Steven Wilson's The Harmony Codex: Intimacy and Infinity

Review and discussion of my 2023 Album of the Year, Steven Wilson's The Harmony Codex.

Mo music, mo problems....

Favorite Albums of 2023 Part 2: The Top 10

A motley crew of albums make up this year's top 10! Including (alphabetically)

Adventures of Jet - Part 3: Coping With Insignificance Alvvays - Blue Rev Beauty Pill - Blue Period Crown Lands - Fearless Colin Hay - Going Somewhere Jantra - Synthesized Sudan Lunatic Soul - Through Shaded Woods The Lemon Twigs - Everything Harmony Xenia Rubinos - Una Rosa Steven Wilson - The Harmony Codex

Below is a curated playlist culled from the Top 20 and Honorable Mentions.

Steven Wilson's The Future Bites: Living in the Algorithm

 Review and Discussion on Steven Wilson’s 2021 album The Future Bites

An older text post about my earliest encounters with Porcupine Tree A text post on Steven Wilson’s Grace for Drowning Another text post on Steven Wilson’s The Raven That Refused To Sing

2021 Album Preview Series: Rhapsodies in June

Brief impressions of albums in play for June 2021, including:

black midi – Cavalcade (2021)
Lyle Workman – Uncommon Measures (2021)
Japan – Quiet Life (1979)
The Biology of Plants – Vol. 2 (2018)
Transatlantic – The Absolute Universe: The Breath of Life (2021)
Steven Wilson – The Future Bites (2021)

Relevant Links:

Text post on early Porcupine Tree

And on Steven Wilson’s first solo album

And on The Raven That Refused to Sing

Text post on Transatlantic’s Kaliedoscope

Dr. Spin's Best of 2017: Part 1

Its almost mid-December, which means its time to start revealing my Top 20 albums for 2017. As usual, I will present this in two parts, with entries 11-20 posted below and the Top 10 going up in a couple of weeks. I follow this format mostly to generate some vague feeling of anticipation to those who follow the blog, but it also allows me to spend just a little extra time with the Top 10 for some last minute tweaking if necessary.

Truth is, though, the harder of these two posts to write is undoubtedly this one, because it represents the cut-off - what albums “made it” and what albums “didn’t.” Last year, I kind of cheated by expanding the list to 30, but even so, there were several great albums that I didn’t include. I have been more diligent in my “roundup” practices this year, though, and in the process have created a relatively accurate record of what has gone through the player.

As a result, I have gone back to 20, and in the process have sadly left off many great albums by longstanding favorites and newer artists that might need the exposure. If these albums prove their mettle in the long run, however, they may receive a dedicated post at some later date.

The same criterion apply as in previous years. An album doesn’t have to have a 2017 release date to qualify, but it has to have connected with my 2017 experiences in one way or another. An album cannot be repeated from a previous year or be strongly associated with experiences previous to 2017, and there can be only one entry per artist.

20. Twin Peaks -The Return OST: This entry represents a whole lot of Twin Peaks music I listened to this year. Although I strongly reconnected with the Fire Walk With Me OST before the new series began, it has past associations preclude its status as a clear representation of 2017.

19. Steven Wilson - To the Bone: I have a few reservations about this release. It’s many good moments, however, represent some of the best music I have had the pleasure of checking out this year.

18. Fleet Foxes - Crack-Up: Where Wilson’s above-noted album represents more accessible aspects of his style, Crack-Up veers towards a more contemplative and open-ended approach. If you perceive the Fleet Foxes to be “The Beach Boys of Winter,” this might be considered their SMiLE.

17. Roger Waters - Is This the Life We Really Want?: To pose a third contrast, Water’s newest release is no more experimental or accessible than his previous work, but instead digs further into his already well-established style. Times have come back around to meet him, however, and his acerbic social commentary seems more relevant now than it was during the last conservative political cycle.

16. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - The Kid: Smith is one of the more original artists that I have had the pleasure of discovering in the past couple of years. It is encouraging to hear the arc of her artistic development on The Kid.

