Decades ago, Steven Wilson used to create private home recordings and let them out to the public, passing them off as long-lost relics of Britain’s psychedelic era. Fomenting a campaign of subterfuge and misdirection, Wilson adopted the seemingly meaningless moniker Porcupine Tree (PT) for his studio inventions and even credited fictional characters with having performed on “the band’s” early releases.
Over the years other musicians would join the PT ranks and, in time, it became abundantly clear exactly what — and who — the band really were. Although in recent years Wilson has increasingly cultivated his solo brand apart from the influential Grammy-nominated band he established, some of the bandleader’s nascent professional instincts have resurfaced.
With the help of lighting designer/director Paul van den Heijkant, as well as a small cadre of video content creators and visual artists, Wilson has dropped the veil of mystery once again with his current stage show, a multi-media live event that’s bolder and darker than anything Porcupine Tree had ever attempted.
In support of the studio effort, The Raven That Refused to Sing (and Other Stories), Wilson’s current tour incorporates spine-tingling visual and theatrical elements such as cinema, stop-action animation, video projection, hallucinatory lighting designs, a quadraphonic sound system, and spirited performances. It’s a dramatic two-hour journey into the unknown, a heady stew for the senses that borders on the occult. “It made sense to combine all of those elements for this production,” says Wilson. “Things like film interludes and a film intro are new to me — I’ve never tried them before. This is my ambition, and we’ve managed to make it all work.”
Ghost Whisperers
A certain Gothic or Grimms’ Fairy Tales-like atmosphere permeates the Raven production, guiding the creation of the haunting imagery that’s been summoned for the tour. In many ways, the stage show is an artistic extension of the deluxe edition of the album, which features short stories co-authored by Wilson and illustrator Hajo Mueller (or Müller) that were inspired by British masters of the macabre and supernatural, such as M.R. James and Algernon Blackwood, among others.
Wilson and van den Heijkant discussed the theme of each song nearly six months in advance of the tour, and the LD conjured a variety of ghastly, ghostly and disturbing design looks. “Luminol,” the lead off track on Raven, concerns a busker Wilson used to pass everyday, someone who was virtually invisible to pedestrians. Tapping into his somewhat twisted sense of humor, Wilson imagined this street musician expiring on the sidewalk only to return as an apparition to perform, presumably forever, at his old familiar haunt. “A ghost in life, a ghost in death,” says Wilson.
To illuminate the song’s thematic basis, van den Heijkant’s use of Congo blue clouds the stage in an eerie luminous mist. “I started thinking about how we can realize the song,” says van den Heijkant. “The UV light, the forensic aspect of the song, that was all taken into account.”
For the 20-something-minute epic, “Raider II,” a phantasmagoric display of deep red, blue and magenta induces a kind of psychedelic experience that borders on paranoia. Given the instances of color contrasts, as well as the horrific subject matter of the tune (i.e. the title hints at the identity of a notorious American criminal) “Raider II” is one of the more insidious and psychologically invasive segments of the production. “I’m led by the atmosphere the music brings,” says van den Heijkant. “To shift from a red, which is the main bit of the song, into a UV magenta look, it creates quite a stark contrast. That makes that whole section completely different from the one before it.”
The Raven show is full of visual surprises. Small, low-budget innovations, like a “birdie” MR 16 lamp installed inside a Rolodex casing, can deliver a big wallop — and some of the show’s uniquely bizarre and effective lighting moments. “I wanted to have a light for Steven and to make it as small as possible,” says van den Heijkant. “The floor cans wash the stage too much. So, Tonto [Jhowry], the guitar tech, came up with the idea of the Rolodex file case, which could be placed on Steven’s keyboard stand. It was perfect, because Steven even sings about a collectible Rolodex in the song, ‘Index.’ An MR 16 fitting was built for me in a Rolodex case to hide the light, but so that it can shine on Steven.”
On Another Plane
To help create the tour’s more cinematic elements, Wilson assembled a diversified circle of content creators, including longtime collaborative mixed media artist Lasse Hoile of Denmark, Sven-Norman Bommes and Mueller, both of Germany. Throughout, the night images are beamed onto a 40 by 25 foot cyc backdrop from a projector located at FOH. These images range from the ghostly (the semi-static Edvard Munch-esque film intro) to the industrial (“Harmony Korine”) to the downright creepy (“Index”).
