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Steven Wilson has announced that he will release his latest studio album, Requeim For A Village, through Fiction Records on November 6. He has also shared a video for the album’s title track.
Earlier this week Wilson telegraphed the release of the album with a seemingly cryptic website, also titled Requiem For A Village, changing the imagery on his social media pages and releasing a short video trailer which featured the Scottish actor David Tennant.
Tennant provides the narration on the new album, Wilson’s ninth, which steps back from the modern world and ventures into the unfamiliar, settling in a village that exists beyond time and place. He is joined on the album by former XTC man Andy Partridge, who has written the narration and some of the lyrics, 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).
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“I wanted to get back to a kind of music where you can hear the metaphorical thumbprints,” Wilson says. “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 led 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.”
Wilson will be hosting a night at The Social in central London on September 22. Songs From The Village will act as an introduction to all the music that inspired the album, where Wilson will perform a DJ set featuring both songs from the album and the music that inspired it: “expect everything from the gauzy otherness of Boards of Canada and Demdike Stare, the haunted ragas of Third Ear Band, to the creeping dread found in British children’s TV and other broadcasts from the ’70s.” All proceeds from tickets will go to the Here 2 Belong charity, which provides first home kits for care-experienced young people stepping into independence.
Requiem For A Village will be available on CD, Blu-Ray, 140g two 12” black vinyl, oxblood coloured two 12” vinyl and as a boxset featuring 2 CDs, Blu-Ray disc packaged in a 96-page hardback book box. Limited amounts of signed CDs will be available through Amazon, and CDs with exclusive packaging will be available through HMV.
Wilson will play two sold-out shows at the Royal Albert Hall on October 28 and 29, accompanied by his band, the Parallax Orchestra & Sansara choir, conducted by Tom Richards, playing previously unheard orchestral arrangements of The Overview and more which have been prepared especially for these shows.
Steven Wilson: Requiem For A Village
1. Swirl In A Lark’s Eye
2. Requiem For A Village
3. The Same River Twice
4. Now Departing
5. Hiraeth
6. On Chapel Slope
7. Murmuration
8. Curcus Fingerprint
9. A Basket Of Bees
10. Great Green Map
11. Wheel
12. The Old God Is Buried