15. Geinoh Yamashirogumi - Akira Symphonic Suite: This is an incredibly innovative recording for the time that it was released. When Paul Simon was barely scratching the surface of intercultural syncretism in his music, this collective had already reconciled the tuning discrepancies between Western keyboards and gamelan, cultivating a compelling pan-Pacific style that is crucial to the eerie feel of Akira.

14. Johann Johannsen - Orphee: Johann Johannsen’s soundtrack for Arrival was my most-played album of the year, but his free-standing 2016 album Orphee is a superior work by a small margin. Its subtle narrative provides an autonomy that Arrival, as great as it is, does not require in as great a measure.

13. Dungen - Allas Sak: Allas Sak has reinvigorated my respect for Dungen. There may be a journey into their back catalog in store sometime in the near future.

12. Weezer - Everything Will Be Alright In The End: I would confidently argue that Everything Will Be Alright In The End is the best album from the band in many years, beating out even last year’s Weezer [white]. It reinvents what was so compelling about the band in the first place by focusing on adult insecurity rather than faux teen angst.  

11. Gaye Su Akyol - Hologram Imparatorlegu: Gaye Su Akyol is an amazingly quirky and daring Turkish art-rocker that I was fortunate to stumble upon this year. I still insist that the world would be a better place if someone could get her contact information in front of David Lynch.

The Auspicious Toss: 2017's Final Roundup

Since O came into the world, I have not posted very often on individual albums, but I have remained diligent in keeping track of what albums I have been listening to and with what frequency.  As a result, 2017’s roundups serve as a pretty complete document of my listening this year.  There is a small gap, however, that began in September and ends now, in mid-November, that I still need to document.  These final albums are the last contenders for my 2017 favorites.  

Grizzly Bear - Painted Ruins:  From a songwriting standpoint, Painted Ruins is perhaps a bit less memorable than Grizzly Bear’s previous albums.  In the end, however, its sonic characteristics push their sound to its most theatrical and refined iteration, making for a consistently engaging listening experience.

Steven Wilson - To the Bone:  Wilson’s most recent effort is an intentional break from the progressive masterworks that have defined his solo work.  It is, instead, a somewhat inconsistent but successful move towards a more concise and accessible sound.

Twin Peaks: The Return OST:  The soundtrack to the recent Twin Peaks series is as effective in representing the show as its predecessor.  That doesn’t mean, however, that it is necessarily an easy or accessible listen as much as it is an intriguing one.

Twin Peaks: Songs from The Return:  I am usually ambivalent about curated soundtracks, but my quest for answers to the myriad questions posed by the new Twin Peaks piqued my interest.  Of course, it doesn't provide any obvious answers, but it does reveal the subtle influence that Lynch’s work has exerted on popular music.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - The Kid:  Smith’s last album immediately grabbed my attention and blew my mind, and I was concerned about her capacity to follow it up.  With its linear narrative and streamlined song structures, The Kid is a worthy successor.

Geinoh Yamashirogumi - Akira Symphonic Suite:  My current interest in soundtracks landed the rerelease of the Akira OST in rotation on an impulse.  Although I have seen the movie several times, I did not remember it being so “world-fusion” in execution, and I certainly did not realize that it was written and conceived by such a fascinating collective of musicians.

Lunatic Soul - Fractured: Lunatic Soul has been on my wishlist since the KScope Sampler a couple of years ago.  Positive reviews on this most recent release forced my hand, and it has not disappointed.

King Crimson - Starless and Bible Black:  I was fortunate enough to see King Crimson on their most recent tour, and in the process of preparing myself I spent a little time reviewing their back catalog.  This is a gem from the John Wetton era that I have often overlooked but that has taken on new life in the wake of the concert.

Mark Mothersbaugh - Thor: Ragnarok OST: Mothersbaugh’s (of Devo fame) name caught my attention, but a cursory listen really got me excited.  Thor: Ragnarok is a compelling blend of orchestral grandeur and retro-synth mayhem that really hit me where I live.

