven Wilson on The Overview, the upcoming tour, the future of AI, and more. (Interview) (The Prog Report Podcast, 7/3/2025) Beato, Rick, Steven Wilson Discusses His Favorite [Sic] Albums (Rick Beato 2, YouTube 24/03/34) Bernhardt, Todd, Andy discusses ‘The Everyday Story of Smalltown’ (XTC’s Blog, 17 February 2008) Betz, Eric, The Big Freeze: How the universe will die (Astronomy.com) Earls, John, Steven Wilson: “I’ve tried to reinvent the classic rock guitar solo” (NME 18/02/25) Everley, Dave, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Prog, April 2025) Fischer, Tobias, Interview with Steven Wilson/ Porcupine Tree (Tonefloat Magazine, undated) Humphries, Stephen, Steven Wilson on “The Overview” Space, the final musical frontier (Under the Radar, 21/2/2025) Kemp, Gary and Pratt, Guy, Gary Kemp album special with Steven Wilson (The Rockonteurs, YouTube 26/01/25) Prasad, Anil, Steven Wilson Cosmic Perspectives (Innerviews, 25/02/25) Robb, John, Steven Wilson: ‘The Overview’ Audio-Visual Experience + Q&A (Cultplex Manchester, 26/02/25) Rousselot, Stéphane, Interview – Steven Wilson (Amarok Magazine, 4/3/2025) Sharma, Amit, Steven Wilson on Porcupine Tree’s triumphant return and his love of “guitar players that can play one note and break your heart” (Total Guitar, August 2022) Shatner, William and Brandon, Joshua, Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder (Atria Books 2022) Sinclair, Paul, Steven Wilson: The SDE interview: SW on his new album, The Overview (Super Deluxe Edition, 17/03/25) ‘Struck’, Steven Wilson (February 11st [sic] 2025 (MUSICWAVES, 11/2/2025) White, Frank, The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution (First Edition Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1987) Wilson, Steven, Limited Edition of One (Constable, April 2022)
Images from The Overview film by Miles Skarin of Crystal Spotlight
This is an analysis of the second half, and title track, of Steven Wilson’s eighth solo album, The Overview. For an introduction to the album, click here. For an analysis of the first half of the album, ‘Objects Outlive Us’, click here.
Perspective begins with radio transmissions from deep space. They sound like the radio transmissions at the opening of another space rock song, ‘Astronomy Domine’ from Pink Floyd’s 1967 album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. In March 2024, Wilson said in a YouTube interview with Rick Beato that one of his favourite albums, by Pink Floyd – ‘still my favourite band’ – is Ummagumma (1969), which includes a live version of the song (although without the spoken words). When The Piper was released, Pink Floyd were managed by Andrew King and Peter Jenner. The latter read out the names of planets, stars and galaxies through a megaphone.
‘Perspective’ includes spoken word commentary from Wilson’s wife Rotem, just like the two previous albums, The Harmony Codex and The Future Bites. She names various cosmic phenomena, and their distances from Earth. Wilson used a website called scaleofuniverse.com to provide scientific facts. The distances involved are hard to comprehend – see below:
A megametre = 10^6 = ten to the power of six = ten with six zeroes = 1,000,000 m = a million m
A gigametre = 10^9 = ten to the power of nine = 10 with nine zeroes = 1,000,000,000 m = a billion m
Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System and Callisto is Jupiter’s second largest moon:
Size beyond one megametre Ten to the power of six Ganymede, Callisto
A still from The Overview Film by Miles Skarin
Rotem’s voice is tuned down in pitch. Wilson told The Rockonteurs podcast that he wanted her voice to sound dispassionate, and ‘emotionally flat… to recite these scientific facts.’ He had in mind HAL, the talking computer in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the spacecraft Discovery One, who memorably says, ‘I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.’
The red camera eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Source; Wikimedia Commons
What intrigues Wilson is not just the scientific facts about the space phenomena that Rotem describes, but also the effect such facts have on human consciousness. In the BFI roundtable discussion to launch the album, he said that the sense of perspective shows who and what we are in relation to the vastness of the universe. He referred to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series and the Total Perspective Vortex. This machine allows the user to take in the whole universe, by extrapolating ‘the whole of creation… from one small piece of fairy cake.’ Built to annoy his wife, when the inventor turned the machine on, she saw ‘in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it… to [the inventor’s horror] the shock completely annihilated her brain.’ Despite this, the inventor had proved to his satisfaction that ‘the one thing [we] cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.’ The machine was later used as a punishment; the first person to survive it was the Betelgeusian, Zaphod Beeblebrox, who promptly ate the fairy cake.
The opening music is the most electronic on the album, following on from the more electronic sound of parts of The Future Bites and The Harmony Codex. Wilson told John Earls of NME that it’s something that the English electronic duo Autechre might have produced. Wilson isn’t the first musician to use electronic music on a prog rock album. Pink Floyd opened The Dark Side of the Moon with ‘On the Run’, which used the VCS3 analogue synthesiser to create the electronic sequence. Roger Waters can be seen manipulating the synth sounds, cigarette in hand, on Pink Floyd’s Live at Pompeii (1972; re-released in 2025 as Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII with new mixes by Wilson).
EMS Putney VCS 3 Synthesiser, of the Type Used by Pink Floyd on The Dark Side of the Moon. Source: Wikimedia Commons
The fiercely rhythmic, jerky synth tracks and electronic drums – all played and programmed by Wilson – contrast with Rotem’s deadpan delivery of scientific facts. At the same time, they create a futuristic soundscape that suggests that science is more dominant on the second side of the album. Wilson told Dave Everley of Prog that Objects Outlive Us is more of a ‘human’ story, whereas in Everley’s phrase, the title track ‘evokes the sparseness and coldness of space.’ At around 2:00, slower, more human-sounding chords begin to take over. We hear Wilson’s voice at around 2:30, albeit partly stripped of its humanity in a wordless vocalise, transposed up an octave, so that it sounds more like a synthesiser than a human voice.
A Beautiful Infinity I/ Borrowed Atoms/A Beautiful Infinity II
The protagonist is now on the other side of the universe, reflecting on his life back on Earth. He considers the time it takes light to travel long distances across space to reach the Earth; we see stars as they were hundreds or thousands of years ago. There’s a strong parallel with Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar. The line ‘Each moment for me is a lifetime for you’ could apply to the film’s plot. It stars Matthew McConaughey as Joseph Cooper, a widowed former NASA test pilot who leaves a devastated Earth on a mission to find other habitable planets, leaving his young daughter Murph behind. Cooper and his crew travel remarkably close to a black hole called Gargantua. The scientific adviser to the film, Kip Thorne, wrote in his 2014 book The Science of Interstellar that time reaches a complete halt at the surface of a black hole.
When Cooper travels near Gargantua, he ages only a few hours while Murph, on Earth, ages eight decades. There’s a profoundly moving moment when he receives a transmission from his daughter, and he realises that he has missed 23 years of his daughter’s life. They are now the same age. When he left Earth, she was a child. Wilson encapsulates the emotion of this moment in the simple but deeply poetic line, ‘Back on Earth, my loving wife’s been dead for years.’ Although the title track concentrates on science, there is room for humanity, too. The protagonist’s distance from Earth puts everything in perspective: ‘what seemed important [is] now like dust inside the squall.’ There’s perhaps an echo of the dust storms in Interstellar, which make Earth uninhabitable.
‘A Beautiful Infinity I’ is the first time we hear Craig Blundell on drums. He plays in a more robust, rockier style than Russell Holzman on Objects Outlive Us; both drummers are superb. Wilson’s vocals are treated with a delay effect; the final part of each phrase is repeated, ‘from here… from here… from here.’ Pink Floyd used this effect on ‘Us and Them’ from The Dark Side of the Moon to add emotional depth. Wilson used the same effect on ‘Arriving Somewhere But Not Here’ on Deadwing (2005).
The slide guitar adds to the Floydian feeling of the track, but the guitar solo isn’t Gilmour-esque. Wilson asked Niko Tsonev to play the solo – his only solo on the album – in a style that combined the classic with the contemporary.’ The acoustic guitar, played by Wilson, is an Ovation in Nashville tuning. He used the same guitar and tuning on ‘Chimera’s Wreck’ from the 2022 Porcupine Tree album Closure/Continuation. He told Amit Sharma of Total Guitar that he used his Ovation guitar in Nashville tuning – the lowest four strings are tuned up an octave, creating ‘a very crystalline, musical box kind of tone.’
‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’
The ‘Borrowed Atoms’ section begins at around 2:40 with a piano break. The delicate musical backdrop of piano and synthesiser accompanies one of the most poetic moments on the album, with the words ‘The clouds have no history’, and ends ten lines later with the words ‘Is this a dream?’ Wilson’s lyrics express profound complexity in simple language. He reverses the ‘pathetic fallacy’, a poetic device where human emotions or characteristics are attributed to nature. (A good example is I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth, which describes the daffodils as human dancers, ‘tossing their heads in sprightly dance.’) Wilson does the opposite, stressing that nature has no human emotion: ‘The clouds have no history/And the sea feels no sorrow.’ This is another aspect of the album’s perspective theme. Nature ignores us, so we shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously. Wilson says our atoms are just ‘borrowed’; when we die, they return to the universe. This is ambiguous – if our atoms are only ‘borrowed’, we are insignificant, but we should also take good care of our atoms, as we only have temporary stewardship. Wilson’s meditation on the nature of selfhood ends with a moving expression of existential angst, warmly sung, ‘Is this a dream?’
‘A Beautiful Infinity II’ begins at around 4:00 with the words ‘There’s no reason for any of this.’ Wilson’s personal view – with which some would disagree – is that the universe was created out of chaos, not by design or by a supreme being,
‘There’s no reason for any of this Just a beautiful infinity No design and no one at the wheel Just an existential mystery.’
The idea of no one being at the wheel is reminiscent of ‘The Creator has a Master Tape’ from the Porcupine Tree album In Absentia (2002). We discover that ‘the creator had a master tape’, which suggests design, only to find that – ironically – ‘he left it in a cab.’
After the massed backing vocals of Wilson and Randy McStine, there are some whimsical, almost scatting vocals from Wilson at around 4:05, in the same style as on ‘Harridan’, the opening track of Closure/Continuation. At around 5:00, McStine closes the track with a richly analogue Moog solo.