For “The Holy Drinker,” van den Heijkant animates stills with ArKaos MediaMaster 3.1.1 media server software to add excitement. “I’ll pan, tilt and zoom around [the images],” says van den Heijkant. “With these functions, you can make it appear as though the still is actually a moving image, and morphing helps this process.”
The most moving and revelatory sequences of the night appear to be saved for the show’s climax. Like the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, the video for the cathartic and bittersweet song, “The Raven That Refused To Sing,” underscores concepts inherent to songs, such as emotional paralysis, human mortality and hope for a spiritual afterlife, and acts as a virtual culmination of the overarching artistic drives propelling the entire production.
In describing the sort of classic or timeless style he had envisioned for the song’s visuals, Wilson used the phrase “old fashioned” in discussions with South African Jess Cope, the video’s animation artist, whose credits include Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie and Storm Corrosion, Wilson’s side project with Opeth mainstay Mikael Åkerfeldt.
“At the beginning of the project, I met with Steven at his house and he played me ‘The Raven That Refused To Sing,’ and I instantly loved it,” says Cope. “I suggested a Multiplane style of animation, an old-fashioned way of animation that I thought really suited the track, the stories and the artwork that accompany the album.”
The “Multiplane” method, created and developed by Walt Disney Studios for its feature-length film animation, creates the illusion of depth by positioning a camera above separate layers of painted glass slotted inside a framed structure. “The backgrounds are placed on the bottom layer of glass, the characters usually on the middle layers and any foreground imagery is placed on the top [layer],” says Cope. “Anything further away or really close to the camera is slightly out of focus, creating this lovely depth in the shot. Most of the [Raven] video was shot on glass slightly bigger than A1 size paper.”
Although the Disney technique involves the use of painted characters on celluloid slides, Cope broke with this process. Instead, she constructed actual jointed figures composed of, as he says, “thick, hand-painted watercolor paper that gives the characters a lovely texture. We also used magnets to hide some of the joints and also to allow us to have removable parts. If I pulled [a figure’s] arm a little bit his body would naturally follow, and this gave the animation a sensation of smoothness. Also, it was more efficient to have limbs attached. When I worked on Frankenweenie I would often lose the little blinks, the removable eyelids. And nobody liked you if you lost the blinks.”
The video was story-boarded by Simon Cartwright, characters and scenery were filmed with a digital SLR camera (12 frames per second, shot “mostly on twos”) using DZED Systems’ Dragonframe stop-motion software and edited in Apple’s Final Cut Pro by Topher Holland, who also did the compositing of the imagery in Adobe After Effects. “The total production time was around four months with about seventy days spent animating,” says Cope.
Through the Veil
Further expanding the breadth of the production’s visuals, van den Heijkant employs a 40 by 30 foot silvery/translucent voile, or gauze, as a secondary video projection surface. “We use the same projector for the gauze and backdrop,” he says. “I can do sizing and cropping from my media server.”
Suspended from an Electro Kabuki double drop release system, which is secured either by a downstage truss or ladder beam scaffolding, the voile hangs from a hook-laden solenoid coil and quickly unfurls when a “fire” button is pressed, producing a semitransparent curtain spanning the approximate length of the stage area. (The “fire” button is pressed a second time to release the gauze to the floor.) In a radical theatrical manner, the band performs from behind this gauze as video is beamed onto the front surface of the veil.
Within what seems like a blink of an eye, the atmosphere in the hall changes precipitously: this dramatic turn of events offers Wilson the opportunity to apply yet another spooky, perception-altering visual layer to the production. During “The Watchmaker,” for example, the bandleader stretches out his arms, evoking crucifixion, or something more
primal and Platonic, like specters spider-crawling along a cave wall.
“Steven and I talked about this,” says van den Heijkant. “The bigger the gesture, the bigger the shadow effects [on the gauze]. With a dimmer effect, with lights going off and on, you will see shadows move over the screen that create quite a dark atmosphere. The shadows pop up in different places on the gauze because there are light sources shining from different angles … So, you might have a double image, maybe even three shadows, of Steven, depending on the amount of light I point on him.”
