Background and early years

Born in Kingston Upon Thames, Surrey, England (but brought up in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, England from the age of 6)[citation needed] Wilson discovered his love for music around the age of 8. It began one Christmas when his parents bought presents for each other in the form of LPs. His father and mother received Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and Donna Summer's Love to Love You Baby, respectively. The young Steven spent much of his childhood listening to these albums in "heavy rotation", as he once commented.

Both LPs would influence his future song writing. He claims "...in retrospect I can see how they are almost entirely responsible for the direction that my music has taken ever since." His interest in Pink Floyd led him towards experimental/psychedelic conceptual progressive rock (as exemplified by Porcupine Tree and Blackfield), and Donna Summer's trance-inflected grooves inspired the initial musical approach of No-Man (Wilson's long-running collaboration with fellow musician and vocalist Tim Bowness), although the band would later develop a more meditative and experimental Talk Talk-esque approach.

As a child, Steven was forced to learn the guitar, but he did not enjoy it; his parents eventually stopped paying for lessons. However, at the age of 11 Wilson rescued a nylon string classical guitar from his attic and started to experiment with it; or in his own words, "...scraping microphones across the strings, feeding the resulting sound into overloaded reel to reel tape recorders and producing a primitive form of multi-track recording by bouncing between two cassette machines." At the age of twelve, his father, who is an electronic engineer, built him his first multi-track tape machine so he could begin experiment with the possibilities of studio recording.

Early bands

It didn't take too long before he began to form bands with his friends from school and play live. However, the activity which kept him satisfied the most was that of experimenting with sounds and producing the recordings he made. Between the years 1983 and 1986 he began to record material for release. Some of those tapes have recently resurfaced due to the increasing popularity of Porcupine Tree. Wilson describes it as "...a bit like a painter having his nursery school paint blots on display..."

One of these projects was the psychedelic duo Altamont (featuring a 15-year-old Wilson working with synth/electronics player Simon Vockings). Their one and only cassette album, Prayer for the Soul, featured lyrics by British psychedelic scenester Alan Duffy, whose work Wilson would later use for two Porcupine Tree songs: "This Long Silence" and "It Will Rain for a Million Years".

Around the same time that Wilson was working as Altamont he was also in a teenaged progressive rock band called Karma, who played live around Hertfordshire and recorded two cassette albums, The Joke's On You (1983) and The Last Man To Laugh (1985). These contained early versions of "Small Fish", "Nine Cats" and "The Joke's On You", which were subsequently resurrected as Porcupine Tree songs.

Up to this point Wilson's diverse musical experiments contained avant-garde and industrial recordings, psychedelia and progressive rock. His next step was to form two more coherent and long-lasting projects: No-Man and Porcupine Tree.
"There is a very thin line between an artist and a serial killer."
—Steven Wilson

Later years

During the late 90's Wilson's love of experimental, drone, and ambient music began to manifest itself in a series of new projects, notably Bass Communion and Incredible Expanding Mindfuck (also known as IEM). He also began to release a series of CD singles under his own name.

Having established himself as a skilled producer with a very high standard of sound engineering, Wilson was invited to produce other artists, notably the Norwegian artist Anja Garbarek, and Swedish progressive-metal band Opeth. Though he claims to enjoy production more than anything else, with the demands of his own projects, he has mostly restricted himself to mixing for other artists in the last few years.

More recently Wilson has become known for his 5.1 Surround Sound mixes - the 2007 Porcupine Tree album Fear of a Blank Planet was nominated for a Grammy in the "Best Mix For Surround Sound" category. The album was also voted #3 album of the year by Sound And Vision. Wilson is currently working on several other surround sound projects, including remixing the King Crimson back catalogue.

Steven Wilson has recently begun to write reviews for the Mexican edition of the Rolling Stone magazine. They're all translated to Spanish. Two reviews have been published so far: one for Radiohead's In Rainbows and other for Murcof's 2007 work, Cosmos.

Solo career

Cover Versions

In 2003 Wilson started to release a series of two track CD singles under his own name, each one featuring a cover version and an original SW song. The choice of cover versions was unpredictable, with the first 5 featuring songs by Canadian singer Alanis Morissette, Swedish pop group Abba, UK rock band The Cure, Scottish songwriter Momus and Prince. He has also released some of his experiments in electronic music as a CD and 2LP set called "Unreleased Electronic Music". These are released on his own Headphone Dust label.

Insurgentes

In November 2008 Wilson released his first official solo album, Insurgentes, recorded all over the world between January-August, as a double CD plus a DVD-A (limited to 3,000 copies) and a 4 x 10 inch vinyl version (limited to 1,000 copies), both with hardback book featuring the images of acclaimed and long time collaborator Danish photographer Lasse Hoile. Both editions are exclusive to Insurgentes.org. A standard retail CD version (also including the 5.1 DVD-A) was released on 9 March 2009.



Source : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Wilson