Steven Wilson has announced details of his forthcoming ninth album, Requiem For A Village - out through Fiction Records on November 6 - alongside sharing the record's title track.
Following the recent teaser release of an extract from the album’s narration, the first full-length track is now online. An introduction to a lost corner of Britain, ‘Requiem For A Village’ is a pummelling cluster of flying drums, a driving bassline and scratchy guitars that opens up into something close to the soundtrack for an approaching apocalypse.
If Steven Wilson’s eighth album, The Overview, explored the depths, distances and desolations of deep space, Requiem For A Village narrows its focus to a tiny, unknown corner buried somewhere off map in the British Isles. The story that sits at the heart of Steven’s ninth album steps back from the modern world and ventures into the unfamiliar, settling in a village that exists beyond time and place.
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In imagining a realm entirely divorced from modernity – and in creating music that willingly embraces both the macabre and the possibilities of studio mistakes – Wilson adopted a similarly unorthodox recording approach. Eschewing AI and corrective studio technologies, he turned instead to organic instrumentation, whether pristine or imperfect, embracing mistakes to see where they might lead. Recorded with regular collaborator and multi-instrumentalist Randy McStine, drummer Russell Holzman (on the tracks Requiem For A Village, Now Departing, A Basket Of Bees and Wheel) and vocalist Katherine Priddy (Murmuration), the album is intimate, ambitious, richly imaginative and knowingly eccentric, featuring a hugely compelling narration written by Andy Partridge (XTC) and voiced by one of the country’s finest actors, David Tennant.
Set in a Wicker Man landscape where the paintings of Stanley Spencer hang in the local art gallery, the stories of M. R. James and Algernon Blackwood sit on the shelves of the public library, and the children of the stones play in the market square, Requiem For A Village is a sepia-toned snapshot of a hidden neverland, and a 54-minute piece of cinema for the ears.
Steven Wilson on Requiem For A Village: “I wanted to get back to a kind of music where you can hear the metaphorical thumbprints. Doubling down on the human gestures and flaws in the music, stuff that can’t be created using software. For example using only analogue synths with all their unpredictability, or not having instruments perfectly in tune. But it also lead to me picking up the violin, the oboe, or trying my hand on the drums – playing things I don’t really know how to play but getting something out of them that inspired me in ways I didn’t expect. Approaching the music with a sense of innocence and seeing where it took me. And where it took me was to the village.”
