Actual space scientists and Prog Magazine discuss prog, space and the new Steven Wilson album

Steven Wilson Space Rocks — (Image credit: Press)

Yesterday Prog sat down with our friends at Space Rocks for a chat about Steven Wilson's brand new album The Overview, and you can watch the whole thing right here...

On Monday we announced how The Overview is currently at No. 1 in the UK album midweek chart. A pretty remarkable state of affairs, thought Space Rocks, that an album that consists of just two long-form pieces of music could even be in the running to top the album charts.

Space Rocks co-founder Alexander Milas, fellow co-founder and astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Mark McCaughrean, Prog Editor Jerry Ewing and solar scientist Miho Janvier got together to discuss prog, space and The Overview.

"This is such a special occasion," says Milas. "It's such an interesting turn of creative events for Steven."

Previously editor-in-chief of Prog’s sister magazine Metal Hammer, Milas was the man who introduced Wilson to the idea of 'The Overview Effect', the phenomenon that affects astronauts when they travel into space and look back at the Earth.

“It’s a recognised phenomenon that astronauts get when they look out into space,” says Wilson. “A cognitive shift reportedly occurs in their mental perspective – the understanding, in a split second, of just how insignificant we are. The album all comes down to this idea of perspective, which is something we all could do with an injection of.”

Space Rocks is a celebration of space exploration and the art, music, and culture it inspires in conjunction with the European Space Agency.

Steven Wilson's The Overview is out now. You can get it here.

Uplink: A Review of Steven Wilson's The Overview - YouTube

Watch On

Writer and broadcaster Jerry Ewing is the Editor of Prog Magazine which he founded for Future Publishing in 2009. He grew up in Sydney and began his writing career in London for Metal Forces magazine in 1989. He has since written for Metal Hammer, Maxim, Vox, Stuff and Bizarre magazines, among others. He created and edited Classic Rock Magazine for Dennis Publishing in 1998 and is the author of a variety of books on both music and sport, including Wonderous Stories; A Journey Through The Landscape Of Progressive Rock.