Progressive Rock
Steven Wilson and Opeth frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt have a second Storm Corrosion album under way, fourteen years after the first and so far only one. Wilson told Anil Prasad about it in a long interview for Innerviews, pegged to “Requiem for a Village”, his solo album out on 6 November.
“It’s very different, but you will recognize the aesthetic,” he says. “We’ve still got a long way to go on it. It’s a massive chunk of music almost entirely played on a lot of acoustic instruments.” He says a lot of it carries over from his self-described “idiot savant” approach to instruments on “Requiem for a Village”, and sums it up: “It definitely continues the vocabulary we created on the first record, but it’s also very different, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. We wouldn’t do it otherwise.” In the video version of the interview he adds that more than one reviewer at the “Requiem for a Village” playback events heard echoes of the 2012 record.
On Porcupine Tree, he says the trio get together a couple of times a year to write and already have a number of pieces, but the album is “a long way off”: he talks about two or three years before they release anything, and possibly a tour. “A belated follow-up to ‘In Absentia’ or ‘Signify’ isn’t what we’re likely to come up with.”
He and Tim Bowness have begun new No-Man material following this year’s archive releases, and are picturing “something like a double album”, hugely sprawling. “It’s not going to happen anytime soon.”
Wilson hasn’t given a title or a date for the second Storm Corrosion album.
Text by Guillem Cardós