Night After Night

An ending.

Time Out New York, farewell—what an amazing 13 years it was. I'll always be grateful. Please be good to my friends and colleagues, especially Hank and Seth.

Change is come.

Yesterday, I missed my mark for my weekly Wandelwatching series, due to a combination of conflicting chores, duties and circumstances. I'll get to that post a bit later, but first, an acknowledgement of something that happened yesterday in the social-media realm. A Facebook post I wrote in the afternoon – intended to set the record straight about a new development – caused rather more response than I'd anticipated. Here's the post:

Dear everyone: Since an official memo has circulated internally, and since word will now commence to spread outside of these walls, please allow me to officially state that after very nearly 13 years of dedicated service, I will be leaving Time Out New York on Friday, April 11. My departure is bittersweet but completely amicable, a choice that I made in order to devote more life and time to my fabulous wife and daughter, while also creating the brainspace for future developments to become clear.

Let me repeat, to ward off speculation summarily: there is NO foul play involved here. It simply became the right time for me to move on to the next stage, and to clear the way for some new professionals to make the most of an opportunity to shine.

More on that front soon. For now, please join me in congratulating new Music Editor, Craw enthusiast and Facebook refusenik Hank Shteamer. And to my Time Out peeps past and present, it's been an honor and a privilege to work with, laugh with, cry with and learn from all of you.

My closest confidantes have known for some time now that I'd been mulling a change of this nature, meant to clarify and simplify my life. I alluded to change strongly in this February post about my sabbatical surrounding the arrival of my daughter, who came just a few days later.

 

Annina, not surprisingly, acted as a strong arbiter of, and initiative for, some fairly drastic change, and that's what's finally taken place behind closed doors over the last few weeks. I'd realized even before she came that being able to spend more time with her – and with her mother! – took precedence over an overbooked, overextended schedule that had already begun to wear. Once she came, the choice was clear.

 

Something had to go, and Time Out – where I've done some work that I'm very proud of during the last nearly 13 years – was the proper choice. I talked about a wide variety of alternative scenarios with supervisors there, but it became apparent fairly quickly that moving on was the thing to do… not least because it will create an opportunity, albeit it a different one than what greeted me on my arrival as a wet behind the ears Classical Music & Opera Editor back in 2001. Whatever the trials and tribulations I may have faced over the years, they were more than matched by camaraderie, compassion and having a place to grow up in public, professsionaly and personally. Whoever takes up that particular torch is going to have a different experience, but a life-changing one nevertheless.

 

There's literally no way that I can thank everyone who deserves it, but I'll always be grateful to my friend and colleague K. Leander Williams for inviting me to visit the office on Broadway between Bleecker and Houston for an intriguing conversation; to Joe Angio for deciding that I was a risk worth taking; to Elizabeth Barr, ever my rock; to Susan Jackson, my immediate predecessor as classical guru, for showing me the ropes with patience and good humor; to Jem Aswad, Elisabeth Vincentelli and Mike Wolf for wise lessons about editing that I still apply every day; to Olivia Marlowe-Giovetti, Amanda MacBlane and Sarah Hucal for helping me to apply those lessons and making me look really, really good; to David Shengold and the sorely missed Marion Lignana Rosenberg for stalwart service and continual inspiration; to Music teammates Jay Ruttenberg, Cristina Black, Sophie Harris, Colin St. John, Corban Goble, Marley Lynch, Leah Greenblatt, Alison Rosen, Drew Millard and Kristen Zwicker; and to my successor as Music Editor, Hank Shteamer, for duty, valor and friendship above and beyond the call.

 

To everyone who responded to my news on Facebook or Twitter: many, many thanks. The kindness and generosity you've showed has been genuinely overwhelming. And for those who've asked: yes, my writing for The New York Times will continue, and almost certainly could even increase. Remember, though, that this is for Annina and Lara, who come first.

Time Out New York: Live preview, Donna Lewis.