Infinity Measured In Moments
This section is the climax of side two. Rotem Wilson returns, reciting another list of space statistics to create a further sense of awe about the vastness of the universe. Blundell’s drumming here is impressive. He adds subtle shifts to the rhythmic patterns here, building the epic feel of the track and bringing a human feel to the electronic parts. The track is built around arpeggiating analogue synth patterns, just as Wilson built up the title track on The Harmony Codex. Wilson’s vocals are warm and rich, multitracked in unison rather than complex harmonies, as often in his Porcupine Tree songs. McStine provides backing vocals and a guitar solo at 2:15, which combines an angular, modern feel with the classic uplifting rock solo.
The Inner Sleeve of In Absentia by Lasse Hoile
It’s followed by handclaps (Wilson) and ukulele (McStine). Porcupine Tree fans may recall a similar effect on ‘Trains’ (In Absentia, 2002), a fan favourite with over 38 million plays on Spotify at the time of writing. There is some very Peter Hook-style bass in this section. Wilson is a massive fan of Hook’s former band Joy Division, listing the band’s debut single Transmission (1979), in his book Limited Edition of One as one of his top 100 tracks. At around 3:20, the track reaches a climax with Adam Holzman’s Moog solo, the first real opportunity Holzman has on the album to show the warmth and virtuosity of his jazz-tinged playing, which was a real highlight of The Overview Tour that came to London in May 2025.
Permanence
The final section of the album is a contemplative instrumental, beautiful, ambient and ethereal. We are now floating in space, billions of light-years away from Earth. The encounter with the alien on the moor at the beginning of the album now seems an infinite time ago.
Theo Travis. Photo by Mariia Korneeva
Theo Travis plays the soprano sax solo. Travis worked on some of Wilson’s solo albums, and the two worked together on Travis’ 2024 solo album Aeolus. That album is a one-hour Theo Travis piece for duduk; the instrument Travis played on ‘Beautiful Scarecrow’ on The Harmony Codex. Wilson produced the recordings and created soundscapes from Travis’s alto flute playing. That album is gentle, meditative, introspective and quietly mesmerising. Travis’s playing has the same effect on ‘Permanence.’
The section begins with the evocative sound of the electric piano, processed through a reverse echo. Two new instruments are added. The first is the celeste or celesta, a keyboard instrument that looks like a small upright piano. Like a piano, a hammer is operated by pressing a key, but instead of striking strings, the hammer hits a metal plate like that of a glockenspiel. Appropriately, in the context of this track, the name means ‘celestial’ or ‘heavenly.’ The second instrument is the Moog synthesiser on which Wilson created a sound like the theremin.
In the film by Miles Skarin, we move gradually closer to a green shoot of life. An out-of-focus creature gradually comes into focus. Our old friend, the alien from Objects Outlive Us, intently investigates the green shoot. We hadn’t forgotten that the alien exists. There is hope after all.
This post was updated at 18.02 on 29 December 2025 to correct the explanation of the terms megametre and gigametre, which had incorrectly referred to kilometres (km) rather than metres (m)
Beato, Rick, Steven Wilson Discusses His Favorite [Sic] Albums (Rick Beato 2, YouTube 24/03/34) Kemp, Gary and Pratt, Guy, Gary Kemp album special with Steven Wilson (The Rockonteurs, YouTube 26/01/25) Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Omnibus Edition, Boekerij 2018) Earls, John, Steven Wilson: “I’ve tried to reinvent the classic rock guitar solo” (NME 18/02/25) Everley, Dave, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Prog, April 2025) Images from The Overview film by Miles Skarin of Crystal Spotlight Beato, Rick, Steven Wilson Discusses His Favorite [Sic] Albums (Rick Beato 2, YouTube 24/03/34) Kemp, Gary and Pratt, Guy, Gary Kemp album special with Steven Wilson (The Rockonteurs, YouTube 26/01/25) Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Omnibus Edition, Boekerij 2018) Earls, John, Steven Wilson: “I’ve tried to reinvent the classic rock guitar solo” (NME 18/02/25) Everley, Dave, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Prog, April 2025) Sharma, Amit, Steven Wilson on Porcupine Tree’s triumphant return and his love of “guitar players that can play one note and break your heart” (Total Guitar, August 2022) Wilson, Steven, Limited Edition of One (Constable, April 2022)
The Overview is Steven Wilson’s eighth solo album, released on 14 March 2025. It charted at number three in the UK, the fourth of Wilson’s albums (as a solo artist or with his band Porcupine Tree) in a row to reach the UK top five. On his website, Wilson described the album as ‘a Kubrickian journey into the darkness of outer space.’
The Overview Effect
The album takes its title from the Overview Effect, a term coined by author and space philosopher Frank White in his book The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution to describe the cognitive shift experienced by astronauts looking back on the Earth from space.
“[The Overview Effect] is the experience of seeing first hand the reality that the Earth is in space, a tiny, fragile ball of life, “hanging in the void,” shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. The experience often transforms astronauts’ perspective on the planet and humanity’s place in the universe. Some common aspects of it are a feeling of awe, a profound understanding of the interconnection of all life, and a renewed sense of responsibility for taking care of the environment.”
Frank White
The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution (First Edition Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1987)
White, who interviewed astronauts about their experiences, wrote that during the initial stages of the Space Program, it was thought that, ‘All the astronauts have religious or spiritual experiences and that they all had their lives fundamentally changed… The reality is far more complex than that.’ He quotes the astronaut Don Lind, who said that having spoken to many other astronauts, he concluded that space travel would intensify previously held religious convictions but wouldn’t make someone religious.
The Blue Marble. The Earth Seen from Apollo 17. Source: Wikimedia Commons
One of the most strikingly negative reactions to travelling into space, mentioned by Wilson in several interviews, was – ironically – from Captain Kirk, the actor William Shatner. In his 2022 book, Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder, he wrote that when he was in space, he experienced profound sadness and grief. Eventually, this became a profound feeling of hope, inspiring him to say that we should ‘rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us.’
“There was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death. I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing… Everything I had expected to see was wrong… The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness.“
Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder (Atria Books, 2022)
William Shatner as Captain Kirk. Souce: NBC Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wilson coined his own phrase for the Overview Effect, ‘cosmic vertigo’, meaning a sense of the fragility of the Earth, and the insignificance of our lives in relation to the vastness of the cosmos. The existential struggle to make something of our lives, to make them signify something, is a recurring theme in Wilson’s lyrics, going back to Signify (Porcupine Tree, 1996). He told Dave Everley of Prog that ‘Religion is a classic manifestation of cosmic vertigo.’ As an atheist, he said that to give life meaning, humankind had invented religion.
‘The Earth doesn’t matter, our life doesn’t matter, and it’s a beautiful thing to accept this idea and enjoy the ride.’
Steven Wilson
Wilson’s solution to the apparent futility and insignificance of our lives, and of the Earth in relation to the vastness of the universe, is not to embrace religion, or misery. He told Musicwaves magazine that, ‘The Earth doesn’t matter, our life doesn’t matter, and it’s a beautiful thing to accept this idea and enjoy the ride.’
White wrote, ‘ The impact of the [Overview] Effect is not limited to space travellers alone.’ Wilson described the effect of profound awe and a feeling of insignificance when he visited the ELT (Extremely Large Telescope) in the Atacama Desert in Chile in early 2025. When completed, the ELT will be able to see further into space and further back in time than any previous telescope. At the album launch at IMAX in London in February 2025, a photo of Wilson standing next to the telescope was exhibited on the vast screen, and Wilson was a tiny orange dot wearing a hi-vis jacket. Thinking about the Overview Effect led him to consider our insignificance and how that creates a sense of perspective. During the roundtable discussion at the IMAX album launch, he said he could have called the album ‘Perspective … but it’s not as good a title as The Overview.’
The Gap Between Releases
The gap between the release of Wilson’s previous album, The Harmony Codex, in September 2023 and the release of The Overview was just under 18 months, a relatively short period considering the gap between his previous solo albums was around two to three years. He told Paul Sinclair of Super Deluxe Edition that there was a pragmatic reason for this. The Harmony Codex was his first album after COVID, and he felt that the previous album, The Future Bites, had been ‘very divisive amongst my fans.’ He didn’t book a tour supporting The Harmony Codex because he wasn’t sure how people would react to the album. By the time he realised that the album had gone down well, it was too late to book a tour for 2024. He decided that in the meantime, he might as well make another record.
The Concept
While he was looking for a concept, Wilson met up with Alex Milas, Editor-in-Chief of Metal Hammer and founder of Space Rocks. This organisation describes itself as ‘a celebration of space exploration and the art, music, and culture it inspires.’ Wilson’s original idea was to collaborate with Milas on an exhibition or an installation for which he created the music. Then Milas mentioned the Overview Effect.
The idea immediately appealed to Wilson. As a teenager, he had a fascination with space. He used to go out on summer evenings to gaze up at the stars. He enjoyed space films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Solaris (1972), and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). He wrote tracks about space on some of his previous albums, particularly for Porcupine Tree. At the IMAX album launch, he said that in a ‘split second moment’ during his conversation with Milas, he had the title and the concept and heard the music in my head.’ He saw it as a ‘piece of cinema for the ears.’
He told Stephen Humphries of Under The Radar that he had written several albums about ‘planet Earth and human beings and the way we engage with each other.’ It was time to ‘write an album about something bigger than us.’
Humphries asked him why he was ‘asking these bigger questions’ now. Wilson admitted that perhaps he was having ‘my own existential crisis… of wanting more perspective on my own life’. Even so, he found it ‘fascinating’ to consider the vast numbers and distances in the universe. He told John Earls of NME that having a concept for the album before he started writing it led him to produce something that ‘intuitively felt like something long-form, analogous to a novel or a film.’
‘This record is definitely more informed by the genre hitherto referred to as progressive rock.’
Steven Wilson
Wilson said to Everley, ‘This record is definitely more informed by the genre hitherto referred to as progressive rock.’ Wilson has an uneasy relationship with the genre. His previous three albums certainly strayed from prog rock. To the Bone was an art-rock record with only one long track, ‘Detonation’; it also contained a happy pop song, ‘Permanating.’ The Future Bites was resolutely electronic. Its longest track, ‘Personal Shopper’ was more like dystopian disco than prog. That album brought some of the best reviews of his career, ‘from the more indie, hipster people that hadn’t really paid attention to me before’, but it also lost some of his core prog audience. To an extent, he has always enjoyed challenging his prog audience, but he also respects that audience. Although the album does mark a return to prog rock, it’s far from the loving, nostalgic homage to prog of his 2013 solo album The Raven that Refused to Sing.
The Album’s Structure
The album is divided into two long tracks of about 20 minutes each, ‘Objects Outlive Us’ and ‘The Overview.’ Wilson told The Prog Report that an album with only two long tracks was ‘a wilfully uncommercial gesture’ and that ‘the reason there are two pieces is I’m old and I still think in terms of vinyl.’
