Welcome back with a new week in the company of Musical Disclosure. This week we focus on prog: in fact, we will talk about Porcupine Tree.

The band was founded in 1987 as a playful project between Steven Wilson and Malcolm Stocks. Inspired by the psychedelic bands of the Seventies, the idea was to create a fictitious progressive rock group with an invented past, complete with festival gatherings and various imaginary trips inside and outside state prisons. This game slowly turns into reality when Wilson manages to set aside enough money to buy recording equipment, starting to create music to give substance to their imaginary band. Wilson soon begins to take his compositions seriously, eventually producing an eighty-minute cassette titled "Tarquin's Seaweed Farm" under the name Porcupine Tree, complete with a humorous booklet about the imaginary band members. The cassette attracts the attention of the British magazine "Freakbeat," which invites Porcupine Tree to participate in a psychedelic music compilation. This project takes time, but Wilson continues to work on new material, releasing the second demo "The Love, Death & Mussolini E.P." in 1990, followed the following year by the third demo "The Nostalgia Factory." With the track "Linton Samuel Dawson" included in the collection "A Psychedelic Psauna" from the newly established Delerium Records label, Porcupine Tree begins to be known in the UK psychedelic music scene. The label decides to re-release the demos "Tarquin's Seaweed Farm" and "The Nostalgia Factory," quickly selling out all available copies. Shortly after, Wilson signs with Delerium as one of the label's founding artists, releasing on May 12, 1992, the debut album "On the Sunday of Life...," which collects the best material from the early demos. In June 1993, Porcupine Tree released their second album, "Up the Downstair," enthusiastically welcomed by critics who describe it as "a psychedelic masterpiece." In this album, Richard Barbieri and Colin Edwin make their first appearance, respectively as keyboardist and bassist, who will permanently join the lineup. On December 4, 1993, Porcupine Tree held their first concert, completing the lineup with drummer Chris Maitland. The third album, "The Sky Moves Sideways," was released in early 1995, receiving great success among progressive rock fans, so much so that they were called the "Pink Floyd of the nineties." This album is the first to be distributed in America, receiving positive reviews. However, the band declared themselves dissatisfied with the fact that the record was mainly the result of Wilson alone and set themselves to work on a collective project for the future.

 

Today's listening is "Stars Die."