 

Donna Lewis, by Marvin Joseph

Donna Lewis
Time Out New York
Aug 15–21, 2013

Any self-respecting pop star would be delirious to have a hit like “I Love You Always Forever,” an irresistible bit of romantic treacle that launched Welsh singer Donna Lewis to global success in 1996. Same goes for “At the Beginning,” the uplifting duet with Richard Marx from the animated film Anastasia, which returned Lewis to the top of the charts in 1997.

But if you really listened past the earworm chorus and bubbly beat of Lewis’s debut hits, you quickly sensed that she was no flash in the pan. The classically trained daughter of a jazz pianist, Lewis had a breathy coo that could recall Kate Bush, and used it with a flexibility that few pop princesses could muster.

Still does, to judge by Brand New Day, a striking demo Lewis has just recorded with prog-jazz trio the Bad Plus. Produced by avant-guitarist David Torn, the collection addresses a personalized pantheon: Songs by Antonio Carlos Jobim, Burt Bacharach, Chocolate Genius and Gnarls Barkley mesh cozily and radiate congeniality. “I Love You Always Forever” merits its inclusion. At Drom, pianist Aaron Parks sits in with Bad Plus bassist Reid Anderson and drummer Dave King for what’s certain to be an illuminating reintroduction.—Steve Smith

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Presumably the reason why the Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson isn't on this gig is because he's opening a run with veteran drummer Billy Hart's superb quartet at Birdland the same night. That band, with saxophonist Mark Turner and bassist Ben Street, is also strongly recommended; read Hank Shteamer's 2012 Time Out feature on the band for more details. All of which said, Aaron Parks is an excellent choice for a sub with Lewis et al at Drom.

Time Out New York: Live preview, Jordan Klassen.

Jordan Klassen (Photograph: Rachel Pick)

Live preview: Jordan Klassen
Time Out New York
Aug 1–7, 2013

“Let me give, let me talk, let me live in your pillow / Kill your fear, whisper words in your ear,” Jordan Klassen intones reassuringly on “Go to Me.” Slipping easily between intimacy and grandiosity, the track is the first single from Repentance, the British Columbian singer-songwriter’s forthcoming album on Toronto label Nevado. That “Go to Me” was also the initial cut on Klassen’s 2012 EP, Kindness, and LP, Monastery, shouldn’t bother you—it’s that solid, elliptical lyrics and all.

Interviewed by a Vancouver newspaper in June, Klassen listed as his chief influences Belle and Sebastian, Paul Simon, Joanna Newsom, Nick Drake, Radiohead and Sufjan Stevens. You’d have guessed as much from spinning Repentance, a clutch of memorable tunes gently intoned by the singer, and whimsically adorned by producer Jonathan Anderson with ukulele, glockenspiel, toy piano, parade drums and whistling. Klassen’s writing earned him early cred, but comparing his fledgling self-releases with the imaginative refinement of Repentance, you hear the distance from aspiration to inspiration.—Steve Smith

Rockwood Music Hall; Aug 5
Mercury Lounge; Aug 6

Time Out New York: Live preview, ErstAEU Showcase.

Anne Guthrie and Richard Kamerman (Photograph: Billy Gomberg)

ErstAEU Showcase
Issue Project Room; Sat 25

For some time now it’s been possible to labor under the impression that electroacoustic improvisation (or EAI) is exclusively available on import, primarily the domain of Japanese, German and English performers. Actually, that’s never been the case; Americans have contributed to this outlier scene and its constantly morphing aesthetic from the start. But the arrival of ErstAEU—a new imprint of genre-defining mainstay label Erstwhile Records, operated by Jersey City tastemaker Jon Abbey—brings a fresh focus on a groundbreaking wave of homegrown talent.

Like AMM, the intentionally vague name used by a seminal British forebear to the current scene, AEU is meant to be amorphous. A clearly stands for American, Abbey readily admits. But E could be Electroacoustic or Erstwhile, and U might represent Union, Underground, Umbrella, Unlimited…U name it. Conjoined under the mysterious moniker is a growing band of outward-bound composers, improvisers and collaborators—“who may or may not yet know of their involvement,” according to the shadowy collective’s sole public statement.

