In a new interview with Anil Prasad, the creator of Innerviews, the first and longest-running online music magazine, British progressive rock icon Steven Wilson confirmed that he has “started work” on the second album from STORM CORROSION, his collaborative project with OPETH‘s Mikael Åkerfeldt. Regarding what fans can expect from the follow-up to 2012’s “Storm Corrosion”, Steven said: “It’s very different, but also you will recognize the aesthetic, shall we say. I don’t wanna say too much about it, ’cause we’ve still got a long way to go on it. It’s a massive chunk of music, and it’s almost entirely played on acoustic instruments. But a lot of them.”

Wilson continued: “We were talking earlier about my upcoming solo album ‘Requiem For A Village’ being a lot of it playing instruments, approaching instruments in a kind of idiot savant way. There’s a lot of that on STORM CORROSION as well.

“It’s funny, I saw a couple of people reviewing the, the playback events we did for ‘Requiem For A Village’, and more than a few of them mentioned how it reminded them a little bit of the STORM CORROSION record — the first one, of course, they would’ve been referring to,” Steven added. “And I think there is a little bit of that in ‘Requiem For A Village’. So it’s definitely continuing on the vocabulary that we created with the first STORM CORROSION record, but it’s also very different, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. And we wouldn’t do it otherwise.”

Regarding what appeals to him about the idea of collaborating with other musicians, Steven said: “I think that that’s one of the things I love most about my career now, is there is no careerism involved in my career. That I have all these projects, and I have all these great collaborations, all these amazing musicians I work with — Tim (Bowness) in NO-MAN, Richard (Barbieri) and Gavin (Harrison) in PORCUPINE TREE, Mikael with STORM CORROSION. And it’s just like getting together with some friends now and finding if we’ve got any interesting music in us, and music that excites us. And I think a lot of that contentment started when I developed my solo career, because I no longer felt frustrated that I was in a group context. In fact, quite the opposite. Once I established my solo career, I felt a lot more inspired going into collaborative situations than I had perhaps beforehand when I might have felt frustrated. Like, ‘Well, why don’t they like this idea? ‘Cause I like this idea.’ And, of course, that’s the beauty of collaboration, is that you have to find that part of the Venn diagram where you all agree. That’s collaboration. But there’s always the frustration when you’re someone like me, that there’s a lot of stuff outside of that, that bit in the Venn diagram, that you don’t agree on. So now I have my solo career well-established, I no longer bring that to the table. If I go into a collaborative situation and they don’t like something I come up with, that’s fine. I can do it with my solo album, I can do it with my solo career. So coming back to PORCUPINE TREE, coming back to NO-MAN, it’s just been without any sense of ego, without any sense of frustration, and just the joy of collaborating with fantastic, creative people.”