Steven Wilson
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Steven Wilson (born Steven John Wilson on November 3, 1967 in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, England) is the lead guitarist/singer and songwriter for progressive rock band Porcupine Tree. Steven is a self-taught producer, audio engineer, bass guitar and keyboard player (among other musical instruments).
Biography
Steven Wilson discovered his love for music around the age of 8. It all began one Christmas when his parents bought presents for each other in the form of LPs. His father and mother received Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and Donna Summer's Love to Love You Baby, respectively. The young Steven spent much of his childhood listening to these albums in "heavy rotation" as he once commented. And little did he know at the time, both LPs would influence his future songwriting. He claims "...in retrospect I can see how they are almost entirely responsible for the direction that my music has taken ever since." With Pink Floyd leaning him towards experimental/psychedelic conceptual progressive rock (as exemplified by Porcupine Tree), and Donna Summer with her trance-inflicted grooves (which No-Man, Wilson's long-running collaboration with fellow musician, vocalist Tim Bowness) has adopted as its musical approach.As a child, Steven was forced to learn the guitar and, like most kids who are obliged to do something, he didn't enjoy it, so the lessons stopped taking place once his parents decided to quit wasting their money.
His next encounter with the instrument would take place around his 11th birthday, when he rescued the nylon string classical guitar from the attic and started to experiment with it, e.g. "...scraping microphones across the strings, feeding the resulting sound into overloaded reel to reel tape recorders and producing a primitive form of multi-track recording by bouncing between two cassette machines." It's clear the 11 year-old displayed an early strong fascination with different possibilities of arranging and playing with sounds.
It didn't take too long before he began to form bands with his friends from school and play live. However, the thing which kept him truly satisfied was experimenting with sounds and producing the recordings he made.
Between the years 1983 and 1985 he recorded material with underground bands Altamont and Karma. Some of those tapes have recently resurfaced due to the increasing popularity of Porcupine Tree. Wilson describes it as "...a bit like a painter having his nursery school paint blots on display..."
He was only 15 years old when he recorded a tape with Altamont, called Si Vockings. This particular work includes lyrics by Alan Duffy that Wilson later used for Porcupine Tree songs, i.e., "This Long Silence" and "It Will Rain for a Million Years".
Around the same time he played with Altamont, he was also in a band called Karma, and they recorded two tapes: The Joke's on You (1983) and The Last Man to Laugh (1985), which contained the original versions of songs later used by Porcupine Tree, "Small Fish" and "Nine Cats" though not "The Joke's On You" (played live but not recorded).
Up to this point Wilson's diverse musical experiments contained avant-garde industrial, psychedelia (with Altamont) and progressive rock (with Karma). Steven's next step was forming the two most important bands in his life so far: No-Man and Porcupine Tree; to continue reading, please refer to the article of the latter, by clicking [here].
Side projects
Apart from Porcupine Tree and No-Man, these are other projects/collaborations Steven is currently working on or has been involved with in the past.
- Bass Communion plays host to Wilson's interests in drone and ambient music. For this project, he collaborated in the late nineties with Muslimgauze, and more recently with Vidna Obmana.
- Blackfield is the name of a recent collaboration with Israeli Aviv Geffen.
- Wilson also releases under his own name. For this and other purposes he created his own record label Headphone Dust.
- Currently he is planning to record a collaborative album with Swedish Opeth singer, guitarist and composer Mikael Åkerfeldt and Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy. He is also producing the next album of Israeli band Orphaned Land, titled The Neverending Way of orWarrior.
Other appearances
- In 1988 Steven helped some friends in a band called Coltsfoot by playing on their demo tape Action at a Distance.
- He produced and contributed backing vocals, guitar and keyboards for Opeth on the albums Blackwater Park, Deliverance and Damnation
- Has also worked with OSI, Marillion, Fish, Cipher and Anja Garbarek.
Equipment
Recording studio
- Apple G4 running Logic 6.4
- Digidesign Mix TDM system
- Neumann U87 microphone
- Mackie 32-8-2 mixing desk
On stage
- Paul Reed Smith Custom 22 guitars
- [Bad Cat] two tone distortion
- BOSS distortion
- Karl Martin compressor
- Line 6 Echo Pro
- [Custom Audio Electronics] switching system
- Bad Cat Hot Cat combo amplifier
References
See also
External links
- [Steven Wilson Headquarters]
- [Porcupine Tree Official Website]
- [Deadwing Official Website]
- [Steven Wilson's Complete Discography]
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