Wilson referenced other records with the same structure, such as Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells(1973), Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way (1969) and Tangerine Dream’s Rubycon (1975). He told Tobias Fischer of Tonefloat Magazine that he has always liked ‘great double albums with just one track per side.’ He referred to Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973 UK, 1974 US) by Yes, which he remixed in 2016, as a ‘much maligned record, but I love it.’
Writing the Album
Wilson told Anil Prasad of Innerviews that ‘the idea and title came before I had written a single note of music… It’s nice when something this strong falls into your lap.’ The album almost wrote itself. Wilson wrote it in the order we hear it, and the lyrics came last.
At a Q&A session at Cultplex in Manchester in February 2025, Wilson told John Robb that ‘one doorway led to the next’, and that the album flowed out of him, ‘it doesn’t always work that way.’ It took Wilson only eight weeks to record the album at this home studio. The process was quite different from recording The Raven That Refused to Sing in a studio, surrounded by other musicians. He played all the bass parts, as he did on the most recent Porcupine Tree album, Closure/Continuation (2022). When he toured with Porcupine Tree, Nate Navarro played the bass parts. When he toured The Overview, the bass parts were played by Nick Beggs.
The Musicians
As with all his albums, except the very early ones with Porcupine Tree, Wilson used real drummers rather than using electronic drums or playing them himself. For the first side of the record, he used Russell Holzman, son of his regular keyboard player, Adam Holzman. Wilson said he wanted a drummer with no obvious connection to the world of progressive rock, or even rock music in general. Holzman plays drums for the American singer Caroline Polachek. Wilson had also seen his renditions of classic drum and bass breaks on Instagram. For the second side, Wilson brought in his regular drummer Craig Blundell, partly because of his experience as a prog rock drummer with the likes of Steve Hackett, but also because of his wide-ranging knowledge of multiple musical genres.
Everley, Dave, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (Prog, April 2025) ‘Struck’, Steven Wilson (February 11st [sic] 2025 (MUSICWAVES, 11/2/2025) Sinclair, Paul, Steven Wilson: The SDE interview: SW on his new album, The Overview, (Super Deluxe Edition, 17/03/25) Humphries, Stephen, Steven Wilson on “The Overview” Space, the final musical frontier, (Under the Radar, 21/2/2025) Earls, John, Steven Wilson: “I’ve tried to reinvent the classic rock guitar solo” (NME 18/02/25) Avin, Roie and Bailie, Geoff Steven Wilson on The Overview, the upcoming tour, the future of AI, and more. (Interview) (The Prog Report Podcast, 7/3/2025) Fischer, Tobias, Interview with Steven Wilson/ Porcupine Tree (Tonefloat Magazine, undated) Prasad , Anil, Steven Wilson Cosmic Perspectives (Innerviews, 25/02/25) Robb, John, Steven Wilson: ‘The Overview’ Audio-Visual Experience + Q&A (Cultplex Manchester, 26/02/25)
“We look inwards so much, and when you look outwards at space there’s so much out there which is unattainable and unreachable for a lot of humans, so maybe we don’t give much thought to the perspective of what we are and what our reality is.” Miles Skarin
A still from The Overview film directed by Miles Skarin
Miles Skarin makes music videos for Steven Wilson and his band Porcupine Tree. He also designs websites such as Stevenwilsonhq with his brother, Rob Skarin. Miles has recently made a full-length animated film to accompany Wilson’s latest solo album, The Overview. The film has been shown during the tour to support the new album, and the track Objects: Meanwhile from the first song on the new album Objects Outlive Us has been released as an official video.
Nick Holmes Music has been given an exclusive insight into the making of the new film with Miles Skarin [MS].
Nick Holmes Music: How did you first meet and work with Steven?
MS: We go back about ten years or so. We originally started out as massive Porcupine Tree fans. We made the fan site starsdie.com. Being big fans of Porcupine Tree, Steven Wilson, and the other progressive rock bands at the time, we made a couple of fan sites. We really wanted to know everything about Steven and Porcupine Tree, and where the music was coming from because we just loved it so much. A lot of these bands hadn’t really taken off on social media at the time.
Miles Skarin
My brother wrote a load of the news articles for the website. I did a lot of the design work. And then one day we had an e-mail that dropped into the inbox. That was Steven saying, “Hey, you guys are doing this really well, do you want to come on board and help us out?” Which was incredible as fans, to have that message just land in your inbox, it was a fantastic day. And so we just jumped at the chance. We redesigned Steven’s website and tried to boost his presence on social media, and we’ve been helping with that ever since.
Nick Holmes Music: Didn’t he say at the time that your website was doing better than his?
MS: I think that was what he said. I think it was just because we were putting way more content onto our website. One of the things that we were thinking about was that every now and again you’d have an album release. And then after the album cycle there would be nothing posted online. Maybe a year, two years later, there’d be another album and maybe there’d be some press.
Steven always did incredible box sets. There was always a massive wealth of artwork and stuff to complement the music. So it was just a way of keeping fans engaged with Steven, even outside of the album cycles. And also while on tour as well, making sure to post photos and updates from live shows and just build that online community.
We had a forum at one point which we really enjoyed doing because it was bringing fans together and talking about the music that we loved. Through that process we met a few more people in the progressive rock space, record labels like Inside Out Music, Sony and Kscope; Steven was on working with those guys through Blackfield and his own releases at the time.
Nick Holmes Music: How did you feel when you saw your film on a massive screen at BFI IMAX in London at the premiere of The Overview?
MS: Oh wow. It’s just the peak, isn’t it? As a filmmaker, it doesn’t get better than that, surely. It was such an incredible experience, to see your work on a screen that’s the size of a building is something that I didn’t think I’d ever experience. As I was delivering the DCP file you take to give to the cinema to put it on the screen, the projectionist, Michael, took me up into the projection room at the back of the IMAX. And that’s cinema history, because you’ve got all of Christopher Nolan films; these huge spools of film, and they’re just labelled with handwritten notes saying ‘Tenet’, ‘Inception’ and ‘Interstellar.’ it was just an absolutely wonderful experience to know that my film was going to be on the same screen.
I feel so fortunate and lucky to have to have been able to do it and it’s all thanks to Steven, for creating the music and placing his trust in me to do a film, hopefully that does some sort of justice to the incredible music that he produces.
Nick Holmes Music: Steven himself has often talked about his albums or individual tracks being like a film and even described his last solo album The Harmony Codex as ‘cinema for the years’ Was The Overview always going to be a soundtrack for a film? Is that how he saw it?
MS: I think he always saw it as a piece that was two halves, side one and side two. When we were talking about visuals for it, one of the things that we were talking about was if you’ve got two 20-minute-long songs there isn’t really a concept of singles. So the idea of doing a promotional single didn’t really apply. Of course we went with the Objects Outlive Us section Objects: Meanwhile as a single.
Steven Wilson – Objects Outlive Us: Objects: Meanwhile
MILES SKARIN ON THE SHAPES IN ‘OBJECTS MEANWHILE’
“The shapes in Objects Meanwhile are constellations, connecting the stars into these shapes. The first one we see are constellation shapes based on the real star positions but later on we see this effect in 3D, where we see the connections forming between a “point cloud” of stars.“
From the start, Steven wanted there to be visual material, a film to go across the entire audio, which is such an incredible challenge to have to try and think about, because especially in my style, which is animation that’s a big undertaking. It was always from the start, “let’s make a film, let’s make a movie for this.”
Nick Holmes Music: How much scientific research did you do for the film?
MS: I’ve always loved space. I’ve always been aware of space, been aware of missions into space and where we are in space, and galaxies and solar systems. So I think there’s a lot of knowledge I had already accumulated about space. I really wanted to build that kind of idea of scale into the film as well, because that was what we were trying to produce from the start, the idea of perspective.
And so I was looking up scales in numbers of how large planets are on Wikipedia. You can search any star or planet and it will tell you in astronomical units how large that planet or star is. And the numbers get big very quickly. I tried putting all those numbers into my computer software thinking, “this will be great. I’ll just put all the numbers in and then I can just pull the camera out and that would show me the scale.” But it starts to glitch physically on the screen. It can’t work out the coordinates for the polygons and the shapes you’re making to exist in a space that large because the computers can’t handle the sheer size of it.
So I was trying to find out as much as I could about space, and trying to keep it very scientific in a way. But as soon as I realised it was going to need a certain level of artistic direction, because the software couldn’t handle it, I had to kind of deviate. But I did definitely try to keep as much of the scientific information there, and I was also looking into different phenomena and objects in space; one of them is called a magnetar, which is these incredibly dense stars which have a very strong magnetic field. And it’s fascinating reading about these objects in space that just don’t seem real. And yet they are out there somewhere. It was very enjoyable doing that.
Sunrise seen from space. Illustration inspired by the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Image by Michael Melchinger. Source Wikimedia Commons
Nick Holmes Music: Tell me about the visual language of the film. How much were you influenced by space films like 2001 or Interstellar, which are fantastic films visually?
MS: Those films are incredible. I would say those films would be my main inspiration and reference points for The Overview. I remember watching Interstellar in the cinema and being absolutely blown away by it, not just visually from how it depicts space, but also the performance of the actors as well, and the emotion, and the effect that time dilation would have on people experiencing it. They did that very, very well.
I guess our challenge was to try and create a new visual language. But the person I have to thank for most of that is Hajo [Müller] who had already created all this incredible artwork. It’s so stark and beautiful in the way that he’s used real imagery and texture to create the pieces. I love the large format images that Hajo produced to really give you that sense of a wide screen or cinematic format. He sent through a load of the artwork quite early in the process. His artwork by the time that I was really working with it was already mostly there and just incredible images. I was looking at that and thinking he’s done it, he’s created the visual language of The Overview and if I can even get a small piece of that into my film then I’ll be happy because I love his work.
Nick Holmes Music: You have said the biggest challenge was to convey the scale of space?
MS: I think the main piece that really shows the scale would be Perspective, the first section of the second half. We’ve got Rotem [Wilson]’s voice, speaking through these incredible numbers such as ten to the power of twelve. But what does that mean? And so one of the things we were talking about was by putting up that number onto the screen, do people know that that’s going to be? The number of zeros that are at the end of these numbers, your brain can’t process it that well. And so when we were thinking of showing the scales, I had to split up those sequences and of course it has to be stylized to the music as well.
But there’s one moment where you can see the sun and you can see the different rings of the orbits of our planets in our solar system. And the camera bounces back and bounces forward quite fast. One of the things that I’m not sure if people quite catch is that our Sun just shrinks by a huge amount and then these absolutely colossal stars that are the next scale up swirl into the frame. So even on a 4K screen, placing these objects next to each other, our Sun suddenly becomes minuscule against these larger stars out there. So it’s actually very difficult to have a reference point when you’re looking at these sorts of visuals in a way that really puts it in perspective for us humans to understand.
