The anonymous of the Sublime should really be inconvented to tell the Steven Wilson concert at the Santa Cecilia Auditorium in Rome. The representation of his latest work “The Ovserview”, gone sold-out In advance, it is an immersive experience that is not limited to pleasure but, citing the treatise of the Greek writer, “tears us from ordinary time and immerses us in an other, dizzying dimension”. Wilson and his band remain almost invisible, swallowed up by the darkness, while on the gigantic screen behind them they flow at a tight pace visions of a boundless nature: fiery deserts, lava flows, stars that explode, men without face that march among the rings of Saturn. A voiceover accompanies a visual journey that progressively expands, in a crescendo that shows increasing objects: remote lands, stars, nebulae, galaxies to lead to a cosmic and perceptual vertigo.
Wilson builds a passage, a passage towards the unlimited with his music that merges perfectly with this flow of images, alternating with ease genres and suggestions: progressive rock, post-rock, Floydian echoes, electronic pulsations. The result is an immersive and totalizing experience, which paralyzes every reaction: the public remains motionless, sitting, completely hypnotized.
“But it's just the beginning!” As he himself promises at the end of the full execution of the album, preparing the public for the second part. At the beginning, the enchantment of the rarefied and dilated atmospheres of the last work with the dreamlike melodies of “The Harmony Codex“. But slowly the concert changes leather and becomes more conforming to what one might expect from a “classic” live (if you can say in Wilson's case). The lights become more intense, the band emerges from the dark, and he himself seeks contact with the public with greater insistence, alternating jokes and short introductions.
It is here that the great songs of his repertoire begin to take the scene: “Home Invasion”, “Regret #9”, and then the incursions in the history of the porcupine Tree with “District Day” and the explosive “Voyage 34”, welcomed with a roar of enthusiasm. Wilson, who recalls his personal rule with self -irony – “on stage I must always be the worst musician of the group” – is surrounded, as always, of extraordinary artists. But virtuosity is never an end in itself. No solo solos or protagonists out of place: everyone contributes to the construction of complex and enveloping textures, which expand with an almost architectural precision in the room. It is a perfect work ofensemblewhich finds full expression so much in the labyrinthine songs and “Ridiculously Huge”, as “Impossible Tightrope”, but in the direct and dry power of a track such as “Vermillion Core”.
In the end, the atmosphere changes: the public finally melts every reserve and approaches the stage, while the musicians let themselves go to direct contact, offering close close solos and moments of interaction without filters. The last two tracks: the monumental “Ancestral”, an ideal land for the most daring instrumental excursions, and the moving “The Raven That Refused To Sing” close a concert that lasted over three hours. When the crow also disappears from the screen, swallowed by the dark, the Santa Cecilia room explodes in a long standing ovation. The lights come back, the stage empties, but something remains in the air, a trace in the following silence.
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