Flashback to the Oughts: 2004

2004 was a year of beginnings that were fueled by equal parts confidence and, if I am honest with myself, delusion. At the end of the previous year, I acquired a Chapman Stick, and the practice that I had been using as therapy started to manifest in some real musical output. Determined to master this non-traditional instrument and use it to somehow subvert academia, I began coursework for a Master’s degree in Ethnomusicology. My studies included jazz improv courses and a seminar in global pop music, both of which began to further diversify my listening.

At the same time, I continued to teach out at Krum. The breadth of these new experiences make connecting the dots between my memory episodes and the reality of the calendar particularly confusing. My propensity to listen to older albums or to let albums simmer for a while complicates matters further.  I’ve had to refer to school records, Amazon shipping statements, and even dates on old pictures to flesh out specifics.  Still, after toying around with my memory and all available information, the 2004 list is, like its predecessors, a good representation of what I was into at the time.



This project is making me realize the extent to which memory episodes resist lining themselves up in neat chronological order.  They seem to arise in vivid flashes as I revisit this music, bringing to mind seemingly random events that must then be categorized.  This all might seem to be more trouble than its worth, but organizing my life story by the music that I surround myself with has, in recent years, emerged as a satisfying narrative in this blog.

10 The Drowners - Think of Me: I continued a steady diet of inexpensive power pop albums throughout 2004, many of which were unremarkable. The Drowners’ Swedish identity provided a unique perspective on the style that was slick and compelling.

9 Muse - Absolution: It has been a rare occasion for me to favorably compare any band to Rush. In 2004, however, I discovered Absolution, which earned Muse that distinction for a time by virtue of its accessible songs, impressive chops, and intense energy.

8 Blackfield - Blackfield: I supported Porcupine Tree’s move towards heavier and more identifiably progressive territory, but part of me missed Steven Wilson's relatively straightforward songwriting on Stupid Dream. Blackfield became the place where I could get my fix.

7 The Decemberists - Her Majesty the Decemberists: I saw The Decemberists in Denton on a lark, without ever hearing a note of their music, one night in 2004. Their show was impressive, and within 24 hours, Her Majesty the Decemberists had the dubious honor of being one of the few albums that I uploaded through ITunes in its earlier iteration.

6 Green Day - American Idiot: I saw American Idiot as the 21sy century Tommy - a punk rock opera of resistance for the Bush administration. Alas, within a few years Green Day would jump the shark with this great album and run it as a broadway musical, but at the time it was quite the statement.

5 The Trey Gunn Band - The Joy of Molybdenum: As I was getting more and more into transcription, I started making more of an effort to find other Stick and touchstyle guitar players that I felt a connection with. Gunn’s style was, and still is, a baffling exploitation of the instrument’s affordances, but his melodicism and conceptual adventurousness makes him one of my favorite players and The Joy of Molybdenum remains my favorite of his solo works.

4. Miles Davis - Kind of Blue: I owned Kind of Blue for decades, but in retrospect, I had never really engaged it beyond mere background music. Transcribing solos from it for an improv class changed all that, however, and provided me with a deep appreciation for the clarity of Davis’ ideas.

3 Brian Wilson - SMiLE: Brian Wilson finally released the long awaited follow-up to Pet Sounds in 2004 with compelling results. The tour that followed provided one of the best live shows I had ever seen.

2. Fela Kuti - Zombie: A seminar in Global Popular Music fleshed out my understanding of Fela and his unique political position. I ended up getting several Fela albums this year, but Zombie remains the best of the bunch.

Album of the Year: 2004

1. Opeth - Damnation: Opeth’s one-off experiment in melodic melancholy would, in hindsight, serve to pivot them from their black metal roots into their current progressive rock incarnation. In itself, however, it remains a unique masterpiece in their catalog.

Steven Wilson's Raven and the Blackest Maw

There is no way to describe the absolute blackness that surrounds the front of a ship at sea during a moonless midnight. The captain and crew might be comfortable getting their bearings from the ship’s instruments in this environment, but a lone landlubber like me feels enveloped in an overwhelming maw. Additionally, winds at sea blow unhindered by obstructions, both natural and man-made. They seem as if they could whisk the largest of men out into the inky void.