‘The combination of analogue electronics and my wife Rotem’s narration, accompanied by Miles Skarin’s brilliant visuals depicting the sheer enormity of our known universe and the idea of cosmic vertigo, is proving to be an incredible high point of the current live show.’Steven Wilson on The Overview: Perspective (1 July 2025)
The other part of the film that talks about scale is the section called Cosmic Suns of Toil which is midway through the first half. For that we’ve got the camera that just pulls back and goes through all the different layers of space. I wanted to frame our solar system and then what’s outside of our solar system. This is where I was doing my research on what these layers are, if I set a course for the stars and kept going, what objects would I move through. As you get outside of our solar system, there’s The Local Bubble, and The Local Cluster.
It’s amazing to consider that there’s so many other stars and solar systems out there, and then it just keeps going and keeps going until we can’t see any further because light can’t travel. There’s a certain amount of light that it can travel compared to how fast the speed of light is and that’s elapsed. Then eventually at the end of that section, Cosmic Suns of Toil, we reach the edge of the Cosmic Web, which is these, almost like strand filaments of the matter of galaxies.
And then what’s on the outside? We don’t know. So we have a slightly more abstract, stylized section and then we just dive straight down. The thing that I find amazing about that is it’s set up to be relative scale, not absolute scale. So when the camera flies straight back through the Local Cluster of our solar system and then back onto Earth, all of that’s over in about like three or four frames of video. It’s incredible that we cross so much distance in the space of a millisecond.
The Alien on the moor
Nick Holmes Music: Can I ask you a bit more detail about the film? It starts off with the alien, saying, “Did you forget I exist now?” Steven himself has said that’s slightly tongue in cheek. How do you feel about the alien? There’s a beautiful section at the end of Part I, where the alien is floating around in space. What’s your reaction to that alien?
MS: I feel like it’s a great way to introduce where we are right now as a species. I think the key takeaway from the film is that we look inwards so much, and when you look outwards at space there’s so much out there which is unattainable and unreachable for a lot of humans, so maybe we don’t give much thought to the perspective of what we are and what our reality is. I don’t know how many people in the modern age are looking up at space and thinking, “I know what’s up there and I know what that means about where I am.”
MILES SKARIN ON THE DESIGN OF THE ALIEN
“The alien design came from Hajo [Müller‘s] artwork… there’s the image of the alien, so using that as reference we designed it as a 3D modelled character. The image in Hajo’s artwork had lots of earthy textures over it, so our first design used only these same materials for quite a flat, matte look. Steven Wilson then suggested that it needed to look more alien and like it had just crawled out of the muddy depths of the moor, and that influenced the more organic looking final design of the alien and the animation at the start of Objects Outlive Us.”
Every time I go outside and walk down to the end of my road at night, and I’ve got stars above me, I’m always looking up and thinking, “that’s all right there.” I feel like that’s a great moment to start the record and say we’re not looking at humans this time around. We know we’re looking out at space, but then we are looking back at what that means for the human race.
A teenager with his first telescope
And there with his first telescope A teenager stands full of hormones and hope As he squints at the night, like a painting of light He doesn’t suppose that a black hole implodes In a trillion years from now.
The section Objects Meanwhile, discusses a black hole swallowing an entire galaxy. And when you think, were there people in that galaxy, did they know what was about to happen to them and if so, what would they be thinking? We get wrapped up in things that maybe we should have a little bit more perspective on. If every single human on planet Earth was able to recognise that we are all just trapped on a rock that’s being flung through space, maybe we’d have a different worldview. But the human race is so complex, I’m not going to go there.
Nick Holmes Music: Talking of the human race, The Buddha of The Modern Agefeatures a series of man-made disasters that lead to the destruction of the Earth?
MS: That section is looking at humans and what we’re doing on Earth before we go out into space. We meet the alien, and then after that we are presented with Earth. It’s not meant to be a future version of Earth. It’s meant to be a current version of Earth. I think it’s very easy to look at dystopian scenes of natural disasters, wars and climate change and think this is all set 20 years in the future, and we’ll work it out, we’ll be fine.
But actually, this stuff is happening now. It’s interesting that while all of these events are playing out and things are getting more and more serious, is enough being done by the human race to really set us on a course where we’re not just going to end up in that dystopian world of Interstellar, a global food crisis and dust storms that swirl around the planet, to the point where the planet is not habitable anymore. Are we barrelling towards that future, and is it too late to stop it? There’s a lot of those classic narratives tied up in that section.
But of course presenting it in such a stark way on screen and moving through all of those environments is one way of really showing this is the state of things right now. Of course it’s dramatized a little bit with animation, and at the end you’ve got all of the figures stampeding and falling off a cliff. I mean take what you want from that.
The message of that section is that maybe the human race could be doing more, but then of course the human race is massively complex in itself. And there’s a lot of problems we need to work out. And I don’t think I’m the person to be able to offer the answers; but hopefully collectively, we can put differences behind us and actually try to work out these things.
‘And now in her old wedding bed/A lady will dream that her husband is dead/ Of course he’s alive/He’ll be back around five’
Nick Holmes Music: Objects: Meanwhile is a very literal and specific description of small-town England with lyrics by Andy Partridge, contrasted with what’s going on in other galaxies. I was interested to see that you turned it into something almost magical with all these shimmering figures, but it’s not a detailed rendition of the lyrics.
MS: The lyrics tell a story, but I’m very mindful about not just taking the lyrics and putting that into visuals. The lyrics tell such a wonderful story and the way it flows from scene to scene, I felt that had to be the way forward for that section. And by setting these small sequences but made out of stardust and put them into these cosmic-looking scenes, I hopefully created a quite a nice way of showing that.
That was one of the things we were talking about first. Steven’s note was he wanted to have everyday objects presented as though they were like a nebula or a galaxy out in space. So I was trying to build different ways of showing that. We had a Nebula Generator [which digital artists use to create configurable space nebula effects]. I could put a 3D model into it, and then it would render it as a galaxy or a nebula out in space.
Her shopping bag broke sending eggs and flour crashing Down to the ground, just like star clusters smashing.
And I wanted there to be moments like the opening where the shopping bag falls and then the flour spreads out and there’s stars inside of that. I really wanted it to look like we were seeing like the birth of a galaxy or the birth of stars or something like that, where an event on Earth has a parallel to events out in space, visually at least.
Nick Holmes Music: There are some very abstract instrumental sections on The Overview. How did you decide to illustrate those, because there are no stories in those sections?
MS: A lot of the designs come from Hajo’s artwork. There are various sections and we wanted to have a journey, especially in the section, where we’ve got Randy McStine’s fantastic guitar solo, just after the Ark sequence where we go into an alien planet and we see the ghost on the moor again. For that sequence, I really wanted to put the viewer into that environment. And the idea there is that we had launched ourselves towards the end of the galaxy into the end of the universe, and now we’re flying back and landing on some other planet somewhere else. That was definitely trying to bring in as many of the colourful possibilities that alien worlds could have and just trying to realise that, and trying to show what it could look like.
I think a lot of these things were so influenced by films that we’ve seen already and designs that have been made, but also there’s probably limits to what we can imagine these alien worlds would look like because we are only influenced by what we see directly around us.
Nick Holmes Music: And in Perspective where Rotem Wilson’s spoken words provide all the perspectives of sizes of planets and galaxies, how much were you drawing on real images and how much was your imagination?
MS: The James Webb Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope have been taking some absolutely fantastic images which are available online where artists can use them. That was a massive resource to be able to look at and get inspiration from.
But for all of the scenes in ‘Perspective’, especially the ones where we’re going through nebulas and the larger cosmic objects, what I’m doing there is creating what is called a Pyro simulation which creates these kind of smoke effects. And that is driven off images and source material that’s taken from these incredible pictures of space.
And because they’re only two-dimensional images that we’ve got from these telescopes, what I wanted to be able to do is create that, but in a 3D space so I can fly a camera through it and we can see there’s some depth to it. I’m sure there’s probably some very technical way we could scientifically accurately do that. But imagine there’s just a slice of the photo or the image of that galaxy or that nebula, and then smoke starts to rise from both sides of that piece of paper that then creates this 3D object that I can then fly a camera into. I can then scatter stars inside of that as tiny little spheres that can then emit light, and that creates the effect of this 3D nebula.
Nick Holmes Music: I’m going to ask a slightly less serious question now, but I have to say when I saw Steven as an astronaut, which obviously he was very excited about, I had this image of Buzz Lightyear.
MS: Yes! [laughs] One of the early notes that Steven gave me was that we didn’t want it to almost come across like an action figure, floating in space; but the actual range of motion you get in those space suits, there is only a certain amount of movement that you can do in zero gravity. But we added a little bit more movement into the character to try and hopefully reduce any sort of, ‘Look, it’s Buzz Lightyear floating out in space.’
That was really good fun. I think the idea for came from Steven – looking across the Earth initially and then just being pulled across time and space and then experiencing the entirety of everything in a flowing strand across the screen, and what that’s meant to represent is the passage of time in this thin thread that’s going across space. Steven falls into that thread and then visits the earth and all these different places and then falls in and out of that in space, which is quite disorientating in a way for him.
Nick Holmes Music: Steven has been quite open about his fear of flying, but has also said that on balance, he probably would go into space given the opportunity. Would you go into space if you had the chance?
MS: I would probably share his fear of flying in a way, because I guess I think about it too much. You’re being rocketed in a tiny little capsule across the sky. But we’ve got ways of managing it, and everything’s tested. And when we know that the technology works, it’s amazing. We’ve had so many years of space exploration that it’s now coming to a point where we’ve commercial astronauts going up and experiencing space. You don’t have to be a NASA-trained astronaut, you need a lot of money at the moment, but maybe one day it will be a point where we can maybe think about doing that, and maybe going on a trip to the moon won’t be something out of The Jetsons. It would be achievable for most people and a regular occurrence.
To answer your question, I think I’d have to think very carefully about whether I did it or not. I guess I like having my feet on solid ground. But I think if I were given the opportunity, I don’t think I’d be able to pass it up, because not many people get to experience something like that. So I probably would be saying yes.
Nick Holmes Music: The final section, ‘Permanence,’ with Theo Travis’ beautifulsaxophone solo. Can you describe what’s happening visually there? Is there a green shoot of hope?
MS: At the end, we’ve just had the Infinity Measured in Moments section, which is such a huge crescendo to the piece. There’s so much going on in that section and everything’s building up, and then we get this very soft end to the film where we’re floating in space.
