Yes, I know… Another review of an old Porcupine Tree album, but I just couldn’t resist! Released back in the year 1999, the album that came out three years later after my favourite album Signify.
via Porcupine Tree – Stupid Dream (1999) — Grendel HeadQuarters
We all know that Steven Wilson is a musical centipede when it comes to making and producing music. Porcupine Tree, no-man, Bass Communion, just to name a few… But have you ever heard about his project named Incredible Expanding Mindf**k?
via Honourable Mention: Incredible Expanding Mindf**k (I.E.M.) — Grendel HeadQuarters
Reading through the excellent blog of Stephen Humphries, I found that the great man is now editing the newsletter of another great man, Steven Wilson.
Sign up here: http://stevenwilsonhq.com/sw/subscribe-to-steven-wilsons-newsletter-and-receive-a-free-download/
Steven Wilson – “Hand Cannot Erase”
Live film for the title track of Hand. Cannot. Erase., one of several clips Lasse Hoile created especially for the HCE shows.
Filmed and edited by Lasse Hoile in February 2015, starring Carrie Grr.
If you need a reminder of what artistic genius is, please watch this deeply and utterly humane Steven Wilson video from last year’s HAND.CANNOT.ERASE. No one who has a lost child can make it through this without the most powerful of emotions swelling up and beyond. Simply incredible.
I will admit, I find it hard to believe that Steven Wilson’s HAND.CANNOT.ERASE. is now fourteen months old. It arrived on my doorstep—courtesy of amazon.com—on the day it was released, and I played it immediately, of course. At the time, however, I had become truly skeptical of anything Wilson was doing at that moment. My dislike and distrust had not come on me suddenly, but, rather over a relatively long period of time. As I mentioned in a previous post, I didn’t come across his work until a random turning on of album rock radio in Fort Wayne played an incredible song—“Trains” if I remember correctly—just as Porcupine Tree had released IN ABSENTIA. I not only purchased that album that day at a Fort Wayne Bestbuy, but I also searched out an independent CD/record store, and purchased much of PT’s back catalogue. To say that a decade of obsession (in the healthy, fan sense; not in the psychotic sense) with Wilson and all of his art set in. I was certainly a completest. If it had Wilson’s name on it, I owned it.
Porcupine Tree, ANESTHETIZE: LIVE IN TILBURG, OCTOBER 2008 (Kscope, 2cd/1dvd, 2015).
I’m a relative late comer to his music. As chance happened (as chance does), I actually turned on a radio (something I’d really not done since the late 1980s) while driving through Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the early fall of 2002. And, miraculously, at that moment, the station was playing something from IN ABSENTIA.
“Trains,” I think.
Continue reading “A Not So Gentle Reminder: Anesthetize from Porcupine Tree”
Just as Nick Beggs told us in his interview with Progarchy.com, Steven Wilson is a huge Prince fan.
Wilson confirmed Beggs’ report when Wilson posted on Facebook on April 21:
Just 30 minutes before we went on stage in Vienna tonight I heard that Prince had died, I couldn’t believe it. It was a very tough show for me to play. The word “genius” is used a bit too often and loosely within the music world, but I think Prince was the real thing, perhaps the most naturally gifted performer of all time. I saw him play live several times, and his show at The O2 Arena in London in 2007 I would rate as the greatest concert I ever saw (Craig Blundell is agreeing with me now, he was there too).
The run of albums from Dirty Mind in 1980 through to Sign ‘O’ the Times in 1987 matches anyone in its sustained brilliance, and it was such a big part of my soundtrack as a teenager (some of you will know that The Ballad of Dorothy Parker from the latter album was on the mixtape made by my character in Hand.Cannot.Erase., which is pretty much what my mixtape would have been at that time in my life).
Tonight I made a humble attempt to sing his song Sign ‘O’ the Times, in fact just before we played David Bowie‘s Space Oddity. It’s been a while since I recorded my version so I couldn’t remember it very well, but I wanted to at least try it, it would have seemed strange to pay tribute to one unique musical genius and not the other. Farewell strange purple one, and thanks for it all.
The word is out that Prince is dead at the age of 57.
What does Prince have to do with prog?
Listen to the Progarchy.com interview with Nick Beggs from February 26 to hear part of the answer to that question…
I’ve been super busy this spring break writing my senior thesis, and as such I have listened to a boatload of music. I finally got the chance to listen to Steven Wilson’s album of covers from 2014 (released throughout his solo career), Cover Version. To be honest, I’m unfamiliar with all of these songs, but the first track, “Thank You,” originally by Alanis Morissette, really stood out to me. The music is so simple, but Wilson’s delivery of the lyrics is amazing… emotional… beautiful. It is simultaneously melancholic and hopeful.
Thank you, Mr. Wilson.
Progarchy 