One of the challenges of employing the gauze, however, is reconciling the need to light the band and the potential for washing out the front projection. “The people coming to the show are not sitting in a cinema watching a movie on a screen,” says van den Heijkant. “There’s still a band to light. So I have to allow for everything to be visible. If I don’t light Steven from the front, using the two floor cans at my disposal, you literally can see only his shadow. If there are no lights from behind him, you can’t see him at all. If I point a light into the crowd, you would just see light ‘blobs’ on the screen. We have eight LED moving lights on the stage, and whenever they hit Steven, they cast a shadow on the gauze. In that sense, you leave enough space for everything to be visible without washing out the screen.”
Being Human
Van den Heijkant ensures that all the visual components are in sync via a ChamSys MagicQ MQ60 console, MIDI messaging and Logic software, which operates backing tracks as well as a click. “We had videos that were synced to the music for the last tour, and while I was programming the lighting, I said, ‘Why not automate the whole show,’” says van den Heijkant. “I play the songs with the backing track and program the show manually and record [the cues] in a MIDI file in Logic. I’ve got two songs that I do manually: ‘Insurgentes’ and ‘Radioactive Toy.’”
All of the lighting elements are locked in from the moment the 30-minute video intro begins. “There’s no going back,” says van den Heijkant. “All sounds, lights and video are synced so that they all begin at exactly the same time. The drummer can’t say, ‘Oh, sh–. I forgot my drumstick.’”
Although van den Heijkant maintains that he can operate efficiently without the assistance of MIDI, digital signals are vital to show cohesiveness and continuity. “If you’re tasked with hitting a button from front of house, even if you’ve done it every day, you’re not going to be exact with the lighting every time,” says van den Heijkant. “But if it is all automated, the backing track just goes. MIDI makes certain video and lighting events happen in perfect timing, which is completely taking the human element out of it.”
At the Best Buy Theater in New York City, PLSN witnessed a rarity — the band’s performance was cut short during the opening section of “Raider II.” A voice in the crowd screamed “Cleveland!!” Another bozo belted out, “Hartford, Connecticut!” As if reacting to this, Wilson raised his arms and waved his hands in the air, signaling for the band to stop playing. Then Wilson pointed in the direction of one of the mouthy malcontents and scolded the joker, telling the crowd that because of this impromptu outburst the band must start over. An audible “ugh” of disgust was heaved by attendees. A few seconds later, as if on cue, the crowd erupts in laughter and cheers when Wilson admits that he had flubbed his part and decided it would be easier to cover up the mistake by blaming his faux pas on a concert attendee.
This little scenario, while offering a possible window into Wilson’s psyche, also showcases how an unplanned moment of levity does very little to impede the progress of a Wilson live show. Says van den Heijkant, a complete stoppage of the action has happened only twice since the start of the tour. “At Best Buy we were three minutes into the song and the track was stopped,” says van den Heijkant. “The backing track is stopped from the stage, and I just go back to cue 1. That’s why I’m sitting [at FOH]. When the band starts … all the lights and video will be in time, again.”
Through the use of MIDI-enhanced synchronization, a spooky video projection veil, memorable low-budget effects and trippy lighting designs, Wilson and crew present a precisely timed live show that is simply, and utterly, haunting.
“We get the most out of the equipment we bring with us on tour,” says van den Heijkant.
“It’s not cheap [to do these shows], but it is not stupidly expensive, either,” concludes Wilson. “The key is knowing how to use the resources at your disposal.”
Crew
LD/Lighting Director:
Paul van den Heijkant
Content Creators:
Hajo Mueller, Lasse Hoile, Sven-Norman Bommes, Jess Cope, Simon Cartwright, Topher Holland
Lighting Companies:
LMG (USA), Colour Sound Experiment (Europe)
Gear
1 ChamSys MagicQ MQ60 console
2 ChamSys SnakeSys B4 Art-Net nodes
1 ArKaos MediaMaster 3.1.1 software
1 MIDI timecode interface
1 backup laptop
8 Robe Robin 600 LEDWashes
2 Floor cans (NSP w/ barndoors)
1 PAR 16 “Birdie” with MR 16 fitting piano set piece
1 Reel EFX DF-50 hazer
1 40’ ladder beam scaffolding
1 Electro Kabuki double drop release system from Magnet Schultz
1 Cyc backdrop (40’ x 25’)
1 Silver voile (gauze), (40’ x 30’)