After the visual onslaught of the ending section, because it is quite a lot and it is intended to make the viewer feel dizzy, it is blurry in sections where it is difficult to focus on it. That section was meant to be a ride through space where we can really just take a moment to consider the frame and see this asteroid that we’re flying down onto, and in the background of that scene, we have a huge black hole. And so we’re just one of the rocks that’s orbiting this black hole. Inevitably, these rocks are going to be sucked into that black hole and shredded.
And then as we reach the surface, we have this green shoot of life appearing in a place where it really shouldn’t. We really wanted to have some sort of ending where it wasn’t all about space as a cold, dark place, where it’s about death and nothing exists out there. I would like to think that there is more life out there and that the chances of there being life are quite high, especially when you look at how many solar systems and planets are out there. We wanted to leave it with somewhat of a positive view after diving into the darker aspects of it.
Nick Holmes Music: It’s also a very Steven Wilson way to end an album, isn’t it? So many of his albums with Porcupine Tree and his solo albums end on a gentle, quiet track rather than in a very loud climax. Is it a technique which he employs a lot?
MS: Well, there’s always been the really big epic tracks at the end of Steven Wilson albums, but yes, it’s going in the opposite direction and putting something quiet has been very effective as well. It just feels like you’ve got that moment to just sit back and take in what you’ve just heard.
Nick Holmes Music: Can I ask you a more general question? Are you a musician? Because watching it again, it struck me how clever the editing is, and how beautifully it matches the pace, the rhythm, and the emotion as well. But from a technical point of view you’re matching the music really well. Where does that come from in your background?
MS: When I was at school, I took music, but mainly music technology and production rather than a classical musical education. I was a kid who was trying to learn as much as I could on guitar, but I found all of the photography, video production, and animation side, and that’s what I ended up doing more music production than guitar. But I still play from time to time, and I still want to try and do something musically because I’ve been so fortunate to work with a lot of my musical heroes.
At some point, maybe I’ll decide to give music another shot. But it’s interesting you mentioned that, because I spent a lot of time listening through the music and finding the moments and following the music, and a lot of the time I find that as a filmmaker, you normally have to build your narrative structure, but what I’ve found is that the musicians have done that job for me. They’ve done the hard job of working out the journey that they’re taking the listener on; all I’m doing is just putting visuals to that story that they’ve already produced. As long as I can follow where the music is going and the moods and the styles of it, then I guess that’s all I need to know musically.
Nick Holmes Music: How would you sum up the narrative of The Overview?
MS: I think the main thing with The Overview, as Steven will say as well, is the idea of having perspective on what we’re doing and our legacy on Earth. What if an alien was looking down at Earth, what would they see and what would they think about us and the way that we live?
It’s a story of sustainability and trying to really protect the home that we all have and trying to forge a path towards being a sustainable human race where we’re able to live in harmony with the planet. A lot of people have had that same dream. But we have to make that align with the way that civilization has to run; we’re going to be consuming a certain number of resources for the human race to exist.
But I think that as long as decisions are being made, we’re consuming the right resources in terms of animals, forests that we’re cutting down, what we’re putting in the oceans. It’s an environmental message, but also an animal rights message as well, where I think that humans, hopefully at some point in time, can look at our impacts on the world and hopefully see a nicer world around us.
Nick Holmes Music: But I think, as you’ve touched on, it’s also a very human message about perspective, isn’t it?
MS: Yes, definitely that. We all get wrapped up in our own lives and everything can feel very overwhelming. You look at the news these days and it’s difficult to think we’re heading in the right direction. We are all just floating on a rock that’s flying through space. And as long as we can just be nice to each other – and I know that’s quite a naive thing to say – but maybe that is the way that we have to look at the world, to take each problem as it comes and make the most empathetic response where we’re understanding our fellow humans on the planet, but also our fellow species on the planet, looking at animals and making sure that we’re providing the best world for us all to live in.
I feel like these days we have the technology to make a better world. And so it saddens me when I see that decisions are being made that are not maybe for the greater good of the planet, and it’s more just to make a bit more money, which only benefits a certain few.
I think there’s a lot of complexity in the human race, but I think that there’s definitely a message in The Overview, which is perspective; let’s try and forge a good path forward.
Nick Holmes Music: Is there anything you would like to add?
MS: I should also mention that I was assisted by my good friend Jack Hubbard, who helped me out with a lot of the more technical visual effects. We both worked on the film, and we were both there at the BFI IMAX show, and it was just an amazing thing to be able to share that experience with someone who has supported me massively over the years on pretty much every single project.
Jack is a visual effects artist who works at Framestore, one of the largest visual effects houses in London. He’s a very good friend and he’s always up for a challenge and he was amazing in answering a lot of the more technical visual effects questions because he uses a more advanced 3D software than I do.
Part of the process of putting it into the cinema is that you have to follow a certain amount of spec and quality control to be able to put it in that sort of environment. And so a lot of what I’ve been learning about in terms of video production and filmmaking is how to produce content to that kind of high-resolution, high-quality scale, and of course Steven works with Dolby Atmos and all of the high-end audio standard. So throughout the production of The Overview, I was really keen to bring that kind of high res, high end workflow towards the visuals as well.
Jack works in high end visual effects for TV, film, and advertising. I try to bring as many of those workflows from these high-end visual effects productions into the work that I do, which is much smaller scale, but it’s amazing what anyone can now access on YouTube software that’s freely available. And you can just follow these same standards and quality processes that feature films go through.
We had a test day at the Dolby showroom in London, where we screened the first version of the film and listened to it back in the Atmos mix. And it was fascinating talking to them about the Dolby Vision and the Dolby Atmos standards that they produce, the high-end HDR imagery. And then also the high-resolution surround audio.
Maybe that’s next on my list of things to do, to try and work out how I produce the highest quality image possible. I know that if you’ve got a Dolby Vision capable TV, there is a way that we could start to create a version of The Overview so that future projects could be Dolby Atmos, but also Dolby Vision as well. I’d love that.
Nick Holmes Music: Thank you very much for your time, and for spending so long talking to me.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.All stills from the film provided courtesy of Miles Skarin, with thanks.
This post was edited on 2 August 2025 to include details about the design of the alien and the shapes in ‘Objects Meanwhile’ provided by Miles Skarinand again on 4 August 2025 to add a link to the Official Video for The Overview: Perspective.
“We look inwards so much, and when you look outwards at space there’s so much out there which is unattainable and unreachable for a lot of humans, so maybe we don’t give much thought to the perspective of what we are and what our reality is.” Miles Skarin
A still from The Overview film directed by Miles Skarin
Miles Skarin makes music videos for Steven Wilson and his band Porcupine Tree. He also designs websites such as Stevenwilsonhq with his brother, Rob Skarin. Miles has recently made a full-length animated film to accompany Wilson’s latest solo album, The Overview. The film has been shown during the tour to support the new album, and the track Objects: Meanwhile from the first song on the new album Objects Outlive Us has been released as an official video.
Nick Holmes Music has been given an exclusive insight into the making of the new film with Miles Skarin [MS].
Nick Holmes Music: How did you first meet and work with Steven?
MS: We go back about ten years or so. We originally started out as massive Porcupine Tree fans. We made the fan site starsdie.com. Being big fans of Porcupine Tree, Steven Wilson, and the other progressive rock bands at the time, we made a couple of fan sites. We really wanted to know everything about Steven and Porcupine Tree, and where the music was coming from because we just loved it so much. A lot of these bands hadn’t really taken off on social media at the time.
Miles Skarin
My brother wrote a load of the news articles for the website. I did a lot of the design work. And then one day we had an e-mail that dropped into the inbox. That was Steven saying, “Hey, you guys are doing this really well, do you want to come on board and help us out?” Which was incredible as fans, to have that message just land in your inbox, it was a fantastic day. And so we just jumped at the chance. We redesigned Steven’s website and tried to boost his presence on social media, and we’ve been helping with that ever since.
Nick Holmes Music: Didn’t he say at the time that your website was doing better than his?
MS: I think that was what he said. I think it was just because we were putting way more content onto our website. One of the things that we were thinking about was that every now and again you’d have an album release. And then after the album cycle there would be nothing posted online. Maybe a year, two years later, there’d be another album and maybe there’d be some press.
Steven always did incredible box sets. There was always a massive wealth of artwork and stuff to complement the music. So it was just a way of keeping fans engaged with Steven, even outside of the album cycles. And also while on tour as well, making sure to post photos and updates from live shows and just build that online community.
We had a forum at one point which we really enjoyed doing because it was bringing fans together and talking about the music that we loved. Through that process we met a few more people in the progressive rock space, record labels like Inside Out Music, Sony and Kscope; Steven was on working with those guys through Blackfield and his own releases at the time.
Nick Holmes Music: How did you feel when you saw your film on a massive screen at BFI IMAX in London at the premiere of The Overview?
MS: Oh wow. It’s just the peak, isn’t it? As a filmmaker, it doesn’t get better than that, surely. It was such an incredible experience, to see your work on a screen that’s the size of a building is something that I didn’t think I’d ever experience. As I was delivering the DCP file you take to give to the cinema to put it on the screen, the projectionist, Michael, took me up into the projection room at the back of the IMAX. And that’s cinema history, because you’ve got all of Christopher Nolan films; these huge spools of film, and they’re just labelled with handwritten notes saying ‘Tenet’, ‘Inception’ and ‘Interstellar.’ it was just an absolutely wonderful experience to know that my film was going to be on the same screen.
I feel so fortunate and lucky to have to have been able to do it and it’s all thanks to Steven, for creating the music and placing his trust in me to do a film, hopefully that does some sort of justice to the incredible music that he produces.
Nick Holmes Music: Steven himself has often talked about his albums or individual tracks being like a film and even described his last solo album The Harmony Codex as ‘cinema for the years’ Was The Overview always going to be a soundtrack for a film? Is that how he saw it?
MS: I think he always saw it as a piece that was two halves, side one and side two. When we were talking about visuals for it, one of the things that we were talking about was if you’ve got two 20-minute-long songs there isn’t really a concept of singles. So the idea of doing a promotional single didn’t really apply. Of course we went with the Objects Outlive Us section Objects: Meanwhile as a single.
Steven Wilson – Objects Outlive Us: Objects: Meanwhile
MILES SKARIN ON THE SHAPES IN ‘OBJECTS MEANWHILE’
“The shapes in Objects Meanwhile are constellations, connecting the stars into these shapes. The first one we see are constellation shapes based on the real star positions but later on we see this effect in 3D, where we see the connections forming between a “point cloud” of stars.“
From the start, Steven wanted there to be visual material, a film to go across the entire audio, which is such an incredible challenge to have to try and think about, because especially in my style, which is animation that’s a big undertaking. It was always from the start, “let’s make a film, let’s make a movie for this.”