I had purposefully held off on listening to The Raven that Refused to Sing until spring break, when I had the good fortune to go on a Disney cruise with the extended family. I hoped to harness it as the private soundtrack for my first-ever sea voyage, but traveling with the Little One afforded me very little time to wander about with headphones on. I did have the opportunity to sneak off late one night, however, and I meandered around the upper decks until I found myself in this oppressive nothingness at the ship’s fore. Even with the album as a shield, the experience was overpowering. I did not have the constitution to linger there for long, but while I was there I connected with the amazing guitar solo in the tune Drive Home (starting at around 5:09 here).



As I became more familiar with the album, I found that all of the musicianship was equally virtuosic. On The Raven That Refused to Sing, Steven Wilson gathered a supergroup of prog illuminati. They are perhaps not the most visible players or ones from well-established groups, but they are the musicians that move behind the scenes, quietly pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the liner notes of amazing albums.

Although it is clearly Wilson’s project, The Raven That Refused to Sing is indelibly stamped by the idiosyncrasies of the musicians involved. Marco Minneman’s drumming is, as always, incredible, but in particular, Guthrie Govan shines brightly. In recent years, Wilson has downplayed his lead guitar voice, and although I miss his melodic soloing, Govan’s fluid and emotive style makes him a stunning stand-in. His masterful playing made me believe in the power of the guitar solo again.



As incredible as the musicianship is on the album’s surface, the conceptual undercurrents on The Raven that Refused to Sing also play toward Wilson’s deeper strengths. His distinctive brand of breathy, insular melancholy permeates the album’s examination of loss, loneliness, and isolation, and his lyrics are impressionistic enough to be multiply interpreted.



It’s interesting how having a child will change your perspective. Things that I once would have found emotionally interesting can now force me to pull the car over and weep. For example, this title track to The Raven That Refused to Sing relates a sense of sustained, unendurable loss, and I initially interpreted it to mean that the narrator had lost a child. I found myself thinking about how I would feel if I lost the Little One, and the effect of that burden as I grew old. It was unbearable – an emotional, conceptual maw that was no less oppressive than falling out into the inky black of a starless night at sea.  That Wilson can capture this is darkly magical.

Steven Wilson's "Grace for Drowning" in the Real World

The death of the record store is a tragic loss for the music fan as a site for cultural exchange, especially as we become increasingly specialized in our listening tastes. I was fortunate to pick up Grace for Drowning at the closeout sale of a local record store. When I brought it to the counter, the clerk's face lit up.  I stuttered through a conversation about Steven Wilson's genius that I never thought I would have with a living, breathing being, distracted by the knowledge that encounters like this are irreplaceable in the virtual realms.

Like the clerk, I am astonished by the amazing breadth of Wilson's work, but his sprawling output is somewhat challenging to my listening categories. I was introduced to Wilson through his prog band Porcupine Tree, so historically I have viewed everything else he has done as a side project. In truth, Porcupine Tree is a relatively small component of Wilson’s oeuvre. Nevertheless, whatever he touches seems immediately essential to understanding his overall concept.

In recent years, however, Wilson has taken a further step – cultivating a solo career. Cut free from the confines of collaboration or expectation, Grace for Drowning spills free of the boundaries set by a singular project. Its broad, orchestral palate pits choirs against grunts and orchestras against post-industrial studio manipulations, and its dissonance overlaps harmonically advanced metal with jazz fusion. On a Porcupine Tree album, these extremes might be cause for alarm, but within the context of a solo album, they reveal the breadth of Wilson’s imagination.



Wilson is probably one of the only progressive rock artists out there that is able to avoid cliché and nostalgia in major doses, but whose work is identifiably in the genre. It’s true that there are many progressive rock bands out there that are infatuated with the sound of their predecessors, but not as many capture the ideology of exploration that lies at the roots of the prog tree. Steven Wilson, however, gets it, and although he shows hints of his influences to those that are in the know, overall is work is distinctively moody and intellectual.



