MUZAK: THE VISUAL ART OF PORCUPINE TREE

Lasse Hoile flooD GAllErY PublIShInG

Collected creepy visuals which enhanced the prog favourites’ aura.

“W hat you are holding in your hands”, says Lasse Hoile in the introduction, “is a record of eight years’ work for what was the best band on the planet at the time.” It is, he continues, “something for the eyes that accompanies something for the ears”. Indeed it may, as he suggests, be best experienced with Porcupine Tree’s last four albums playing alongside. Yet even as a silent book of art and photography it brims with a dark fascination.

It may prove even darker than you’d expected. These are, in the main, very sinister images, pessimistic in their view of modern life, its perceived soullessness and failed communications. While Steven Wilson and band’s songs certainly delved into these areas between 2002 and 2009, Hoile’s accompanying art amps up the misery without the life-affirming respite which music inevitably brings. In Absentia, Deadwing, Fear Of A Blank Planet and The Incident were no cheery celebrations, but these images, separated, feel like a cross between Francis Bacon, Bill Viola, Banksy on Mandrax and The Blair Witch Project.

Designed by the Dane’s collaborator Carl Glover (and containing many previously-unseen works), Muzak is a lush production, expensive and collectable. Glover interviews band members Richard Barbieri and Gavin Harrison, their former manager Richard Allen and Hoile himself. There’s much talk here of budget and technique, though Barbieri nails it when musing “there seemed to be a balance between beauty and the grotesque”. In Absentia, though, prefers the latter, Hoile’s own face in warped poses of agonised torture as if trapped in Hell. Deadwing lightens up (relatively), depicting women, children, hooded figures and spooky forests. Fear Of A Blank Planet creates resonant images of alienated youths addicted to TV and pills in bleak concrete cityscapes, while The Incident fuses Victorian Gothic and a dash of Tarkovsky (again, veiled heads are used to unnerve us).

Some of this ominous, malevolent mood could be stereotyped as Scandinavian, but you sense the artist is reacting to a global unease (as well as to what he specifically hears in P-Tree’s work). Stressed eyeballs, brains on palms and a level of foreboding which Edvard Munch might have deemed excessive are not everybody’s idea of a deluxe coffee table book – (it’s averse to the wit of, say, Hipgnosis) – but then again P-Tree thrived against the grain, their success defying and bewildering the mainstream. Fans, thus, will love immersing themselves in this eerie, twitchy world, which is perhaps closer to reality than most of us care, or dare, to admit.

A MIX OF FRANCIS BACON, BANKSY ON MANDRAX AND BLAIR WITCH.