Nick Holmes Music: How much scientific research did you do for the film?
MS: I’ve always loved space. I’ve always been aware of space, been aware of missions into space and where we are in space, and galaxies and solar systems. So I think there’s a lot of knowledge I had already accumulated about space. I really wanted to build that kind of idea of scale into the film as well, because that was what we were trying to produce from the start, the idea of perspective.
And so I was looking up scales in numbers of how large planets are on Wikipedia. You can search any star or planet and it will tell you in astronomical units how large that planet or star is. And the numbers get big very quickly. I tried putting all those numbers into my computer software thinking, “this will be great. I’ll just put all the numbers in and then I can just pull the camera out and that would show me the scale.” But it starts to glitch physically on the screen. It can’t work out the coordinates for the polygons and the shapes you’re making to exist in a space that large because the computers can’t handle the sheer size of it.
So I was trying to find out as much as I could about space, and trying to keep it very scientific in a way. But as soon as I realised it was going to need a certain level of artistic direction, because the software couldn’t handle it, I had to kind of deviate. But I did definitely try to keep as much of the scientific information there, and I was also looking into different phenomena and objects in space; one of them is called a magnetar, which is these incredibly dense stars which have a very strong magnetic field. And it’s fascinating reading about these objects in space that just don’t seem real. And yet they are out there somewhere. It was very enjoyable doing that.
Sunrise seen from space. Illustration inspired by the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Image by Michael Melchinger. Source Wikimedia Commons
Nick Holmes Music: Tell me about the visual language of the film. How much were you influenced by space films like 2001 or Interstellar, which are fantastic films visually?
MS: Those films are incredible. I would say those films would be my main inspiration and reference points for The Overview. I remember watching Interstellar in the cinema and being absolutely blown away by it, not just visually from how it depicts space, but also the performance of the actors as well, and the emotion, and the effect that time dilation would have on people experiencing it. They did that very, very well.
I guess our challenge was to try and create a new visual language. But the person I have to thank for most of that is Hajo [Müller] who had already created all this incredible artwork. It’s so stark and beautiful in the way that he’s used real imagery and texture to create the pieces. I love the large formats images that Hajo produced to really give you that sense of a wide screen or cinematic format. He sent through a load of the artwork quite early in the process. His artwork by the time that I was really working with it was already mostly there and just incredible images. I was looking at that and thinking he’s done it, he’s created the visual language of The Overview and if I can even get a small piece of that into my film then I’ll be happy because I love his work.
Nick Holmes Music: You have said the biggest challenge was to convey the scale of space?
MS: I think the main piece that really shows the scale would be Perspective, the first section of the second half. We’ve got Rotem [Wilson]’s voice, speaking through these incredible numbers such as ten to the power of twelve. But what does that mean? And so one of the things we were talking about was by putting up that number onto the screen, do people know that that’s going to be? The number of zeros that are at the end of these numbers, your brain can’t process it that well. And so when we were thinking of showing the scales, I had to split up those sequences and of course it has to be stylized to the music as well.
But there’s one moment where you can see the sun and you can see the different rings of the orbits of our planets in our solar system. And the camera bounces back and bounces forward quite fast. One of the things that I’m not sure if people quite catch is that our Sun just shrinks by a huge amount and then these absolutely colossal stars that are the next scale up swirl into the frame. So even on a 4K screen, placing these objects next to each other, our Sun suddenly becomes minuscule against these larger stars out there. So it’s actually very difficult to have a reference point when you’re looking at these sorts of visuals in a way that really puts it in perspective for us humans to understand.
The other part of the film that talks about scale is the section called Cosmic Suns of Toil which is midway through the first half. For that we’ve got the camera that just pulls back and goes through all the different layers of space. I wanted to frame our solar system and then what’s outside of our solar system. This is where I was doing my research on what these layers are, if I set a course for the stars and kept going, what objects would I move through. As you get outside of our solar system, there’s The Local Bubble, and The Local Cluster.
It’s amazing to consider that there’s so many other stars and solar systems out there, and then it just keeps going and keeps going until we can’t see any further because light can’t travel. There’s a certain amount of light that it can travel compared to how fast the speed of light is and that’s elapsed. Then eventually at the end of that section, Cosmic Suns of Toil, we reach the edge of the Cosmic Web, which is these, almost like strand filaments of the matter of galaxies.
And then what’s on the outside? We don’t know. So we have a slightly more abstract, stylized section and then we just dive straight down. The thing that I find amazing about that is it’s set up to be relative scale, not absolute scale. So when the camera flies straight back through the Local Cluster of our solar system and then back onto Earth, all of that’s over in about like three or four frames of video. It’s incredible that we cross so much distance in the space of a millisecond.
The Alien on the moor
Nick Holmes Music: Can I ask you a bit more detail about the film? It starts off with the alien, saying, “Did you forget I exist now?” Steven himself has said that’s slightly tongue in cheek. How do you feel about the alien? There’s a beautiful section at the end of Part I, where the alien is floating around in space. What’s your reaction to that alien?
MS: I feel like it’s a great way to introduce where we are right now as a species. I think the key takeaway from the film is that we look inwards so much, and when you look outwards at space there’s so much out there which is unattainable and unreachable for a lot of humans, so maybe we don’t give much thought to the perspective of what we are and what our reality is. I don’t know how many people in the modern age are looking up at space and thinking, “I know what’s up there and I know what that means about where I am.”
MILES SKARIN ON THE DESIGN OF THE ALIEN
“The alien design came from Hajo [Müller‘s] artwork… there’s the image of the alien, so using that as reference we designed it as a 3D modelled character. The image in Hajo’s artwork had lots of earthy textures over it, so our first design used only these same materials for quite a flat, matte look. Steven Wilson then suggested that it needed to look more alien and like it had just crawled out of the muddy depths of the moor, and that influenced the more organic looking final design of the alien and the animation at the start of Objects Outlive Us.”
Every time I go outside and walk down to the end of my road at night, and I’ve got stars above me, I’m always looking up and thinking, “that’s all right there.” I feel like that’s a great moment to start the record and say we’re not looking at humans this time around. We know we’re looking out at space, but then we are looking back at what that means for the human race.
A teenager with his first telescope
And there with his first telescope A teenager stands full of hormones and hope As he squints at the night, like a painting of light He doesn’t suppose that a black hole implodes In a trillion years from now.
The section Objects Meanwhile, discusses a black hole swallowing an entire galaxy. And when you think, were there people in that galaxy, did they know what was about to happen to them and if so, what would they be thinking? We get wrapped up in things that maybe we should have a little bit more perspective on. If every single human on planet Earth was able to recognise that we are all just trapped on a rock that’s being flung through space, maybe we’d have a different worldview. But the human race is so complex, I’m not going to go there.
Nick Holmes Music: Talking of the human race, The Buddha of The Modern Agefeatures a series of man-made disasters that lead to the destruction of the Earth?
MS: That section is looking at humans and what we’re doing on Earth before we go out into space. We meet the alien, and then after that we are presented with Earth. It’s not meant to be a future version of Earth. It’s meant to be a current version of Earth. I think it’s very easy to look at dystopian scenes of natural disasters, wars and climate change and think this is all set 20 years in the future, and we’ll work it out, we’ll be fine.
But actually, this stuff is happening now. It’s interesting that while all of these events are playing out and things are getting more and more serious, is enough being done by the human race to really set us on a course where we’re not just going to end up in that dystopian world of Interstellar, a global food crisis and dust storms that swirl around the planet, to the point where the planet is not habitable anymore. Are we barrelling towards that future, and is it too late to stop it? There’s a lot of those classic narratives tied up in that section.
But of course presenting it in such a stark way on screen and moving through all of those environments is one way of really showing this is the state of things right now. Of course it’s dramatized a little bit with animation, and at the end you’ve got all of the figures stampeding and falling off a cliff. I mean take what you want from that.
The message of that section is that maybe the human race could be doing more, but then of course the human race is massively complex in itself. And there’s a lot of problems we need to work out. And I don’t think I’m the person to be able to offer the answers; but hopefully collectively, we can put differences behind us and actually try to work out these things.
‘And now in her old wedding bed/A lady will dream that her husband is dead/ Of course he’s alive/He’ll be back around five’
Nick Holmes Music: Objects: Meanwhile is a very literal and specific description of small-town England with lyrics by Andy Partridge, contrasted with what’s going on in other galaxies. I was interested to see that you turned it into something almost magical with all these shimmering figures, but it’s not a detailed rendition of the lyrics.
MS: The lyrics tell a story, but I’m very mindful about not just taking the lyrics and putting that into visuals. The lyrics tell such a wonderful story and the way it flows from scene to scene, I felt that had to be the way forward for that section. And by setting these small sequences but made out of stardust and put them into these cosmic-looking scenes, I hopefully created a quite a nice way of showing that.
That was one of the things we were talking about first. Steven’s note was he wanted to have everyday objects presented as though they were like a nebula or a galaxy out in space. So I was trying to build different ways of showing that. We had a Nebula Generator [which digital artists use to create configurable space nebula effects]. I could put a 3D model into it, and then it would render it as a galaxy or a nebula out in space.
Her shopping bag broke sending eggs and flour crashing Down to the ground, just like star clusters smashing.
And I wanted there to be moments like the opening where the shopping bag falls and then the flour spreads out and there’s stars inside of that. I really wanted it to look like we were seeing like the birth of a galaxy or the birth of stars or something like that, where an event on Earth has a parallel to events out in space, visually at least.
Nick Holmes Music: There are some very abstract instrumental sections on The Overview. How did you decide to illustrate those, because there are no stories in those sections?
MS: A lot of the designs come from Hajo’s artwork. There are various sections and we wanted to have a journey, especially in the section, where we’ve got Randy McStine’s fantastic guitar solo, just after the Ark sequence where we go into an alien planet and we see the ghost on the moor again. For that sequence, I really wanted to put the viewer into that environment. And the idea there is that we had launched ourselves towards the end of the galaxy into the end of the universe, and now we’re flying back and landing on some other planet somewhere else. That was definitely trying to bring in as many of the colourful possibilities that alien worlds could have and just trying to realise that, and trying to show what it could look like.
I think a lot of these things were so influenced by films that we’ve seen already and designs that have been made, but also there’s probably limits to what we can imagine these alien worlds would look like because we are only influenced by what we see directly around us.
Nick Holmes Music: And in Perspective where Rotem Wilson’s spoken words provide all the perspectives of sizes of planets and galaxies, how much were you drawing on real images and how much was your imagination?
