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Gettting Visual With STEVEN WILSON

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You never really know where an interview with Steven Wilson is going to go. I’ve learnt from a number of times chatting with him from his days with Porcupine Tree that he is one of the most fascinating musicians in the world to chat to, but even knowing that didn’t prepare me for the chat that I just had with Wilson as he prepares to bring his spectacular new live performance to Australian shores.

Talking about the visual elements to Wilson’s show lead us down a cinematic path and soon we are talking about things as varied as Ultravox, experimental cinema and how we both share a love for the Australian classic Picnic At Hanging Rock and its soundtrack.

“Well it is a very immersive experience,” Wilson says when I ask him how he can best describe what Australian fans can expect from his shows. “It is very much an audio visual experience. You know every tour that I have done I have tried to raise the bar a little bit with what I am trying to present and how I present the music. It is not just five guys on stage, it is quadraphonic sound, there is audio coming from behind you as well as in front of you, there are films, there are multiple screens and there are world class musicians on stage with me. And a lot of the show is based around my current record but I am also going a fair way back into may back catalog as well on this tour. I’ll be picking out some songs that I have recorded over a pretty lengthy amount of time and it is a pretty long show… it is pushing three hours. So I hope it will be a really immersive and really engaging night of music and visuals.”

“I grew up loving cinema as much as I did music,” Wilson explains when I ask where the idea for the visual came from. “In some aspects parts of me have always been a frustrated filmmaker as well as a music maker, and in some ways that is two sides to the one coin because if you are creative with music then at the same time what you are doing, certainly what I am doing is seeing the music in my head before I create it. So I’ll have a musical idea and at the same time I will be creating and thinking ‘how would this look, what would it look like’ I will be thinking in visual terms, so I have always thought about audio and visual in the same way and it has been a very logical thing to take that and bring it into a live concert context.”

All the details about Steven Wilson’s tour can be found below.

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