Does Steven Wilson ever sleep? He’s about to release his third solo album in three years with the eerie, folk horror-inspired Requiem For A Village (the fifth if you count the two he’s put out under his experimental Bass Communion alter ego). And that’s not to mention his parallel career as the remixer to rock’s great and good, from Jethro Tull to Phil Collins.
But he’s already looking ahead, with multiple projects on the go, including Porcupine Tree, No-Man and Storm Corrosion, his long-dormant collaboration with Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt.
The latter released their sole, self-titled album back in 2012, but Wilson reveals that he and Åkerfeldt rented a studio owned by Benny Andersson of Abba to begin work in earnest on the much-anticipated follow-up.
“We spent a week in Stockholm earlier this year and created a 45-minute framework,” says Wilson of Storm Corrosion. “A single piece of music that is 45 minutes long, and it's fucked up. It's almost entirely acoustic, but it's very dark, very atonal in places, and very beautiful in places. It has a vaguely nautical theme about an old guy shipwrecked on an island.
“It’s not completely acoustic,” he continues. “Mike still plays some electric guitars. But Benny from Abba has this incredible collection of instruments and we set them up in the studio and we basically just went around playing all manner of stuff. I was like a man possessed for a week, and we ended up with this amazing piece of music. We haven't done the vocal tracking yet, but I'm really excited about it.”
Storm Corrosion remains one of the most beloved, if cult-ish projects Wilson has been involved in. “I think it's an acquired taste, but the people that love that record really love it,” he says. “Interestingly, if there’s one album that has some close affinity with Requiem For A Village, it’s the first Storm Corrosion album. It has this slightly dissonant feel - it’s almost like an avant garde folk record in places. I’m doing that a lot more on Requiem For A Village, but there’s a little bit of it on that record - that dark, uneasy feeling.”
Storm Corrosion isn’t the only iron Wilson has in the musical fire. “All my projects are always on the go,” he says. “There are Porcupine Tree songs that have been written, but we're a long way from it being an album's worth, so it could be years. I've got new No-Man stuff on the go. Me and Tim [Bowness, Wilson’s No-Man partner] have sketched out a double album's worth of material over the last couple of years. Again, we’re in no rush to finish it, but I still love collaborating.”
And then there’s a potential follow-up to Requiem For A Village itself – or even follow-ups. Wilson and Andy Partridge, the former XTC frontman who co-wrote lyrics for the new album, have talked about returning to the haunted landscape they’ve imagined up between them.
“We got to the end of the project and we were both really happy with it,” he says. “We went, ‘Hasn’t this got the potential for a sequel?’ Being prog, I obviously said, ‘It’s got to be a trilogy.’ And straight away, Andy said, ‘The second part will be about the people and the third will be about the animals, the birds or the dead.’ We might even do the sequel fairly quickly off the back of this one.”
Requiem For A Village is released on November 6. Read the full interview with Steven Wilson in the brand new issue of Prog, on sale now.