Performing in this inaugural splash at Issue are the three duos who recorded ErstAEU’s initial trio of releases. Joe Panzer and Greg Stuart connect Gerhard Richter’s slathered, scraped canvases to Merzbow’s assaultive sonic discharge on Dystonia Duos. Anne Guthrie and Richard Kamerman palpably convey sensations of space, dimension and unrest on their rich, enveloping Sinter. Graham Stephenson and Aaron Zarzutzki hew closest to recognizable shades of EAI interplay on Touching, while neatly avoiding predictability. Don’t expect anyone to “play a song from our latest album” here.—Steve Smith

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This event took place at Issue Project Room on May 25, 2013. Since previews on the Time Out New York website now disappear from view once an event is passed, I'm preserving it here for personal posterity. Sadly, I was unable to attend, but warmly recommend the three CDs mentioned in the text.

Time Out New York: Interview, Lauren Worsham.

Lauren Worsham, by Kristin Hoebermann

Interview with Lauren Worsham [link missing]
Time Out New York, Feb. 21–27, 2013

An excruciatingly short snippet from a lengthy, wide-ranging and brilliantly fun conversation with Lauren Worsham (full name: Lauren Worsham Jarrow), who plays Flora in New York City Opera's stylishly spooky production of Benjamin Britten's opera The Turn of the Screw.

Worsham caught my eye and ear in Brooklyn Village, a wonderfully creative multimedia concert event staged by the Brooklyn Philharmonic at Roulette (reviewed here), then shook me to the core in a Peak Performances staging of David T. Little's opera Dog Days at Montclair State University (reviewed here).

Since both of those events made my list of Top 10 events for 2012 in Time Out, talking to Worsham about her City Opera assignment was a no-brainer. We covered her Texas roots, her training at Yale University, her early jobs, her relationship with opera and her flamboyantly stagey rock band, Sky-Pony, which she leads with her husband, theater composer Kyle Jarrow.

Someday, I'd love to get around to transcribing and posting the entire interview. Don't hold your breath right now, though. Instead, look out for Worsham as Guadalena and Manuelita in City Opera's production of Offenbach's La Perichole at City Center, April 21, 23, 25 and 27. And watch this video of Sky-Pony in action at Joe's Pub, then see the band's schedule for your next chance to witness it live… as of this writing, it's March 30 at Pianos on Ludlow Street.

Time Out New York: Live preview, Choi Joonyong and Hong Chulki.

Choi Joonyong (Photograph courtesy Issue Project Room

Preview: Choi Joonyong and Hong Chulki at 155 Freeman
Time Out New York, Feb. 7–13, 2013

It’s not as if music didn’t exist in South Korea before 2012. Prefab acts from Seoul had been conquering the world, one market at a time, for years; Super Junior, 2NE1 and Girls’ Generation are bigger than you think. But long before K-pop became a lingua franca—and definitely prior to a certain galloping rapper turning everyone’s attention toward his homeland—South Korean performers were reaching out and touching their global colleagues on the rock, jazz and traditional-music circuits.

And just as any thriving culture creates its own subsects, so has South Korean music spawned a native lunatic fringe of free-improvisers and noise musicians to rival any other in the world. This week, two leading lights of Seoul’s experimental underground make their local debut: Choi Joonyong and Hong Chulki, who cofounded the pioneering improv group Astronoise in 1997, and who have jointly operated the influential label Balloon & Needle since 2003.

As to what their work sounds like, ignore PSY and think Paik—meaning Nam June Paik, the seminal Korean multimedia artist and Fluxus figure. Hong, whose arsenal includes turntables with and without cartridges, paid direct homage to Paik on Amplified WC, a crackling, juddering 2009 mini-CD on the Ghost & Son imprint. And Choi, whose Burn Yoido Burn on the same label offers livid, Merzbow-esque power electronics, derives his style from error, malfunction and happenstance. As a duo and with other collaborators, the two approach sound with an inquisitive intensity that makes every recording a fresh experience—a condition that should be even more pronounced live.—Steve Smith

Time Out New York: Live preview, Aaron Dilloway and Jason Lescalleet.

