Steven Wilson has heard the future, and it sounds incredible. “Over the next three to five years, we’re going to see a massive change in how records sound and how people listen to them,” he says.
“The developments in audio are incredible right now. Atmos and spatial audio is going to succeed where things like quadraphonic did not, because the technology is there and it’s relatively affordable. You can have a soundbar or a pair of binaural headphones and you can listen to spatial audio. For the first time it feels like I’m at the forefront of something that’s changing.”
It’s a sunny morning in late August, and we’re sitting opposite each other on wicker sofas in the back garden of Wilson’s north London home while his two small rescue dogs run around our feet. Wilson moved here with his family before the pandemic, and spent much of the next two-and- a-half years working on his seventh solo album, The Harmony Codex, which is the jumping-off point for his impassioned speech.
Talking multi-channels and waveforms isn’t usually the stuff that great interviews are made of, but this is different. The Harmony Codex is a shape-shifting, darkly dreamlike album, one that forgoes Wilson’s normal approach of staying on one set of musical rails and switches between electronic prog and crepuscular jazz to pop-adjacent piano balladry and even a warped take on hip hop over the course of its 10 songs.
But that’s not the most fascinating thing about The Harmony Codex. What sets it apart from his past albums – and pretty much any other album you’ll hear this year – is what it sounds like. The sometime Porcupine Tree frontman has poured all the experience and expertise he’s built up from remixing other artists’ classic records in Atmos and spatial audio into his own.
“I’ve learned from mistakes I’ve made as I’ve gone along,” he says, “and I’ve taken everything that was successful and put it into this record. I felt this is absolutely the time to make this album.”
A week before we meet, his label holds a series of playbacks at the London HQ of super-high-end speaker manufacturers L-Acoustics. Sitting in a pitch-black room, surrounded by 18 giant wall speakers and three more embedded in the ceiling, the spatial audio version of The Harmony Codex does indeed sound like nothing else.
Where Wilson’s work on other people’s records was bound by the materials he was given, this was clearly and meticulously built from the ground up. Songs wash around the room, individual parts disconnecting and reconnecting in a grand ballet. Instruments and vocals give the illusion of being everywhere at once. Details, whether it’s the glitchy beats and keening backing vocals of graceful first single Economies Of Scale or the rain that concludes final track Staircase, are rendered in vivid, pinprick detail.
It’s hugely impressive yet distracting at the same time: not so much a work of art as a work of architecture, one whose impressive scale and sonic ambition is a kind of misdirection, pulling the attention away from the songs themselves. On first listen, at least, The Harmony Codex is easier to admire than it is to love.
When we get to the point where artificial intelligence is able to replicate music by the yard, something is wrong
“The albums I ended up loving the most were the ones where I wasn’t sure what I was listening to in the first place and if I even liked it or not,” says Wilson a week later, sitting in his garden. “But there was something about those albums that made me curious to go back to them two, three, four times. There’s something great about music that’s beyond easy description or categorisation.”
That’s precisely what Wilson says he was shooting for with The Harmony Codex. “My aim with this record, and generally, is to try and make music that exists outside of any notion of genre. I’m fed up with generic music. We’re at the point where some genres have such a specific set of rules that AI can make it very easily. When we get to the point where artificial intelligence is able to replicate music by the yard, something is wrong.”
It’s ironic he says so, because his own solo albums to this point have all had their self-imposed parameters: the left-field alternative rock of Insurgentes, the old-school prog feel of The Raven That Refused To Sing, the robots-dancing-on-a-production-line approach of 2021’s The Future Bites.
“No, this is one of the first times I’ve not had an agenda to start with,” he says. “I just wanted to let the music flow. I think that’s why it’s all over the shop, in the best way.”
He started working on the album at the beginning of the pandemic. “I loved it,” he says of the enforced isolation that came with those initial lockdowns. “After six months, this creeping sense of dread began to come up, and then it became less appealing. But until then I fucking loved it.”
At the same time he began writing his autobiography, Limited Edition Of One. The book would feed into the record and vice versa, most notably via the short story that concluded it and gave the album its title: The Harmony Codex. A piece of unsettling fiction centred around two characters – Jamie and his sister Harmony – as they try to escape a nameless skyscraper via a seemingly never-ending staircase, it shares a surreal, inscrutable internal logic with the album. Both are, Wilson says, about the journey rather than arriving at any specific destination.
“What could be a more universal theme than the idea of the journey being the important thing? I like the idea that people won’t be able to catch hold of what The Harmony Codex is about – if it’s even about anything. You can look for explanation, you can look for logic, but it’s not there. To me, the narrative is in the music, not the lyrics or the storytelling. There’s a very considered flow and shape to the way the album unfolds, but it’s all in the music.”