MS: The James Webb Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope have been taking some absolutely fantastic images which are available online where artists can use them. That was a massive resource to be able to look at and get inspiration from.
But for all of the scenes in ‘Perspective’, especially the ones where we’re going through nebulas and the larger cosmic objects, what I’m doing there is creating what is called a Pyro simulation which creates these kind of smoke effects. And that is driven off images and source material that’s taken from these incredible pictures of space.
And because they’re only two-dimensional images that we’ve got from these telescopes, what I wanted to be able to do is create that, but in a 3D space so I can fly a camera through it and we can see there’s some depth to it. I’m sure there’s probably some very technical way we could scientifically accurately do that. But imagine there’s just a slice of the photo or the image of that galaxy or that nebula, and then smoke starts to rise from both sides of that piece of paper that then creates this 3D object that I can then fly a camera into. I can then scatter stars inside of that as tiny little spheres that can then emit light, and that creates the effect of this 3D nebula.
Nick Holmes Music: I’m going to ask a slightly less serious question now, but I have to say when I saw Steven as an astronaut, which obviously he was very excited about, I had this image of Buzz Lightyear.
MS: Yes! [laughs] One of the early notes that Steven gave me was that we didn’t want it to almost come across like an action figure, floating in space; but the actual range of motion you get in those space suits, there is only a certain amount of movement that you can do in zero gravity. But we added a little bit more movement into the character to try and hopefully reduce any sort of, ‘Look, it’s Buzz Lightyear floating out in space.’
That was really good fun. I think the idea for came from Steven – looking across the Earth initially and then just being pulled across time and space and then experiencing the entirety of everything in a flowing strand across the screen, and what that’s meant to represent is the passage of time in this thin thread that’s going across space. Steven falls into that thread and then visits the earth and all these different places and then falls in and out of that in space, which is quite disorientating in a way for him.
Nick Holmes Music: Steven has been quite open about his fear of flying, but has also said that on balance, he probably would go into space given the opportunity. Would you go into space if you had the chance?
MS: I would probably share his fear of flying in a way, because I guess I think about it too much. You’re being rocketed in a tiny little capsule across the sky. But we’ve got ways of managing it, and everything’s tested. And when we know that the technology works, it’s amazing. We’ve had so many years of space exploration that it’s now coming to a point where we’ve commercial astronauts going up and experiencing space. You don’t have to be a NASA-trained astronaut, you need a lot of money at the moment, but maybe one day it will be a point where we can maybe think about doing that, and maybe going on a trip to the moon won’t be something out of The Jetsons. It would be achievable for most people and a regular occurrence.
To answer your question, I think I’d have to think very carefully about whether I did it or not. I guess I like having my feet on solid ground. But I think if I were given the opportunity, I don’t think I’d be able to pass it up, because not many people get to experience something like that. So I probably would be saying yes.
Nick Holmes Music: The final section, ‘Permanence,’ with Theo Travis’ beautifulsaxophone solo. Can you describe what’s happening visually there? Is there a green shoot of hope?
MS: At the end, we’ve just had the Infinity Measured in Moments section, which is such a huge crescendo to the piece. There’s so much going on in that section and everything’s building up, and then we get this very soft end to the film where we’re floating in space.
After the visual onslaught of the ending section, because it is quite a lot and it is intended to make the viewer feel dizzy, it is blurry in sections where it is difficult to focus on it. That section was meant to be a ride through space where we can really just take a moment to consider the frame and see this asteroid that we’re flying down onto, and in the background of that scene, we have a huge black hole. And so we’re just one of the rocks that’s orbiting this black hole. Inevitably, these rocks are going to be sucked into that black hole and shredded.
And then as we reach the surface, we have this green shoot of life appearing in a place where it really shouldn’t. We really wanted to have some sort of ending where it wasn’t all about space as a cold, dark place, where it’s about death and nothing exists out there. I would like to think that there is more life out there and that the chances of there being life are quite high, especially when you look at how many solar systems and planets are out there. We wanted to leave it with somewhat of a positive view after diving into the darker aspects of it.
Nick Holmes Music: It’s also a very Steven Wilson way to end an album, isn’t it? So many of his albums with Porcupine Tree and his solo albums end on a gentle, quiet track rather than in a very loud climax. Is it a technique which he employs a lot?
MS: Well, there’s always been the really big epic tracks at the end of Steven Wilson albums, but yes, it’s going in the opposite direction and putting something quiet has been very effective as well. It just feels like you’ve got that moment to just sit back and take in what you’ve just heard.
Nick Holmes Music: Can I ask you a more general question? Are you a musician? Because watching it again, it struck me how clever the editing is, and how beautifully it matches the pace, the rhythm, and the emotion as well. But from a technical point of view you’re matching the music really well. Where does that come from in your background?
MS: When I was at school, I took music, but mainly music technology and production rather than a classical musical education. I was a kid who was trying to learn as much as I could on guitar, but I found all of the photography, video production, and animation side, and that’s what I ended up doing more music production than guitar. But I still play from time to time, and I still want to try and do something musically because I’ve been so fortunate to work with a lot of my musical heroes.
At some point, maybe I’ll decide to give music another shot. But it’s interesting you mentioned that, because I spent a lot of time listening through the music and finding the moments and following the music, and a lot of the time I find that as a filmmaker, you normally have to build your narrative structure, but what I’ve found is that the musicians have done that job for me. They’ve done the hard job of working out the journey that they’re taking the listener on; all I’m doing is just putting visuals to that story that they’ve already produced. As long as I can follow where the music is going and the moods and the styles of it, then I guess that’s all I need to know musically.
Nick Holmes Music: How would you sum up the narrative of The Overview?
MS: I think the main thing with The Overview, as Steven will say as well, is the idea of having perspective on what we’re doing and our legacy on Earth. What if an alien was looking down at Earth, what would they see and what would they think about us and the way that we live?
It’s a story of sustainability and trying to really protect the home that we all have and trying to forge a path towards being a sustainable human race where we’re able to live in harmony with the planet. A lot of people have had that same dream. But we have to make that align with the way that civilization has to run; we’re going to be consuming a certain number of resources for the human race to exist.
But I think that as long as decisions are being made, we’re consuming the right resources in terms of animals, forests that we’re cutting down, what we’re putting in the oceans. It’s an environmental message, but also an animal rights message as well, where I think that humans, hopefully at some point in time, can look at our impacts on the world and hopefully see a nicer world around us.
Nick Holmes Music: But I think, as you’ve touched on, it’s also a very human message about perspective, isn’t it?
MS: Yes, definitely that. We all get wrapped up in our own lives and everything can feel very overwhelming. You look at the news these days and it’s difficult to think we’re heading in the right direction. We are all just floating on a rock that’s flying through space. And as long as we can just be nice to each other – and I know that’s quite a naive thing to say – but maybe that is the way that we have to look at the world, to take each problem as it comes and make the most empathetic response where we’re understanding our fellow humans on the planet, but also our fellow species on the planet, looking at animals and making sure that we’re providing the best world for us all to live in.
I feel like these days we have the technology to make a better world. And so it saddens me when I see that decisions are being made that are not maybe for the greater good of the planet, and it’s more just to make a bit more money, which only benefits a certain few.
I think there’s a lot of complexity in the human race, but I think that there’s definitely a message in The Overview, which is perspective; let’s try and forge a good path forward.
Nick Holmes Music: Is there anything you would like to add?
MS: I should also mention that I was assisted by my good friend Jack Hubbard, who helped me out with a lot of the more technical visual effects. We both worked on the film, and we were both there at the BFI IMAX show, and it was just an amazing thing to be able to share that experience with someone who has supported me massively over the years on pretty much every single project.
Jack is a visual effects artist who works at Framestore, one of the largest visual effects houses in London. He’s a very good friend and he’s always up for a challenge and he was amazing in answering a lot of the more technical visual effects questions because he uses a more advanced 3D software than I do.
Part of the process of putting it into the cinema is that you have to follow a certain amount of spec and quality control to be able to put it in that sort of environment. And so a lot of what I’ve been learning about in terms of video production and filmmaking is how to produce content to that kind of high-resolution, high-quality scale, and of course Steven works with Dolby Atmos and all of the high-end audio standard. So throughout the production of The Overview, I was really keen to bring that kind of high res, high end workflow towards the visuals as well.
Jack works in high end visual effects for TV, film, and advertising. I try to bring as many of those workflows from these high-end visual effects productions into the work that I do, which is much smaller scale, but it’s amazing what anyone can now access on YouTube software that’s freely available. And you can just follow these same standards and quality processes that feature films go through.
We had a test day at the Dolby showroom in London, where we screened the first version of the film and listened to it back in the Atmos mix. And it was fascinating talking to them about the Dolby Vision and the Dolby Atmos standards that they produce, the high-end HDR imagery. And then also the high-resolution surround audio.
Maybe that’s next on my list of things to do, to try and work out how I produce the highest quality image possible. I know that if you’ve got a Dolby Vision capable TV, there is a way that we could start to create a version of The Overview so that future projects could be Dolby Atmos, but also Dolby Vision as well. I’d love that.
Nick Holmes Music: Thank you very much for your time, and for spending so long talking to me.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.All stills from the film provided courtesy of Miles Skarin, with thanks.
Lyrically I arrived at a point where I was no longer interested in writing about abstract concepts, like war, religion, space… etc. These are very personal and emotionally raw songs.
Steven Wilson, on Porcupine Tree’s Lightbulb Sun (2000)
Steven Wilson’s latest album, The Overview, is inspired by the emotional and sometimes spiritual experience that astronauts have described when they look back at the Earth from space, known as ‘The Overview Effect’. Wilson often used space as a theme, particularly in the early years of Porcupine Tree, when the band was essentially a solo project. But on later Porcupine Tree albums, from Lightbulb Sun (2000) onwards, Wilson’s lyrical preoccupations turned first towards the profoundly personal on that album, and then to his broader concerns about modern society on later albums from In Absentia (2002) to The Incident (2009). The band then went on hiatus for over ten years while Wilson launched his successful solo career. This article reflects on Porcupine Tree’s space songs, album by album, and track by track. For Part II: The solo years, click here.
The cover of On the Sunday of Life (1992)
Space Transmission (On the Sunday of Life, 1992)
This is not really a song, but more a message from outer space. It’s a genuinely creepy monologue, uttered by a creature that’s been trapped on another planet, ‘for many eons’ by ‘You know who’, in complete darkness since going blind or ‘since the sun exploded fourteen centuries ago’. It could have come from a Doctor Who episode – it’s not difficult to imagine the song’s monster causing children to hide behind the sofa. We know nothing about ‘He who keeps me here’, but he regards himself as a competitor to God, so is apparently a supreme being. The protagonist appears to be a creature with ‘scales’, whose threats of revenge upon returning to Earth are as dark as the black liquid that seeps uncontrollably from its mouth.