The following is a Top Live Shows preview I wrote for the current issue (Nov. 1–7) of Time Out New York. The concert in question has been postponed indefinitely due to storm- and transit-related concerns, so I'll just post it here for the time being.

Aaron Dilloway/Jason Lescalleet

Bobby Redd Project Space; Sat 3

When arts journalism is your bag, quoting other critics is a weak way to make your case. Then again, it’s hard to resist repeating what the redoubtable Bill Meyer wrote in his Dusted review of Grapes and Snakes, the new LP by avant-garde provocateurs Aaron Dilloway and Jason Lescalleet: “If used stereo components could scuttle under a table and hide, you’d see a lot of emptied shelves whenever either of these men walks towards the back of the Goodwill store.” His point is well-taken: For anyone put off by one too many gigs featuring inscrutable laptoppers who could be checking their e-mail onstage, know that Dilloway (ex–Wolf Eyes) and Lescalleet are supremely physical sound-surfers whose electric-junk performances partake of punk-rock aggression and guerilla-theater chaos.

Supremely well documented by the German label PAN, Grapes and Snakes is a tactile tour de force. Burbling analog synths get manhandled, magnetic tape gets stretched and, at one point, Godzilla gets strafed by flying saucers, or so it seems. The pair come to the collaboration in prime form, each having released an aesthetic-expanding, critic-wowing double album (Dilloway’s Modern Jester, Lescalleet’s Songs About Nothing) destined to be cited among the year’s top releases. In this rare Brooklyn outing, for which presenters promise ultra-high-fidelity sound, each will have a solo set before the inevitable clash of the titans.—Steve Smith

Nov. 4 addendum: Erstwhile Records proprietor Jon Abbey indicates that this show might arrive belatedly in January, date and location to be determined. Stay tuned.

Time Out New York: Live preview, 2NE1.

Live preview: 2NE1
Prudential Center; Aug 17
Time Out New York, Aug 16–22, 2012

How and when South Korea’s pop-music industry began to insinuate itself in the U.S. isn’t altogether clear, but mounting evidence indicates that K-pop, a polyglot sound purveyed by a swelling stream of slick, energetic boy bands and girl groups developed by entertainment megacorps like S.M. and YG, has established a beachhead here. 

Small wonder: These fresh-faced performers and their sticky-sweet sounds are as addictive as Pop Rocks, and the choreography, costuming, video and stagecraft involved in their packaging beat most anything going. SMTown Live, a showcase of top acts like Super Junior, Girls’ Generation and SHINee, not only sold out Madison Square Garden last October, but matched and even surpassed Justin Bieber’s most recent Garden extravaganza for sheer dazzle and preteen decibels. Now, American kingpins like Kanye West and Teddy Riley are working with K-pop acts, and Girls’ Generation strutted on Letterman in April. 

All of which sets the stage for the arrival of 2NE1, alternately pronounced “to anyone” and “twenty-one” (the latter prompting fans to dub themselves “Blackjacks”). A YG-groomed girl group crowned 2011’s “Best New Band in the World” by viewers of global-pop showcase MTV Iggy, 2NE1 stirs hip-hop and dancehall sounds into its spotless dance pop; singers CL, Bom, Dara and Mimzy drop English choruses and asides among Korean verses, but their attitude needs no translation. Blackjack, 2NE1’s Will.i.am-helmed English-language debut, has yet to arrive, but last year’s 2nd Mini Album includes six of the group’s strongest cuts. Listen to inspirational thumper “I Am the Best,” and you too might be chanting “naega jeil jal naga” with the diehard Blackjacks in Newark.—Steve Smith

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The preceding ran in the issue of Time Out New York currently on newsstands, previewing a concert held last Friday at the Prudential Center in Newark. Jon Caramanica's review of that show is in The New York Times today, online here. Phil Freeman also reviewed the show, producing an epic post for MSN Entertainment.

Time Out New York: Interview, Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree.