When I gave Grace for Drowning its first serious listen a couple of weeks after picking it up, I was on my annual trip to San Antonio to attend the Texas Music Educator’s Association convention. TMEA is usually a conflicting combination of inspiration and frustration for me, and despite being surrounded by like-minded people and networking opportunities, it can sometimes be a lonely experience.

The album's gently self-flagellating melancholy empowered my introverted mood. With Grace for Drowning on headphones, I meandered out of the showroom floor onto the Riverwalk on that overcast February afternoon and, while I ate lunch and watched the bustling crowd, I took that time to appreciate the movement of pigeons begging for food and boats full of people lazily floating down the canals. Perhaps a good number of them were feeling isolated and aloof in the crowd as well, but I doubt that any sought out the odd comfort of Wilson’s resigned loneliness.

Porcupine Tree's Early Work: "Stupid Dream" and "The Sky Moves Sideways."

Beginning in high school, I very rarely listened to the radio and I only purchased mainstream music after special consideration. I propelled my listening habits by reading liner notes, articles and reviews, taking recommendations, and, thanks my long-term involvement in record retail, I sometimes test-drove something new in the event that it would present itself. I rarely ran into any serious ruts or dead ends. Still, there was a huge amount of music going on that danced outside of the horizons of these resources, so the internet had a pretty significant impact on my listening when it began to emerge in the 90s. To my amazement, I found out that progressive rock was alive and well, and a cornucopia of incredible music came to light. This is when I found out about Porcupine Tree.

Porcupine Tree began as a joke: a studio-only band fabricated by guitarist and producer Steven Wilson. The first couple of albums were almost entirely Wilson working solo, using drum machines and sequencers to fill out his psychedelic experiments.  Since then, Porcupine Tree has gained a bit more visibility, and with good reason. In my opinion, Steven Wilson is maybe the most consistent artist in recent history. In the last fifteen years, he has created more good quality work than nearly anyone in a similar span of time. Porcupine Tree began to receive a bit more notoriety in the mid-00’s, so if you are just becoming familiar with the band, it is likely that at first, more recent albums like The Indicent or In Absentia will be suggested as places to start. Porcupine Tree’s mindblowing consistency makes purchasing nearly any of their albums a good bet, but it was their pre-2000 work that initially caught my attention. I think that it would be a shame if these incredible albums were lost in the shuffle, because they are fantastic works in their own right.

By the third album, it became apparent that the hypothetical band, which had garnered some underground interest by virtue of their early releases, should evolve into a live, performing group. Wilson made this transition in 1995 on The Sky Moves Sideways, which was my entry point for the band. This album really grabbed my attention in 1998 when I put it in rotation. Thanks to Wilson’s breathy delivery, melodic atmospheres, and long-form compositions, Porcupine Tree was hailed as the “Pink Floyd of the 90s,” a label that Wilson apparently resented. By Porcupine Tree’s towering standards, The Sky Moves Sideways is a bit outdated, but it is still a masterful album that laid the groundwork for what the band would become.  I had never seen early clips of this work until I found this one yesterday.



The album that really put the group on the map for me, however, was 1999’s Stupid Dream. Wilson refocused Porcupine Tree for this album, and began applying the melancholic atmospheres he developed in his early work to more succinct songwriting. Stupid Dream was still identifiably progressive and it provided a foundation that allowed me to rethink the genre as forward looking rather than incestuously retrospective.  Among all the new and exciting music I was getting into at the time, this album was distinctive, and with incredible songwriting, amazing lyrics, and unbelievable musicianship, it sat very comfortably in my post-power-pop-era prog listening tastes.



Today it is still my favorite album from Porcupine Tree, and easily ranks among my all-time favorites alongside Discipline, Frengers, and a short list of others. This clip is from a later incarnation of the band, but Even Less is an indispensible favorite from Stupid Dream.



Porcupine Tree has always evolved subtly from one album to the next, so from album to album, the band's progression seems logical.  Over a larger arc, however, the band's beginnings hardly seem to match their most current work.  Following their evolution from a psychedelic studio project to a performing group with a profound influence on contemporary progressive rock is the most rewarding way to experience their oeuvre, in my opinion, and these albums are compelling places to start.