It Will Rain for a Million Years(On the Sunday of Life, 1992)
This track is mainly instrumental; the lyrics are spoken, rather than sung. The protagonist is leaving Earth, presumably because a war or natural disaster has left the planet in such a dystopian state that the rain will never stop. He’s leaving in a spaceship, and in the opening lines, there are echoes of the David Bowie persona, Major Tom (from Space Oddity and others),
‘I locked myself inside the capsule And watched the planet slowly turning blue.’
Bowie’s song describes the lonely Major Tom as being in a ‘capsule’, and the protagonists of both songs observe that planet Earth looks ‘blue’. The two songs share a sense of melancholy due to the inability to return to Earth, though for different reasons. The protagonist in the Porcupine Tree song will visit ‘worlds of crystal beauty’ but will never find answers, suggesting that his quest is existential rather than simply an escape from a ruined planet,
‘I’ve seen the past, I’ve seen the future Beyond dimension and into empty space Finding questions, never answers Living time behind another face.’
The cover of The Sky Moves Sideways 1994
The Sky Moves Sideways Phase 1: II. I Find That I’m Not There (The Sky Moves Sideways 1993)
This is the only section of the largely instrumental track The Sky Moves Sideways (from the 19994 album of the same name) that includes lyrics. It has a lovely, desolate feel, as the protagonist seems to disappear; first going off the map, before not being there at all. The lyrics blend the surreal and the poetic, suggesting space travel while evoking a journey to the inner consciousness. The vocals possess a contemplative introspection, enhanced by the use of echo, and a desperate, almost angry tone of despair.
‘We lost the skyline We stepped right off the map Drifted into blank space And let the clocks relapse.’
Moonloop (The Sky Moves Sideways 1993)
Wilson was inspired to record a song about the Moon when, in an Oxfam shop, he found a vinyl copy of the spoken word recording, Man On The Moon, narrated by Walter Cronkite, the American broadcaster who anchored CBS Evening News for nearly twenty years. This instrumental track was recorded in July 1995, 26 years after the Apollo 11 Moon landing. In July 1969, as the Moon landing took place, Pink Floyd were in a television studio, improvising another Moon-themed piece. Floyd guitarist, David Gilmour, wrote in The Guardian in July 2009,
‘They were broadcasting the Moon landing, and they thought that to provide a bit of a break, they would show us jamming. It was only about five minutes long. The song was called ‘Moonhead’ – it’s a nice, atmospheric, spacey, 12-bar blues’.
The sample near the end of Moonloop is a NASA recording of the Apollo 11 Astronauts, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, at Tranquility [sic] Base on the Moon, communicating by radio with Bruce McCandless, an astronaut at Mission Control in Houston. In a heavily edited recording, Neil Armstrong can be heard climbing down the Lunar Module ladder, describing the Moon’s surface as he sets foot on it. It was at this point that he made his most famous quote, which is not present in the sample, ‘That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind’
The track begins with what could be the sound of an ocean on the Moon. Early astronomers thought the sea of tranquillity, or Mare Tranquillitatis, was actually a sea, though closer inspection revealed it to be a dry plain created by ancient volcanic eruptions. Wilson’s distorted guitar provides space-rock stylings until around fifteen minutes in, when the song reaches a stasis point, and the above-quoted samples appear. The song has a trance-like, hypnotic feel, making it part of the space rock that began in the 1960s, with bands like Gong and Hawkwind, and resurfaced in the 1990s.
The cover of the Moonloop EP (1994)
Stars Die (Moonloop EP 1994)
The concept of stars dying suggests that, in the long term, everything dies; that humanity is fragile and ephemeral, and that the Earth itself will eventually perish,
‘Tree cracked And mountain cried Bridges broke And window sighed.’
The sample at around 2:30 is of President Richard Nixon speaking from the White House Oval Office to the Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin when they were on the Moon. In what he describes as ‘the most historic telephone call ever made’, the President says the astronauts’ achievements have inspired mankind to ‘redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquillity to Earth’. Perhaps the Moon mission brought hope. But the song itself doesn’t suggest peace and tranquillity will come to Earth. It ends with an image of humanity blasting off into space – astronauts in ‘hypersleep’, the deep coma-like sleep that’s essential for long-distance space travel.
The cover of Stupid Dream (1999)
A Smart Kid (Stupid Dream, 1999)
A quietly melancholy song about the infinite loneliness suffered by the protagonist, the last remaining human being stranded on planet Earth after what seems to have been a five-year nuclear winter. After ‘a chemical harvest was sown’, nuclear clouds obscure the sun. It appears there was a nuclear war, which the protagonist ‘must have won’: making the song title profoundly ironic. He has won an empty victory.
The nuclear war theme is related to Radioactive Toy (from On the Sunday of Life), in which the ‘toy’ grants ‘the freedom to destroy’. It would perhaps be foolish to describe Robert Oppenheimer – credited as the ‘father of the atomic bomb’ – as merely a ‘smart kid’ like the song’s protagonist. The reality is much more subtle, but Oppenheimer later did express regret about the ‘sin’ that he and other physicists had committed: that once the knowledge that created the atomic bomb had been gained, it could never be lost again.
In A Smart Kid, the protagonist is waiting for an alien spaceship to arrive to rescue him from Earth. He will wait ‘until the sky is blue’. The implication is that it will never be blue again.
‘A spaceship from another star They ask me where all the people are What can I tell them? I tell them I’m the only one There was a war but I must’ve won Please, take me with you.’
The Cover of Lightbulb Sun (2000)
Last Chance To Evacuate Planet Earth Before It Is Recycled (Lightbulb Sun, 2000)
The first part of this song is called ‘Winding Shot (Summer 1981)’, part of the more personal lyrical themes Wilson began writing songs about on Lightbulb Sun. It refers to the time when childhood turns into adolescence. In the summer of 1981, Wilson was thirteen and living in Hemel Hempstead, an English town about 24 miles northwest of London. Winding Shot is the name of a small cul-de-sac off Spring Lane in Hemel Hempstead. The nostalgia in the song is tinged with regret as summer comes to an end,
‘Summer went away And we just weren’t the same.’
This part of the song ends with his childhood friend kissing him on the lips, as they reach that strange limbo of adolescence, suspended between childhood and adulthood; ‘Not grown-ups but not kids’. A rhythmic acoustic riff drives a short bridge, leading to an instrumental passage from which the song title is derived.
The title could convey an environmental message, something that’s become even more critical in the two decades since the song was written. But Wilson told Joakim Jahlmar of DPRP.net in March 2001 that, Last Chance To Evacuate Planet Earth Before It Is Recycled is not about ecology. It takes its title from the edited transcript of a videotape dated 29 September 1996, from the leader of the Heaven’s Gate religious cult, who called himself Do (real name: Marshall Applewhite).
‘This planet is about to be recycled, refurbished, started over. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be destroyed; it doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world. And whether or not you believe that this civilization is going to be recycled or refurbished is up to you. Now, the purpose of this tape is to warn you that this is about to happen and that it’s going to happen very soon. At the End of the Age, the planet is wiped clean… refurbished… rejuvenated.‘
On 22 March 1997, Heaven’s Gate published a macabre press release,
‘HEAVEN’S GATE ‘Away Team’ Returns to Level Above Human in Distant Space
By the time you receive this, we’ll be gone – several dozen of us. We came from the Level Above Human in distant space, and we have now exited the bodies that we were wearing for our earthly task, to return to the world from whence we came – task completed.‘
Applewhite told his followers that they could leave Earth on a spaceship that would accompany the comet Hale-Bopp, which was due to approach the planet in early 1997. Tragically, despite a claim on the Heaven’s Gate website that the group was strongly against suicide, 39 cult members (including Applewhite) were found dead in a San Diego house on 26 March 1997. The track ends with the song title’s chilling words, spoken by Applewhite before he joined his followers in a mass suicide, achieved by consuming a mixture of apple sauce, vodka and barbiturates.
The cover of Closure/Continuation (2022)
Herd Culling (Closure/Continuation 2022)
This track opens with the visceral lines,
‘Son, go fetch the rifle now, There’s something in the yard.’
These words throw us immediately into a compelling psychodrama. Wilson has the ability of a poet or scriptwriter to enter a story halfway through – the narrative gradually unfolds as the song progresses, teasing the listener to extract the meaning of the song, wondering who the ‘strange gods’ are,
‘Did you fall to earth to cull a herd? Strange gods above the earth These are things you just won’t believe.
In the shackles of the night There are lights up in the sky…’
Wilson revealed the song’s meaning to Anil Prasad of Innerviews before he later retracted, saying he would prefer listeners to make up their own minds. Those who prefer not to have their views influenced by Wilson’s thoughts should skip the next paragraph.
Wilson told Prasad that the story of Skinwalker Ranch, near Ballard, Utah, inspired the song. Several accounts suggest that the ranch has been plagued by paranormal activity and UFO sightings, and several books, films, and documentaries have been published about it. The song describes the family’s attempts to defend themselves against aliens, ‘strange gods above the earth’ who may have landed to ‘cull a herd’ of cattle on the ranch. He told Prasad: ‘I remain sceptical when it comes to the UFO stuff and government coverups. But I love the stories.’ His scepticism is echoed in the chorus of the song, which consists of the single word ‘liar’, resentfully muttered at first, then viciously spat out as his venom increases.
Sources
Gilmour, D., My moon-landing jam session (The Guardian, 2 July 2009) Press release, HEAVEN’S GATE “Away Team” Returns to Level Above Human in Distant Space (22 March 1997) Applewhite, M., Last Chance to Evacuate Earth Before It’s Recycled; Edited Transcript of Videotape (Heaven’s Gate website, 29 September 1996) Jahlmar, J., An Interview with Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree (DPRP.net, March 2001) Prasad, A., Porcupine Tree Collective Action (Innerviews, 2022)
For Steven Wilson’s Space Songs Part II: The Solo Years, click here
“It’s about death… in the nicest possible sense of the word.”
*****
To celebrate the 50th 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 Bitesand 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.
I am pleased to announce that the Second Edition of my book, Porcupine Tree On Track, is now available to order from Burning Shed and other good bookshops.
The new edition is fully revised and updated to include an in-depth analysis of Porcupine Tree’s most recent album Closure/Continuation.
“… [Holmes’] analysis is critical and well-balanced, and he does well to keep his fandom out of the text. An interesting and thoughtful critique of an interesting and thoughtful band.”