Porcupine Tree; photograph by Diana Nitschke

Interview: Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree
The Volume blog
Time Out New York
Sept. 20, 2010

Founded in England at the onset of the 1990s, Porcupine Tree was originally passed off as a "forgotten" old-school prog-rock band. But yarn-spinning ceded to singer, guitarist and bandleader Steven Wilson's knack for reconciling vintage influences with contemporary sounds, while never forgetting the strength of a solid hook. The band's most recent album, The Incident, showcases a seamless 55-minute epic that combines Wilson's customary sophisticated arrangements and soaring melodies with the heavy crunch of progressive-metal bands like Opeth (led by Wilson's friend and collaborator Mikael Åkerfeldt).

This Friday, Sept. 24, Porcupine Tree plays its biggest New York show to date at Radio City Music Hall. Via telephone from his home in England, Wilson spoke to TONY about the current prog-rock groundswell, the stifling qualities of contemporary life and Insurgentes, a gorgeously moody Lasse Hoile film spun off from Wilson's 2008 solo album of the same title. (The film screens at the IFC Center on Tuesday, September 21, followed by a Q&A with Wilson and Hoile.)

Time Out New York: Every now and then you hear about a progressive-rock resurgence, most recently when Emerson, Lake and Palmer headlined England's High Voltage Festival. Is this convenient media jargon, or is there truth to the notion?

Steven Wilson: I don't think it's ever really gone away, but there certainly is now a re-embracing of ambitious, album-orientated rock music. That, for me, ultimately is what progressive music is. Into that, you can throw anything: Flaming Lips, Radiohead, Muse, Massive Attack. For me, these are all artists very much in the tradition of the original wave of so-called progressive bands. Let's not forget that none of those bands ever referred to themselves as progressive bands at the time; they were simply bands that had come out of the climate that the Beatles and the Beach Boys created with albums like Sgt. Pepper and Pet Sounds, for ambitious music not necessarily conforming to the three-minute pop-song format. Bands like Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, ELP, Genesis, they had very little in common with each other except for that. They were trying to do something more conceptual, more ambitious with the album, and perhaps putting more focus—not all of them, I don't think Pink Floyd were, but some of them putting more focus on musicianship, perhaps, than '60s pop bands had. But even that, I think, is a moot point, because a band like Floyd weren't great musicians, and yet arguably were the most progressive of all of those bands.

You used to read stories about Roger Waters supposedly thanking David Gilmour for recording the bass parts that won Waters some big poll as "best bass player."

They weren't great musicians, but many people think of them as the kind of quintessential progressive rock band, in the sense that their music has proved to be much more timeless than most of the other progressive bands, mainly because there wasn't that emphasis on musicianship. It was purely an allegiance to doing something more creative with the album, the idea of the album as a musical continuum, a musical journey. Has that ever gone away completely? Certainly it had some dark ages in grunge and all those things. But I think that idea of the album as a musical journey as always been around, and it's probably more popular than ever before now—or not ever before, but since that original wave—because music has been liberated from commercial radio and MTV.

Liberated is an interesting choice of words.

What is most responsible for confining popular music to the three-minute pop song over the last 25 years is those two things. If you take those two things out of the loop, there's no need anymore to conform to the three-minute pop-song format, and I think that's one of the reasons why you've had a resurgence in music that doesn't necessarily think about commercial popular-music formats. The other reason is it's now possible to make music for a much smaller market and still survive on that by selling directly to fans through the Internet. So people don't have to think so much in commercial-radio terms in the way that perhaps they did in the '80s, certainly, which is when I started. You had to focus on getting things on the radio, because you weren't going to make a career otherwise. That's not true anymore. I think in that sense, a band like Rush from the '70s is the great model, a band that have just toured and made consistently quality albums, never really had big hit singles, never been fashionable, never been on MTV, and yet are bigger than ever. So I think they're really the model for what's going on right now.

Yet working outside of the commercial mainstream, Porcupine Tree is playing Radio City Music Hall this week. How did you achieve that kind of success without much obvious music-industry support?