What could be a more universal theme than the idea of the journey being the important thing?
The pandemic shaped the album in different ways, both directly and indirectly. Unable to hole up in a studio with a regular band, he opted for a mix-and-match approach. Some songs, such as Economies Of Scale, are the work of Wilson alone. Others feature what he calls “a bespoke line-up” – he estimates that Impossible Tightrope is the work of 10 different people.
There are some familiar names in the record’s cast list, including semi-regular collaborators Craig Blundell, Adam Holzman and Israeli singer Ninet Tayeb, alongside a few curveballs, among them Jack Dangers of EBM veterans Meat Beat Manifesto, Interpol drummer Sam Fogarino, and the Manic Street Preachers (the latter remixed Economies Of Scale on the bonus disc that accompanies the album, itself a total reimagining of the original record).
The hermetic nature of the album’s creation lends it a much more insular feel than The Future Bites, which turned its gaze on society, technology and humanity. “It became more indulgent, which I don’t find to be a negative thing,” says Wilson. “It’s based on a story that a lot of people won’t have read, but that’s why I love music above all other art forms – it demands more of the person experiencing it than, say, a movie, where you generally know what the characters are thinking.”
By that definition, The Harmony Codex is no more or less indulgent than any previous Wilson album, where he’s followed no vision other than his own. If it is indulgent, it’s in the way it places the ambition and detail of its sound above actual songs – there’s little to initially grab hold of beyond its admittedly impressive sonic architecture.
“You’re not the first person to say, ‘I was very disconcerted by that, I didn’t really understand what I was listening to,’” he says. “I remember having the same reaction myself listening to Giles Martin’s mix of Abbey Road: ‘This is weird, all the glue was gone from the music.’ But when I started working on it, I thought, ‘Okay, this is my chance to really raise the bar, set the benchmark for spatial audio in the way that The Dark Side Of The Moon set a benchmark for stereo.”
But listening to it, being immersed in this amazing sound and hearing all the different pieces moving within each song, isn’t disconcerting – it’s distracting. It takes away from the songs themselves. It feels like the music is written as a vehicle for the sound. “Oh no. The songs always come first.”
I thought, ‘This is my chance to raise the bar – set the benchmark for spatial audio in the way that The Dark Side Of The Moon set a benchmark for stereo
But where’s the human heart within it? It’s hard to find it. Wilson looks surprised. “What Life Brings?” he says, referring to the album’s fluid, guitar-led second track: “‘Love it all, and hold it in your hands’? Yes, the lyrics are ambiguous in places, but they’re so simple in other places.” He pauses. “Is it a cold album? You’re making me worried now.”
It’s not cold, though it is hard to connect with, especially listening to it on a set-up that most people couldn’t dream of affording. “My answer to that is that I’ve worked hard on the stereo mix. I understand that hardly anyone has a spatial audio system in their front room. It’s not like I’ve geared everything towards the spatial mix.”
He’s not upset or defensive when he says this, just slightly disconcerted that we’re hearing the album differently. We talk a while longer, about everything from his excitement at developments in Atmos and spatial audio technologies (“Apple and Spotify are on board – this is the future!”) to the idea of forgoing traditional touring in favour of week-long residencies in venues with state-of-the-art sound systems.
We talk about what he’s working on right now (a new Bass Communion album, the first proper one in 12 years) and the future of Porcupine Tree after their surprise reunion (“No plans, but I’m not going to say we’re never going to do it again”). Then it’s time to say goodbye and leave Wilson to his family and his dogs.
It takes a few days and several more spins of the record – on humble stereo headphones – for the penny to drop. Wilson is right: The Harmony Codex, like so many of the albums that inspired him, gives up its secrets gradually rather than instantly. That human heart is there in the melancholy sweep of Rock Bottom and the almost childlike-references to Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside and Jeff Wayne’s War Of The Worlds in Time Is Running Out and the gentle spoken-word vocal by Wilson’s wife Rotem on the coruscating title track.
While it’s the album’s game-changing sonic architecture rather than its music that truly gives The Harmony Codex its progressive edge, there’s humanity beating at the centre of it.
During our conversation in his back garden, Wilson had touched on the meaning of the word ‘codex’ in its title. The word refers to an old manuscript, a forerunner of the modern book, but there’s another meaning. “For me, a codex is something to be solved, a puzzle,” he’d said. “There’s something there to be figured out and understood. Except you need to make up your own mind. I don’t know the answer either, and I like that fact.”
