The Incident: The Interview Pt2
There are no outside collaborations on The Incident. Is there any reason for that?
It wasn’t planned! We had some orchestrations written, but we decided we didn’t need them. It’s just one of those things. It’s the first Porcupine Tree record with no guest involvement for well over 10 years. If a musician I admired had come along at the right time, I wouldn’t have said no. Alex Lifeson just happened to come into contact at that time for the last record. If I’d happened to meet Jeff Beck and he’d said, “I want to be on your record,” I wasn’t going to say no, obviously.
When you’re not on the road, you seem to be working on many other projects. Has that had an impact?
It’s important to me to work in many different musical styles simultaneously. That’s a reflection of my own listening tastes. I love everything from jazz to death metal, ABBA to Frank Zappa, ambient music to progressive music and everything in between. I like to have the opportunity to express all those different aspects.
And working on a solo album before coming back into the band environment presumably also had some impact?
That was a really liberating experience. It was the first time since the early days of Porcupine Tree - which also started as a solo project. And now I have a much wider palette of influences and sounds I like to explore. On the solo record I had different styles within the same song in a way I’ve never done before, even with Porcupine Tree. Mixing noise music with orchestral music, with trip-hop music, shoegazing music, all sometimes within the same five-minute song! I’m not sure how easy it is to listen to that kind of music, but I’m certainly very proud of the record.
Coming into The Incident, there’s definitely a sense that there’s a Porcupine Tree sound. There are certain things I know that I couldn’t - or wouldn’t - put forward for Porcupine Tree. I do think of The Incident as a post-solo album in the sense that there are some elements of sound design that I took from that album, some darker corners that have perhaps come from that sound - more electronic aspects in places.
But I always rely on the fans to tell me what kind of album we’ve made. You can’t see the changes in your own personality over the years because for you, you’re living with it the whole time - it’s kind of incremental.
You have remixed a lot of your albums in 5.1 surround sound, and indeed have been charged with doing this for the King Crimson back catalogue too. How important has 5.1 audio become for you?
Commercially it’s not important at all because it’s a very small market, but I do say that this is the definitive way to hear the music because the music is quite “produced” and is quite dense and there’s a lot of layers to the production. Sometimes it’s very difficult to hear all that in a stereo spectrum.
I would love to believe everyone will listen to the album in surround sound but realistically I know only a very small percentage, a few thousand people will get to hear it in surround sound - the definitive way to hear any of my music.
Part 1 / Part 3
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