One thing I realized very early on when I started making music as Porcupine Tree—which was in the early to mid-'90s, and I was just doing it as a solo thing at the time, doing it really for myself because I didn't think anyone else wanted to listen to it—is that there is always an audience out there for music with integrity, music that doesn't necessarily play by the commercial mainstream rules. In fact, some people are put off by what they perceive to be courting the mainstream. I consider myself one of those people. When I was growing up, I was always looking for the most willfully uncommercial music: Whether it was Captain Beefheart or Frank Zappa or King Crimson, that's what attracted me. And if I felt for a moment that one of those artists was beginning to try and court the mainstream, that was the beginning of the end for my relationship with that band. This is where we come back to Rush as being a great example. Floyd is another, Led Zeppelin...both bands that never really released singles throughout their heyday. And I think Porcupine Tree is definitely in that tradition of a band that have kept faith with the fan base by never scaring them off with this idea that we might go for the almighty dollar. So it's been very organic, it's been very slow, but it has been always on an upward trajectory; for 20 years now it's kept going up, and there aren't many artists that can say that. It's been a very slow curve, but nevertheless it's always gone in the right direction.

Steven Wilson; photograph by Diana Nitschke

Your lyrics, especially on your most recent records, seem to express a kind of melancholy, a distrust and unease with the status quo of the modern world. Is that a conscious thing for you?

Well, yes is the simple answer. Like anybody, I look around at the world that we live in, and I find it hard to be completely positive about everything that's going on. One of the things that I think has really hit home for me over the last five years, and over the last couple of records particularly, is how much being young has changed, even since I was young, which wasn't that long ago. I grew up in the '80s, and the example I give most people is the idea that I could go to my parents as a teenager, or even as a 10-year-old, and say I wanted my own TV would have been laughed out of the room. Now look at the situation: Kids not only have their own TVs, they have cell phones, iPods, Sony PlayStations, they have the Internet portal, which of course is a kind of gateway to...well, to everything.

The good, the bad and the ugly.

Yeah. I never heard people talking about kids being on prescription drugs when I was a kid. If your parents were having trouble with you, then that was a problem in the family, it wasn't because you had attention deficit disorder or one of these other catchphrases you hear. It's quite easy now to be—and here's the thing, this is the word that for me sums up everything—it seems very easy now to live your life without, capital letters, curiosity. And curiosity, I think, is the greatest, the most underrated human attribute. Without curiosity, you never look beyond the mainstream. You never look at what isn't being marketed to you, in terms of products, TV, film, music, whatever it is. And you never actually have the ambition to travel outside of your immediate vicinity. And these are all things that, for me, were so important as a kid. I couldn't wait to finish school, I couldn't wait to get out of my home town, I couldn't wait to travel. I couldn't wait to devour everything, all the books, all the music, all the cinema—the more obscure, the better. I wonder now with all of the things we've been talking about, the Internet particularly, whether that same sense of curiosity is already dead by the time kids leave high school. And that's what I write about. I know I'm generalizing; not everyone is like that, and I've met a lot of kids that are very passionate and very curious about life. But I was a big fan of Bret Easton Ellis, and for me he summed up the boredom of modern life better than anyone else.

What about the liberating potential of the Internet for a kid stuck in a dead-end small town in the Midwest, who pokes around and follows links and discovers things like, well, Porcupine Tree?

Well, absolutely, and this is where there's no black and white. In many respects the Internet is the great liberator. Unfortunately, the way I perceive it, and the way I wrote about it in Fear of a Blank Planet particularly, was that you have this incredible tool for knowledge and information, and 99 percent of us use it to download pornography and music. Again, I'm generalizing, but that seems to be the way the human race goes. The other kind of symptom of this for me is I grew up with great music journalism. I was reading music journalists and buying music papers: people who could actually enthuse you about music in the way that they wrote articulately, informatively, with context and all that stuff. Now I can go on the Internet and find a million reviews of my latest record—literally a million reviews of Porcupine Tree! [Laughs]—and it's just noise. It's just, "this album sucks," "this is the best album they've ever done," "this is the worst album they've ever done." It's just people expressing opinions as fact, without any real kind of insight or understanding. And that, also, I find a bit depressing. So I guess I'm old-fashioned in the respect that I find myself feeling slightly alienated from the modern world. Go back 15 years and you had OK Computer, which was about the same thing. Go back another 15 years and you had Dark Side of the Moon, very much about the same thing. So I'm not new in kind of feeling, getting to a certain point in my life and feeling that sense of alienation and confusion of being in this modern world.

I used to cut out and save old print reviews and articles from Rolling Stone and Musician, about bands like Public Image Ltd. and Joy Division, who weren't covered anywhere else.

Exactly. Let's just say that a kid is going to go out and discover Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica on the Internet today. Now, this was one of my Holy Grails when I was a kid, because I would hear about this album in kind of legendary terms, and it took me months to hunt it down. By the time I found that record—and I actually found it as an expensive American import, and I had to spend a lot of my pocket money to buy it—I had been searching for it for months. And I had such an incredible investment in terms of time, energy and money that even though I hated the record the first time I heard it [Laughs]—and the second time, and the third time, and then the fourth time it began to make some kind of sense—you can bet your bottom dollar I was going to get anything and everything I could out of that record before I gave up on it. If a kid wants to hear Trout Mask Replica now, he can go on the Internet and he can find it effortlessly, and probably download the whole thing in a few moments. Has he got the same investment of time and energy and money in that record? No, he has none of those things. So that likelihood is if it doesn't hit the first time—and as a p.s. here I would say most of the records that I love the most I didn't like the first time—if he doesn't like it the first time, is he going to persevere with it? Probably not. I'm not saying the Internet is a bad thing; it is progress, and it's great that people can go and find Trout Mask Replica easily. But at the same time, also, in the back of my mind I'm thinking it's too easy. It's too easy now to find music, and it's therefore too easy to dismiss music, particularly music that doesn't hit you the first time you hear it.

Let's talk about Insurgentes, because you're participating in a screening while you're here in New York. How did that project get rolling, and how did it become such an elaborate multimedia concept?

I'll try and cut a long story short. It basically came about because I decided I wanted to make a solo record. Now, early Porcupine Tree were de facto solo records anyway, so it's not the first time I've made a record on my own. What made this project different, what made me think this is the first time I want to actually put my own name to an album, is that it was the first time I felt that I wanted to try and incorporate all of my musical interests into one record. I grew up listening to bands like the Cure, Joy Division, Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance—these are the bands that I actually grew up with, and I always had these things in my taste, too. And I always loved industrial music as well: I listened to Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Cabaret Voltaire. And shoegaze bands like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine. All these things were part of my musical world, which people had never really heard before in my own music. So I wanted to create this record which kind of incorporated for the first time all the aspects of my musical personality. And the other thing I decided to do, because making a record usually just means holing up in a studio and looking at the same four walls for three months, I actually said to myself, I don't want to do that; I want to travel the world and make this record. And as soon as I made that decision I thought, great to take a filmmaker with me and document this process.

We went to Mexico for a few weeks; literally, we made it up as we went along. We went to Israel, to Japan, to America, Scandinavia, meeting musicians, writing on the road while I was traveling, being inspired and making this record. But what was very interesting is how the film went far beyond just being a making-of documentary. It became—partly, I think, because as you can tell I'm quite opinionated about the music industry today and I have a lot to say about it—it partly became a document of what it means to be a working musician in the music industry today. I don't mean like a Michael Jackson or a U2; I mean someone at the kind of grassroots level with a small but dedicated fan base. How do you reconcile download culture? How do you reconcile the death of commercial product and the death of record companies? How do you reconcile that all with being a working musician in the early 21st century? So there's a lot of talking about that in the film, talking about download culture, American Idol, the packaging of records these days, the resurgence in vinyl. And also talking to other musicians, and in one case a record producer: We spoke to Trevor Horn, who was a big influence on me. He's a guy that's always made great-sounding records; how does he feel about his records being compressed to shit, basically? How does he feel about the fact that 90 percent of the people listen to music now as MP3s on iPods, on teeny little iPhone headphones? So we talk about all those things in the movie, with other musicians. And so it took on a life of its own; it became much more than a film about me. It became a film about being a musician in this time.

Extra: Check out the video for "Harmony Korine" from Steven Wilson's Insurgentes, filmed by director Lasse Hoile.